Team GATV Roundtable: Looking Back At Season 3

Did any particular actors or characters really impress this season?

MATT: I’m not sure impress is the right word. As mentioned earlier, I enjoyed both Matt Nable and Brandon Routh, despite their given plots. I was happy to see Katie Cassidy given better stuff to do, and I think it’s a direction that better takes advantage of what she can bring to the show. I also enjoyed Colton Haynes in both “Guilty” and his farewell arc as a regular.

LAUREL: Willa Holland’s Thea was one of my favorites in season 3 — a big change from previous seasons when she was sort of an afterthought in my mind. Another stand out was Katrina Law as Nyssa al Ghul, who was basically perfect in every single scene.

DEREK: Katrina Law as Nyssa got a lot of meaty material, and that’s especially nice considering her character brings in always-needed diversity. I really enjoy the smaller-scale humanization/identity arc she got to complement the season’s big ones, though I hardly think she’s reached the end of that journey yet. I was annoyed at the whole “betrothed” bit at the end of the season — I see how it upped the horror and personal scale of the situation for everyone, but it just seemed too out-of-place — but thankfully that got dropped pretty quickly. Otherwise, she’s amazingly well-integrated into the cast now, considering this season she formed complex, intimate relationships with Oliver, Laurel, Thea, and Malcolm for vastly different reasons. She’s a definite wild card with well-defined characterization, and I love that about her. Plus she kicks ass.

CRAIG: I also loved Katrina Law, because as Nyssa, she did have that weird mix of what I want: great action and some levity. A character like Laurel is a lot better when they’re around someone fun — her scene with Cisco on The Flash will always be one of my favorites of the past year.

STEPHANIE: Time for the broken record. Katrina Law was impressive as always, but I was also highly impressed with the other females this season. Audrey Marie Anderson and Charlotte Ross were lovable. In terms of characters, Laurel received excellent material after being underwhelming the previous two seasons. I started off not having much of an opinion about Maseo and Tatsu, but by the end of the season, it was devastating watching Tatsu kill her husband.

Is there anyone you might not have liked?

CRAIG: I like Brandon Routh and I really did like some of what they did with Ray, but I didn’t like it when he seemed reduced to being a pawn in a shipper triangle. (I think it also was a disservice to the Felicity character to have to go through that). I’ve already talked about not feeling Ra’s, but more than anything, I have to say CHASE THE DJ WAS THE ABSOLUTE WORST.

Yes, worse than Akio.

I typed that all up before remembering Werner Zytle – the new Count Vertigo – and his awful accent that made me feel like I was watching Boris and Natasha cartoons or something. Is there any way we can have Seth Gabel back? Everyone else seems to return!

DEREK: Other than Chase the DJ, I didn’t hate any of the new characters so much as I was often underwhelmed by them, particularly Ra’s. And I can’t say I dislike any main characters on the whole, but I have problems with how Malcolm, Felicity, and Oliver were often written this season. Malcolm in particular didn’t really have problems with his character so much as just how poorly he fit into this story, even during points when he was a central figure (looking at you, “Uprising.”) Conversely, making Felicity the romantic lead has had the unfortunate result of stripping her of everything else but that role; her main storylines revolved around romance drama with Oliver or Ray, and even her flashback episode made her nemesis another ex-boyfriend. It’s bizarre for a character that initially succeeded because she was so the opposite of the terrible “female for the men to fight over” trope that the show used with Laurel in season 1.

I can’t so much pinpoint what I didn’t like about Oliver, other than that he just did all the same wrong things — lying to his friends, making decisions for them without their consent, etc. I’m glad he got a taste of his own medicine in “Broken Arrow,” and I get that he’s stubborn, but man, it’d be nice to see our main character at least recall how many times screwing over his teammates has bit him in the ass. Hopefully the Al-Sah Him stuff was the last straw. That said, I do like all of those characters at their core, still, and Stephen Amell, Emily Bett Rickards, and John Barrowman did their best and deserve better material. So if season 4 can refocus a bit and give them all better things to do, all will be well.

STEPHANIE: Aside from Chase the DJ, I wasn’t fond of Danny Brickwell or Count Vertigo, version 2.0. They came off as too arch, too concerned with being a villain for the sake of being a villain and it didn’t work with out a further look at their motivations and psyche.

LAUREL: As I mentioned before, Laurel’s transition to Black Canary didn’t really work for me until later in the season. Sort of as a corollary to that, the characterization of Lance didn’t work — he seemed to have lost all focus, just being kind of mad at Laurel some of the time. His renewed “I’m gonna get the Arrow” quest right at the end of the season, however, was good.

MATT: There weren’t really actors I didn’t like nor really even characters.  Though, I think we can all agree that Chase the DJ was not only a waste of time but a fairly obvious plot twist.  For me, it really came down to the writing for the characters that was an issue.  Felicity became my least favorite character on the season, but that had more to do with how they were writing her.  I will say I was a bit baffled as to why Malcolm was a regular this season, even though technically he had his fingers all in the League plot to maneuver his way into becoming the next Ra’s al Ghul.  He spent much of the season off-screen, and when he was on it, they relegated John Barrowman to some fairly one-note stuff.