10 Radical Ideas To Save Arrow

Oliver’s relationship with Felicity is the catalyst for the final steps in his three-year journey from murderous vigilante to hero. She’s lightened him up, and given him something else to live for and work towards. But this show’s not called Olicity And The Superfriends.

I understand the idea behind foregrounding their relationship. It’s the narrative principle that conflict creates drama. To begin with, the pairing was very popular: but the problem is that they've replaced the engine that drives Arrow with one from a melodrama, or a romantic comedy.

A romcom is structured in a specific way. You want person A and person B to get together, but you have X amount of time to fill: so obstacles are contrived to keep them separate and unhappy until the last ten minutes. This is a show about superheroes, not a Bridget Jones movie.

The engine that drives a show like this should be based on a far more traditional kind of conflict - the defeat of the bad guys by the good guys. Arrow's spin on that involves the protagonists trying not to become worse than the antagonists: it's a light versus dark thing.

For example, the story of season four’s 'Broken Hearts' wasn’t the return of heartbroken serial killer Cupid to exact vengeance for her lost ‘lovers’, and it should have been - yet the villain played second fiddle to Oliver and Felicity’s recent break-up, the resolution of her plotline based around two heartfelt speeches on the nature of love like the show was a bloody Shakespearean comedy.

Olicity’s issues were front and centre in 'Legends Of Today', too: Oliver was depicted as being so distracted by the problems in their relationship that he dropped the ball and allowed Vandal Savage to murder him and all of his team.

Keep the two of them apart, or get them back together, if you must, but don’t let the show’s driving force and primary narrative become subordinate to the mediocre conflict created by a bumpy relationship. Which brings me to...