10 Radical Ideas To Save Arrow

There have been so many filler episodes in both season three and season four that Ra's Al Ghul and Damien Darhk’s stories could have been told over half that time, and probably much less, without losing anything. Twenty-three episodes is a long time for a season to meander this badly.

The fact is, filler episodes shouldn't be happening at all in an action-packed superhero show like this. Guggenheim and Mericle should be taking lessons from The Vampire Diaries on the same network. No matter what you might think of the cheesy Twilightesque set-up and the Abercrombie & Fitch cast, each twenty-two episode season of 'TVD' is like a stampeding herd of wild horses: there’s a genuine cliffhanger every single week, and enough non-stop action crammed in to fill two or three seasons in any other show. All killer, no filler.

Contrast that with Arrow’s third and fourth seasons, where the villains present themselves, the heroes front up to oppose them… and then there are long, listless stretches where the villain lies low for no real reason, while the heroes pace around like caged tigers getting melodramatic about it (and, inevitably, about each other).

Why not have the season broken up into arcs, with the main ‘big bad’ taking up the final six or so episodes, but foreshadowed throughout the previous seventeen? Other, lesser villains can be built up to take on double or triple episode arcs, rather than the single episodes they get as filler cannon fodder at the moment.

Anarky, for example, has appeared twice in the fourth season, and both outings have felt rushed. He’s one of Batman’s most interesting villains of the past twenty years, a genius-level terrorist and master criminal, and potentially a major antagonist in and of himself. The character deserves a lot more than he’s been given as a weird sociopathic stalker on Arrow.