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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