Arrow Season 5 Review

Another year, another few months we must post our green hoods and quivers up until the CW’s Arrow returns to television. Unlike last year…and the years before that…we’ve got a real cliffhanger, though, so that’ll keep us guessing as to the fate of certain characters, as well as where the show can go from here. There’s some hints and clues in the last few episodes, but overall the finale was pretty final in terms of the story we’ve seen the last five years. Arrow this season was about cycles and about history repeating itself (not like The Flash, which involves actual time-travel). And it was the return to form that everyone was looking for, making it the second best season of the show.

FULL SPOILERS FOR SEASON 5 FOLLOW
With this new season came a slew of characters new and old into the limelight: Curtis returned to become Mr. Terrific, Wild Dog and Ragman were introduced, Evelyn was brought back to serve as a pseudo-Artemis, and we even got ourselves a new Black Canary. A couple of new villains appeared, as well as another anti-hero, and yet another tech-based villainous enterprise rose up. Does it seem like a lot? It should, but it doesn’t really feel like it.

The previous two seasons tried to remain rather simple in their storytelling, focusing mostly on the misadventures of Oliver as he fought various demons, both real and fake. This year was a return to the groundwork, opening up themes from Seasons 1 and 2 as well as forging new paths for the future. The supernatural was mostly diverted, save for a few small elements, and we finally got to see the Star City that we’d been building toward since Season 2.

All of the new elements brought onto the show seemed incredibly natural, and almost all had thematic reasoning behind them. Some of this was not evident upon initial introduction, but by the end of the season, or arguably by the midseason stuff, it was clear why certain things had been introduced.

This season, above all, had been hyped by the producers about Oliver’s past, and how he would deal with this. Season 2 had a similar theme, particularly with the rise of Deathstroke and the episode “Three Ghosts” served as the show’s episode to reveal these themes. Much like that, this season’s Episode 9, titled “What We Leave Behind,” showed Oliver reliving the steps he took a night he murdered a man as The Hood. Flashbacks in that episode were shown and used well to foreshadow what would happen by the end of the episode, with a sickening twist that showed us how lethal the villain of the season, Prometheus, would be.

“What We Leave Behind” is probably the best episode of the season, and in recent seasons, simply due to the quality of acting, the pacing, and the overall tone that the episode gave off. It resonated throughout the season and had been carefully built up until that point. It was a quiet, somber episode until the rather emotional ending. Stephen Amell, who plays Oliver, delivered a heartbreaking performance that episode, though one could argue that it carried over from his pretty solid acting from the previous episode, “Invasion!”

“Invasion!” was the show’s 100th episode, and showed us a reality where things hadn’t gone so bad. All of Oliver’s family and friends were still alive, and he had no reason not to return home and continue being a vigilante. However, much like Captain Kirk from Star Trek, the pain makes him who he is, and he couldn’t live with that small voice in his mind knowing that this was all fake, a ruse put on by the Dominators to take him out of the game. “Invasion!” showed us how far the show had come for everyone’s development, from Oliver to Thea to Sara to even Ray Palmer. All had become heroes in their own and while they needed to stave off the darkness in their hearts, they still fought the good fight.

To speak on the four-part crossover very quickly, I thought it was rather enjoyable. While it was a bit odd for everyone to cast Barry aside as untrustworthy so fast, I did like that the two biggest names for the CW television universe, Green Arrow and Supergirl, stood by his side. As a fan of all three characters, it was incredible to see the Flash, Green Arrow, and Supergirl leading a team of minor heroes and anti-heroes against the Dominators. It allowed Oliver to continue his role as a mentor, even for Supergirl, and showed Barry as capable of inspiring hope in an entire team of heroes with various personalities.

While Season 2 is, in my mind, the best season for the show, I think Season 5 has some of the strongest themes of the entire series. For one, the themes are more relevant, and all have a central focus: evolution. They’re mostly shown in the change that Oliver and Diggle find themselves in at the start of the series.

Diggle, seeking punishment, takes a way out that Oliver resists: he wants to spend his days in prison for killing his ill-intent brother. When Oliver breaks him out, he suggests that he serve his penance as Spartan, his vigilante identity, much like he has been doing as Green Arrow. Both fight for justice to save those from the darkness that almost took them. With Diggle, it was an interesting turn-around for him then on. He’d always been a major anchor for Oliver, but now he could serve symbolically and literally as a means for Oliver to remember that he fights for himself and for others.

Ragman, Wild Dog, and Artemis, the three new recruits (Curtis had been around on Team Arrow last year, and doesn’t really count) serve as three different aspects of Oliver’s mission and his refinement of what he’s doing. While it’s never explicitly stated in the show, instead written as a means for him to possibly leave the vigilante business or have more people to rely on in the field, it is evident that they were chosen, by the writers for a reason.

Artemis represents Oliver’s need for justice through the skills he haphazardly picked up in the face of death. Yao Fei’s death on the island, and his subsequent training with Shado and Slade, began the path Oliver would go on as he discovered the secrets behind his father’s final words, “Right my wrongs.” Both want justice but sometimes they mistake justice for vengeance, and are morally questioned at times by how they’ll go about saving the day.

