Team GATV Roundtable: Looking Back At Season 3

What would have changed your opinion of Season 3? i.e., what would you have liked the show to be more like?

CRAIG: While I wouldn’t want it to be as violent as Daredevil and I wouldn’t want Oliver at this point to be as optimistic as Barry Allen, I think a good mix would have been nice. I get that Arrow is a show on The CW, but again, I liked that Daredevil brought characters in NOT or the purpose of being love interests.

As good of an actor as Matt Nable is, I wanted a scarier Ra’s – that might have changed my opinion of Season 3 a lot.

MATT: Here’s where we start getting into the structural problems of broadcast television. With relatively little time to break the season story, plus having to fill 23 hours of television, it felt like they were handicapped with trying to tackle this particular theme. Sure, the whole thing with identity is a pretty standard trope in superhero stories, but it felt like they were trying to get to something much more philosophical and deeper than the simple struggle of the man vs. the mask. Without the proper time to really push and pull at those questions, we got something that just wasn’t sure what it wanted to be. On top of that, Daredevil premiered on Netflix and really stole the crown of the street-level vigilante/hero. It had far more focus that Arrow could’ve benefited from.

DEREK: I would have been okay with season 3 being a different show from the last two seasons, especially considering the close-endedness of “Unthinkable.” And it was, kind of, and seemed like it would be going in a wildly different direction after the midseason finale. But it ended up as this weird mix of changing and holding onto all the wrong things. It still tried to be a non-stop momentum machine, but without a dense enough plot to pull it off. It tried to hinge on a major lesson or choice for Oliver (like season 2’s no-kill rule), but did so with an extremely abstract, existential concept (identity) that wouldn’t fit its plot-centric storyline. And even worse, it kept starting to go to new places with relationships, but never went beyond halfway — Oliver and Felicity declare their love, but then still flop back and forth between that and will they/won’t they; Oliver and Diggle’s friendship massively fractures, except it kind of doesn’t; Thea trusts Malcolm, then hates him, then kind of trusts him again. A major reason the finale was so unsatisfying is because most of the big character revelations were ones they either already had or could have had at the beginning of the season, which makes the bulk of the storylines feel like padding rather than an essential journey. It needed to be different, and it kind of was, but it didn’t go far enough. What resulted was a tonal mismash and almost everyone going in circles, and that was frustrating to watch. Go big or go home.

STEPHANIE: I am so beyond fascinated with the League of Assassins that I wished by this point they had more fully developed what they introduced. The term “the League” was mentioned numerous more times than the full League was shown. Then we got a tiny look at Oliver’s “transformation” into Ra’s, but no real look at what it’s like to be Ra’s. What are his daily duties and what are the calls he has to make? Granted this aspect might be explored with Malcolm this upcoming season, but the League has been around for about a season and a half and I’m still a little fuzzy on how they operate and why … aside from assassinating their enemies.

In addition, several of the supporting characters received a spotlight this season, but I’d like to see more of Malcolm and Quentin.

LAUREL: Better flashbacks would have been an excellent starting point — other than introducing a nasty disease and then kind of explaining why Oliver’s friends went super-badass, was there a point to any of that plot? Say what you will about seasons 2 and 3 in the flashbacks, but they mattered to the story. Season 3’s flashbacks could have been scrapped altogether. As for the Oliver-Felicity romance, I would have liked a more believable arc as opposed to the all-or-nothing approach.