Arrow Season 4: 5 Reasons Why The Comics Shouldn't Matter

Back in 2012, The CW premiered an experimental new show called Arrow. The series would follow the misadventures of former billionaire playboy Oliver Queen whose five-year crucible after being shipwrecked on a hellish island inspired him to take up vigilantism upon his return to civilization. He’s a master archer and martial artist, the likes of which had never been introduced as a live action protagonist in a DC venture on television. Oliver Queen is Batman with a bow.

He is also based upon a comic character known as the Green Arrow.

As it happens, however, Green Arrow is one of the more obscure heroes from DC lore. Plenty of viewers who tuned into the show in 2012 hadn’t even known that it was an adaptation of comics at all, and yet they were still able to enjoy it just fine. In the first two seasons especially, the show made sense for comic virgins. The distant source material didn’t matter in the least.

The third season saw the show abandon its tenuous grip on realism to an unprecedented extent, forcing those comic virgins to wrack their brains for reasonable explanations for some of the twists. Arrow has always worked best when producers and viewers alike treat the show as an adaptation rather than a translation.

Here are five in-depth reasons why the specifics of comic lore should really be used as guidelines rather than actual rules for the series. 

Television is a self-contained medium. Even cliffhangers and crossovers such as those that have frequented Arrow throughout Season 3 were designed to entice viewers to return for the next installment rather than to send them to their browsers to hit up Wikipedia for information about the characters that appeared in any given episode. Whether a show is written as a serial in the vein of a Law and Order or toward a single climax a la True Detective, it is designed to be complete within itself. Even series based upon real life events such as the reimagining of the Charles Manson ordeal of the 1960s with Aquarius can be watched without a background in the true crime genre or the American civil rights movement.

If Arrow were to rely heavily on comic lore already known to a subset of viewers with the expectation that general viewers would follow up could backfire rather spectacularly. The show veered a bit to closely to over-reliance on comic lore with the introduction of the Lazarus Pits and Laurel’s receipt of the Canary Cry. As proven by the consistent usage of flashbacks, Arrow is fully capable of incorporating and expositing its own lore on its own terms; there’s no reason why the show should be hamstrung by past goings-on of the comics.