Monday, 28 April 2014

TV Series Review- Arrow Season 1


The first season of the Arrow television series feels like it struggled to really find it’s feet. Sometimes it felt like it had found it’s groove and was going to be a blast. Othertimes it felt like it was trying so hard to be a grim and dark Batman rip-off that it was quite painful to watch. Unfortunately, the latter moments well and truly outnumbered the former.

Arrow is the story of Oliver aka Green Arrow, a DC Comics superhero.  The main gimmick of this superhero is that he dresses in green and is armed with a bow and, of course, arrows. The arrows he shoots are green, thus giving him his name. If this set-up feels like this series should be a whole lot of swashbuckling fun, then you would be wrong. There is nothing like trying to make a green guy jumping around with bows and arrows as dark as possible outside of a couple of moments of self-awareness. They are scared of even giving him his superhero name the entire first season.

The first season follows Oliver in two stages of his life. He has spent 5 years “stranded” on an island with his only goal being to survive. The story picks up after he is rescued and he comes back to his city with a vague goal of saving the city. While he is parkouring around the city and shooting people quite dead with his arrows, which are green, we are also told the story of when he is on the island through flashbacks.

The best parts of this show are the fight scenes. They are well choreographed and have that feel of swashbuckling hero. The flashbacks while he is on the island are also good, except when they are dragging. Knowing that he is going to be trained on the island to acquire his skills after being a rich playboy (maybe even in montage form), it feels like they take forever to get around to him not whining about being on the island to whoever is around him.

The biggest problem with the first season is consistency, followed closely by trying to copy Batman. These two issues are connected. Examples of this throughout the series include giving him a tech genius who also serves as a morale compass (but it is a blonde girl, not Morgan Freeman), and the grumpy policeman who has to learn to trust Arrow. This goes against one of the positive parts of the series for me in giving him an ally, being an army veteran who is his senior, who was also meant to serve as his morale compass but who becomes kind-of redundant. There are also episodes where the morale is that he puts his mission above personal goals, but it is then reversed in the morale of the next episode where, apparently, he has to put personal goals above the mission. Other examples include a mass-murdering assassin suddenly not killing a main character because apparently he wasn’t paid for it (despite killing a bunch of police officers beforehand, but it is okay because they weren’t named characters).

However, by the end of Season 1, Arrow finally starts to get into its groove. It finally begins to try things outside of the Batman formula, the action scenes are solid and it has a decent twist to make both the current story and the flashbacks compelling.  It starts to introduce some more outlandish villains and seems to actually start having some fun. Despite this, however, there are still allot of problems that I haven’t even touched on (inconsistent characters, weak female damsel-in-distress characters, lack of consequences to actions) making it very hard to recommend.

One and a half out of five green waffles.

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