Team GATV Roundtable: Looking Back At The First Half Of Arrow Season 4

Did the crossover successfully set up Legends of Tomorrow?

MATT: Oddly, I’ll say no. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What worked about it was that it provided good backstory for Legends and gave us reason to be interested in Carter Hall, Kendra Saunders, and Vandal Savage. You can’t dismiss that kind of foundation. As far as a full set-up for Legends, it really had little to do with the operating premise of the series. It wasn’t a backdoor pilot in any way, shape, fashion, or form, and I liked it for that.

DEREK: More or less. It was a wild pair of episodes, and it feels like they wanted to get as much exposition as possible out of the way to dive right into LoT‘s action first thing. That’s probably smart, since even with the streamlining of the Hawkpeople and Vandal Savage mythology, it’s still fairly dense backstory. I have to admit, I’m not totally sold on the Hawk and Savage actors yet — Ciara Renee showed potential, but I was so in love with Michael Shanks and Phil Morris as their respective Hawkman and Vandal Savage that the new guys have a high bar to meet. In terms of showing the tone of the series, well…considering the crossover featured an ancient Egyptian weapons disintegrating the entire cast of two shows and undoing it with time travel, I think it’s now well established that LoT will up the craziness ante.

CRAIG: Set up the series as a whole? I’m not sure, since 80% of the cast wasn’t in the crossover. It was nice to “meet” the Hawks, and get set up with Vandal Savage. I just hope that elements of the crossover – like what Malcolm did – are reflected in the new spin-off. I also did like how the crossover felt like two parts of a larger whole, rather than just an episode of the Flash with Arrow characters and vice versa.

STEPHANIE: What strikes me as odd about the way they did the crossover this year is that it set up a series that already exists. Unlike how they introduced Barry Allen on Arrow to test whether he could have a series, this set up for Legends of Tomorrow doesn’t seem to have a motivation like that behind it. The crossover got out an extraordinary amount of the backstory for Vandal Savage and the Hawks prior to Legends of Tomorrow, so in that way it did succeed in setting up the new series. With Legends of Tomorrow having a smaller episode order than the Flash and Arrow, it must be nice for the writers to just dive into the story with less exposition to cover in the beginning; however, I’m not sure that it was entirely necessary to do it that way. So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how much the crossover helped.