Arrow: 10 Mistakes It Must Fix In Season 5
3. It Promised Lightness...And Didn't Deliver
After Season 3 spent the majority of its 23 episodes living under a cloud of misery, Season 4 was supposed to bring a marked change of tone to Arrow.
It was finally changing the hero from the Arrow to the Green Arrow, and was set to bring him closer to his comic book counterpart: more humour, a lighter tone, without completely moving away from the dark edge Arrow always had (and needed).
The new, lighter tone lasted for about half of the Season 4 premiere, and then the characters returned to Star City, and things continued as they were (although in fairness, that first half of Season 4 was much stronger than the back half). It wasn't necessarily miserable, but there wasn't really a lot of humour or lightness that the show could've done with to recover from Season 3.
It is, however, still achievable for the show. It doesn't need to become The Flash, but dropping in some more moments of humour - from Felicity, from Curtis, to Oliver himself, and also Thea, who was one of the best parts of the second half of Season 4, and clearly knows how to deliver a group - and some occasionally levity wouldn't go amiss. Arrow can, at times, be a ridiculous show; sometimes it should fully embrace that.