Team GATV Roundtable: The Arrow Season 3 Road So Far

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Has Season 3 been everything that you expected it to be?

CRAIG: I’m not entirely sure what I expected Season 3 to be. It has certainly taken different directions than I expected, and it’s different in a good way. I would have never expected the show to potentially kill Oliver off in the midseason finale, that’s for sure!

Some things that I expected, have turned out well. I like Brandon Routh as Ray Palmer, as I thought I would the moment he was cast. I like the interaction Arrow has with fellow DC show The Flash. The show does continue to shock and surprise me at times, so they succeed there, too.

STEPHANIE: I’ve learned by now not to have too many expectations about what’s going to happen because I’m usually far off. Although I did expect the first run of episodes to build the anticipation and ask questions rather than give answers, so that’s been accurate.

MATT: We touched on this some in our Season 2 roundtable during the summer, but I wasn’t sure what to expect in Season 3. There was a very clear chapter close to the first two years, and it wasn’t entirely obvious where they were going to take the story. That was especially evident in the flashback timeline with the shift to Hong Kong. For some out there, any criticism of the show is a slight and somehow means we just don’t care for the show. Furthest from the truth. We are fans, first and foremost, or else we wouldn’t volunteer our time and passion to covering and discussing it. Personally, I’ve been impressed with the show, the direction of the show, the breaking of story and plot. That’s given a lot of leeway to the showrunners and writers in my eyes, a lot of trust. It’s felt like they’ve been searching for the story, or the “in” for the story they want to tell this year. I trust that they can hone in and solidify things, but it would be disingenuous to not own up to feeling a bit disappointed with the first nine episodes as a whole.

DEREK: I had no idea what to expect going into this season, given it was a new beginning of sorts. I did expect the show to be different, and it has been, but not quite in the ways I wanted. Maybe it’s a weird comparison, but I have the same conflicted feelings watching season 3 of Arrow as I did watching season 6 of Buffy. Both are seasons that followed up successful completed storylines, but were vastly different in their approaches, purposefully shedding things that made the show work previously to tell a different kind of story. I lean more on the side of defending that season of Buffy, but right now, I’m the opposite when it comes to Arrow. That said, I appreciate the show being more experimental with how it’s structured, and understand that it’s a gamble and could be playing the long game. So I’m holding out hope for the second half, given where we’re at.

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