Wild Dog is Oliver’s ravenous side, the one who is willing to take a life in order to save another. It’s the Oliver we saw growing under Yamashiro in China while he was being detained by A.R.G.U.S. Wild Dog’s eventual realization that he needed to be a father, not a stranger, reflects Oliver’s realization that he needs to keep his family, real and vigilante-based, out of harm. Wild Dog grew more in that department, and because he has such a soft-side, he also represents the sensitive attitude Oliver has toward certain aspects of his life, family included.

Ragman is the spiritual side of Oliver. Obviously I don’t mean that literally, but I mean it in such a way that Ragman is the hero Oliver wants to be and the one that, had he learned under Yao Fei, he could have become. Ragman used magic and his own beliefs to fight his battles for him, while also relying on the skills he attained over time. He represents Oliver’s belief in the fight for justice, to keep people safe from corruption and the scum of the city. Ragman’s compromise to work with Felicity, who destroyed his hometown last season, is Oliver’s compromise to work with himself, who murdered several men in Season 1.

Felicity had her own small journey as well, mostly having to do with the secret tech-based organization HELIX. Her journey there was a bit underplayed, and the group mostly seemed like a method of just moving the plot along, but it was interesting to watch her slip down a rabbit-hole with them. She gave into the temptation of tech, diving into it instead of relying on her own skills or her team. It was an interesting mirror to Curtis, who used the support of his team and his superior intellect to not only create T-Spheres, but fully inhabit the identity of Mr. Terrific. Of all the recent CW heroes, I can really only say that there are two definitive versions of characters that have risen: Melissa Benoist as Supergirl, and Echo Kellum as Mr. Terrific. I fully believe that they are those characters, and I’d be lying I wouldn’t die to see a Justice League/ JSA formed with Green Arrow, Flash, Supergirl, and Mr. Terrific as the heads of the organization (like a pseudo Batman/ Superman/ Wonder Woman).

Still, I tolerated Felicity a lot more this season than in recent years if only because she was finally given something to do and got to experience odd reflections of herself through HELIX. It was good to see her not realize that she could be duped so easily by them, and when things eventually caught up to her, her development and serious attitude toward taking down Prometheus helped her character quite a bit.

Lance and Thea were put a bit more to the side this season to allow our new characters to flourish, which is perfectly fine. I think Thea’s reached her limit in terms of overall growth, and Lance finally peaked as a mentor for Wild Dog, serving literally as his boss as well as someone who would convince him that family mattered over all. It was smart of the writers to introduce Wild Dog’s family as a means for both Lance and Wild Dog to shine whenever his family came into a topic of conversation.

The new Black Canary introduced, Dinah Drake, was brought on somewhat random, but she fit in well with the crew. She definitely had a ton of charisma about her, and her chemistry with all the sidekicks and Diggle was not wasted at all. Her backstory of being a cop helped her get a grasp of how the criminal mind worked, and she was very capable with her meta-human powers. Her outfit was a bit strange, basically just a mask with a leather jacket, and I feel that they only had her use a bo-staff because that's what Laurel and Sara did. It was weird to see her walking around in it, sometimes.

Probably the most wasted character of the season, that's meant to have some kind of an impact, is Thalia al Ghul, who is probably dead due to the finale's events. She wasn't nearly given the time nor respect her comic book legacy deserves, and I'm curious why they didn't have Oliver learn from another master? Sure there's the plot point that she informs Prometheus about Oliver and agrees to train him in order to kill him, but that begs the question why she isn't the one to kill him? There are other martial artists out there who could have fit this role just fine. If you want to establish more characters, why not bring in Richard Dragon? Not only is he a premier martial artist, but he's fought against Green Arrow and Diggle before in the "Broken" storyline of the Green Arrow comic!

Which leaves us with Prometheus, our main villain of the season. I appreciated that, for all but the first few episodes, he was our villain. Tobias Church was fine (if a bit too over-the-top and too good at martial arts at time) but his early death came as a shock and did cement Prometheus as our villain. Still, there are certain aspects of him that disappointed me.

For one, the reveal. Adrian Chase as Prometheus eventually made sense, and I’m not disappointed that we got a complete reversal from everyone believing he would be Vigilante, but it also really doesn’t make much sense that he would be Prometheus leading up to it. If you’re going to fake out the audience then that’s fine, but it has to make sense. He has a weak backstory, too. The Hood killed his father, who we never saw in Season 1. That never made sense to me.

There were a whole lot of big names and executives that were killed in Season 1 that we saw die on-screen. If you want to go all-in with the “full-circle,” thing, why not have Chase be the son of the first big name that Oliver killed in Episode 1? It’d both fulfill the theme as well as have more callbacks to the first episode, which the season finale was full of.

Plus, the acting for Chase became over-the-top for a bit while he was in villain-mode. He was threatening, yes, and it was clear that he had Oliver beat, but there were times where it was reaching Heat Wave/ Captain Cold levels at times.

