Team GATV Roundtable: Looking Back At Season 3

Was Season 3 everything you hoped for it to be?

STEPHANIE: Coming off of a terrific season two, it was near impossible for them to top it with season three, so I didn’t set myself up for many expectations going in to this year. Most of what I hoped for was to see Laurel transform into her alter ego, to see Thea continue on her path of growing up, and to be surprised with and scared by the villains they introduced. Two out of three isn’t bad.

DEREK: It definitely did things I’d wanted to see on the show for a while. By the end, Laurel and Thea suited up as Black Canary and Red Arrow/Speedy, respectively, which fulfills a foregone conclusion for both those characters and provides us with more kickass female superheroes in live action. Laurel didn’t have a single love interest — Ted Grant only counts by a small margin — and her defining relationship was with another woman, a great way to write a female character (and got a couple of episodes to pass the Bechdel test!) We got lots more Nyssa. Diggle had a more pronounced role, got married, and got resolution with Deadshot. We got to see the Lazarus Pit and journeyed to Nanda Parbat. We saw The Atom in action, shrinking notwithstanding. The show even experimented a bit, which is something I’ve clamored for in past roundtables, as it broke its structure to spend an arc (mostly) without its main character. The cliffnotes version of this season sounds really cool, honestly. I was seldom disappointed in a lot of the wilder comic book-y stuff we saw. And the production, action stuntwork, and effects are all still top-notch. There’s a lot to love from a comic book standpoint this season, even if that gets buried in the the lackluster narrative and the character problems.

CRAIG: I think there could have been a stronger Season 3 than what we got, with a more controlled narrative and a scarier villain. I’m not really in for the romance, so that part didn’t excite me. I was excited to see Ray Palmer and even more excited to see him as The Atom, and was disappointed that rather than shrinking, he was just more of a DC Iron Man. I did want to see what would happen when the team worked with Malcolm, and we got that; we also got more Nyssa, which made me happy. I also like the directions the show took for Thea, and we finally got Black Canary!

MATT: Not really, but I think I was in somewhat of the same place as the writers and showrunners — where does the story go next? There was a hope and expectation that the show would continue the solid and propulsive storytelling that defined last year. The word I used to describe Season 2 during our season wrap-up roundtable was “dense.” There was so much intricate plot detail and connection that served to make the season a well-woven whole that we were all spoiled. I didn’t have many story-specific hopes for Season 3 as much as I expected something just as engrossing.  Sadly — and more important, frustratingly — that’s not what we got.

LAUREL: Not really — I liked a lot of the darker path, but it just didn’t feel like there was enough story to keep the story moving all of the time. Except when there were Flash crossovers — those were amazing.