Team GATV Roundtable: Looking Back At Arrow Season 5

“Spectre of the Gun” was a controversial episode with real-life political elements. Do you think it was successful, and would you like to see more of it?

CRAIG: Green Arrow has always been a character involved in “social justice” type stories. The character arguably became famous in the “socially relevant” Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics of the 1970s, so Oliver Queen getting political or taking a stance on a major issue is something that shouldn’t surprise anyone; if they are surprised or offended, they don’t know the history of the character.

With that said, I think in some ways “Spectre of the Gun” might have been more successful if it had been bolder in its message. I don’t believe that Felicity would have no opinion on guns, considering how she was shot just last season.

I get it, though. They don’t want to offend half of their audience, but I guess I expected even more hard-line stances?

With that said, I’d totally welcome more socially relevant stories, and I know the Arrow writers have the talent and the passion to make them happen. We are in a politically-charged world, and if any character is going to go there with those deep stories, it should be the Green Arrow.

STEPHANIE: I think the most successful aspect was that it evaluated both sides while still respecting both sides, but ultimately, I don’t think the episode was successful because the resolution fell flat. I understand it’s television, and television has license to be more idealistic than realistic, but concluding in an unclear, both-sides-win middle ground failed to get a message across. Like Craig said, you don’t want to offend roughly half of your audience, but if done correctly, television can inform and persuade, rather than offend, and this episode didn’t do any of that.

I’m all for seeing more politically-relevant stories incorporated into Arrow. Supergirl is proof that you can blend social elements and superheroes in a fun and enlightening way, and with Oliver being mayor, I see no reason not to lean in this direction in the future.

MELISSA: I’m not against message episodes in principle, but I thought “Spectre of the Gun” was a colossal failure. Guns and violence are a part of the DNA of Arrow and in order to do a thoughtful episode on gun control, they needed to explain why now they were having that conversation and there needed to be lasting impact on the show after the episode. Neither happened.

A shooting at City Hall in real life should have been enough to spark a conversation, but it’s not in the fictional world of Star City where both previous Mayors and most of the previous City Council had been mowed down in previous seasons. Even within this same episode, we learned that there’d been a shooting not so long ago at a mall, but no one apparently cared enough then to talk about guns.

I also felt the many sides of the argument were framed poorly as regurgitated clichés and statistics that the characters spit out in supposedly heated discussions that still somehow came off flat and one dimensional, not even tapping into the show’s history of how guns in previous seasons had affected anyone.

Oliver once said he hated guns. This would have been a perfect time for us to find out why, but it became clear as the season went on, what was said in “Spectre of the Gun” was never intended to matter on Arrow in the long run. Nothing changed and the issues were never revisited. Without lasting impact on the show, they had no business delving into the topic.

They did try to offer a personal angle through Rene’s flashbacks, but that message was lost in the revelation that instead of sobering up and getting his semi-orphaned daughter out of foster care, he’d abandoned her in favor of putting on a mask, waving his guns around and beating up people.

I’m not sure there was one part of the episode that I felt was well done and such an important topic deserved so much more. Like with Oliver’s rapidly passed, miracle bill that managed to do everything and nothing; I found the whole notion insulting to the real world complexity of an issue that will require actual choices and real compromises, not a bunch of fictional people patting themselves on the back for what amounted to smoke and mirrors.

MATT: I didn’t think it was the preachy trainwreck that so many thought it was, but I thought it took some shortcuts in its resolution given the explicit drive to be a message episode. I thought the legalities of Oliver’s and the assemblywoman’s solution didn’t really hold up and it was kind of a loosey goosey way out. Also, it’s hard to take a stance like this in a show that features vigilantes — heroes or not — and two in particular who use guns to fight their battles.