Arrow: 10 Ways That Season 3 Went Wrong

The flashbacks of Season 3 had a lot of potential. The surprise cliffhanger at the end of Season 2 that saw Island Ollie wake up in a bed in Hong Kong was more than welcome after two seasons on Lian Yu, and it was about time that Oliver got a start on gaining some of those other souvenirs that he mysteriously accumulated over the five years after the shipwreck. At the very least, it was a clue that Oliver would be learning Mandarin and receiving his abdominal tattoos in the near future.

Sadly, the closest that Season 3 came to Ollie learning Mandarin was Ollie fumbling with a Mandarin-to-English dictionary while referring to the language as “Chinese,” and his tattoos are still absent. Of course, there are presumably not many viewers who sat down for Season 3 hoping for twenty episodes of Oliver memorizing rules of syntax while picking out images for his abs, but more needed to actually happen in the flashbacks. The Yamashiros made for a compelling family, and the duel between Tatsu and Maseo was one of the high points of the final few episodes, but the disconnect between past and present for the majority of the season took its toll.