Team GATV Roundtable: Looking Back At Arrow Season 6 & Forward To Season 7

What did you think of Ricardo Diaz as the season’s villain?

CRAIG: Well, first off, aside from some as-to-be-expected good performances in his final episode, Cayden James as played by Michael Emerson never had the “bite” or the feeling of fear that I was hoping for from an Arrow villain. But when Diaz came up from behind as the “Big Bad”… again, Kirk Acevedo is a great actor, but I didn’t feel as invested, even after we had seen his origin story. Maybe it’s because he didn’t have deep ties to Oliver or the others… and not every villain should… but I didn’t have that emotional connection aside from “he’s the bad guy and Oliver needs to kick his ass.”

MATT: I dig Kirk Acevedo as an actor, so it was nice to see him get a meatier part in the second half of the season. There was also something welcome and fitting about them going smaller with the villain, a bit better version of the arcs they tried with Brick and Tobias Church in previous seasons. The corruption angle was a fair touch, but it’s hard to escape feeling like we’ve seen a lot of this before. That’s with both Cayden James and the group opening the season, and Diaz and the Quadrant closing it.

STEPHANIE: He was a borderline unhinged angry dude who I never found as threatening as I should have. Diaz never came across as smart enough to pose a significant danger to the team and the city in the same way that Damien Darhk and Adrian Chase did because Diaz seemed unorganized, like he was scrambling to align himself with whichever bad guy group he could find at the moment and hope it worked out well for him. I’m also not fond of the idea that he used his rough childhood to justify his obsession with obtaining power and his freewheeling attitude toward murder.

MELISSA: Ricardo Diaz tops my all season list as worst executed big bad. Beyond Kirk Acevedo’s habit of reading his lines in indecipherable mumbles and growls, Diaz’s powers of planning and manipulation often were at odds with the timeline and even his own actions. It was a constant parade of tell, not show. Nothing supported he had the resources or even the personality to execute a plan with such Rube Goldberg levels of needless complexity.

For example, we saw in show that Diaz’s plan hadn’t been to take over the city but to wait around for that helicopter ride out of the city before James set off his bomb. Then we watched Diaz panic and scramble when he suddenly realized James had no intention of providing that helicopter. So immediately, Diaz came with a credibility problem exacerbated when the show revealed its twist by Diaz killing James while in police custody. So Diaz had bribed or blackmailed half the people in charge? When was that supposed to have happened? How was that supposed to have happened?

Even in a universe with time traveling speedsters and flying aliens, if the writers don’t craft their story with enough credibility, it becomes nothing but painfully obvious strings.