Arrow Season 7: 4 Ups & 2 Downs From 'Emerald Archer'

Ups...

4. The Documentary Format

On one hand, 'Emerald Archer' was an adventure that saw the heroes of Star City attempt to take down a new vigilante hunter. But on the other hand, it was something quite different.

Opening with its own Warner Bros. logo before launching into some gritty amateur footage of vigilantes on the streets (all neatly rounded off with some fancy narration by Kelsey Grammer himself), the episode's documentary format, which looked at the rise of vigilantism in Star City, served as the perfect vehicle for the show to pay tribute to its past (more on that later). However, it also provided the creative team with the opportunity to change things up, presenting the show's recycled format in a different light and, in a sense, refreshing it.

An example of this is the first fight scene between Oliver and Chimera, in which the crew follows the Green Arrow into an abandoned building where he squares off against the vigilante hunter. The beauty of this is that we got to watch the entire scene unfold through the crew's camera and it was, quite frankly, beautiful.

With long dimly-lit corridors, intentional shakiness and heavy-breathing, the documentary's camera added a found-footage effect to the entire sequence which, combined with the heart-pounding music, made for a genuinely suspenseful and thrilling scene. Not only did this restore a more grounded feel to Arrow (that the show has been missing in recent years), it set the entire episode apart, portraying it as the visual spectacle that it deserved to be.