His backstory is also a bit weak. How’d he learn about Thalia al Ghul? I’ll by that he’d be a trained fighter after five years with her, but again, how and when? There are also so many things that he knows about that would be impossible for him to unless certain dead characters were alive to tell him, or if he were there. The explanation is that he studied Oliver so intently and finally went after him, but the only way that’s possibly is if he went either through Helix, or found out through Thalia.

However all we saw of Oliver and Thalia was the method by which he would eventually become the Hood, and the christening of his crusade in Russia. If Chase found out through Helix, then why wouldn’t they know about his existing identity? Or his old one as Simon Morrison? If he knows all about Oliver’s crusade and has been studying for so long, too, then when did he have time to train with Thalia?

Again, I don’t think he’s a bad villain. I just think the writers underestimated how much Oliver still keeps to himself about the island and his mission. Like in the comics, sometimes Prometheus was just too smart for his own good.

I’ve got mixed feelings about the season finale, “Lian Yu,” as well. Had the endings gone differently, and the subplot with Felicity, Curtis, Samantha, and Thea not been about Malcolm Merlyn’s random redemption (?) been stronger, I would’ve called it one of the best episodes of the series. However, there are some major flaws with it.

For one, that subplot. Merlyn’s reappearance in the season was random and rushed, and his final act of redemption could have been seen throughout the season. It would be a re-hash of the “honor thy father” tropes the show has been dealing with, but it’s become so ingrained in the anatomy of the show that it would fit in quite easily. It’d also be reflective of Merlyn actually doing something again to save Thea, which would be a means by which to quiet Prometheus’s declarations that Robert Queen was a villain.

Quick side-note: that whole “Honor Thy Father” episode was clearly structured off of self-defense. Yes, Robert killed a man, but the footage makes it clear that he was being attacked and threw the man off in self-defense. It’s not as if he killed him like some sort of a serial killer. Sure, it was all a means for Prometheus to also get into Oliver’s head, but he can’t be so thick-headed not to see it.

Anyway, the finale. The action in it was pretty solid. Having Slade Wilson back as Deathstroke, as well as Nyssa Raatko to fight Thalia, was a major benefit. They still fight as good as ever, taking down three enemies in the time it takes one of our sidekicks just to take down one. It shows that those two are on a completely different level from everyone, and reinforces that Oliver Queen is, definitively, the best martial artist we’ve seen on the show. Prometheus is good, yes, but all of his moves are clearly meant just to be a means for deflecting Oliver.


The final confrontation in the temple between Oliver and Chase was clearly meant to ape the imagery of Oliver and Slade of “Unthinkable.” However, this fight kind of lacks the gravitas. “Unthinkable” was two seasons’ worth of build-up, showing us a friendship that crumbled into absolute lunacy. The choreography was also much better in that fight, flashing back and forth between past and present to show the struggle they’ve had for so long. I actually found the fight between Oliver and Kovar more engaging, as a fight-scene, than the one between Oliver and Chase. All Oliver did was beat him down, pretty simple.

There were some bone-headed “I can’t believe they fell for it,” moments, too. One was where Oliver walked right into the trap set by Boomerang and Thalia, and the other was Slade turning in Oliver. It helped move the plot along, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t cool to see Slade rip into a sweet action scene.

The “endings,” as it were, also were quite a letdown. I’ll get to the one with the flashbacks when I discuss those for the season, but the cliffhanger of Lian Yu blowing us just seemed so extreme. Where did Chase have the time to lay all those chargers? Have they been there all season? And it’s clear that they didn’t just wipe out the entire cast of Arrow. Merlyn’s not coming back, I doubt Boomerang is going to live, and maybe one or two characters don’t make it out, but there’s no way they killed Diggle, Felicity, Lance, Thea, or Sladeoff-screen.

Plus, I’ve got a pretty good feeling that Joe Wilson, aka Jericho, will be a major character, possibly villain, in Season 6. Why else would they bring up? They could be talking about Grant, who we saw in the first season of Legends of Tomorrow, but Jericho would make more sense. It’d also be a neat way to possibly introduce Rose Wilson. Why not? I’ve got a feeling Slade will be a major player in Season 6, possibly rising to the anti-villain role he has in the comics (save for the time of this writing, as the “Lazarus Contract” storyline continues).

I’d be remiss to say, though, that the moment leading to that wasn’t absolutely incredible. Chase’s impossible choice he left Oliver was marvelous and the acting was superb. It the first real “edge-of-my-seat” moment since Season 3’s “Public Enemies,” and this one moment was probably far better. It resolved well, too, and was a perfect moment.

While I do dislike Chase killing himself, though it was the only way out, I will admit I thought the way they framed his character the entire episode was brilliant. In almost every shot of him, they keep the gun he would eventually commit suicide with in frame, but not making it obvious. Good on them.

The flashbacks this season were a ton of fun. Having Anatoli is always a blast, and I will happily take him as a season-regular if we can. Dolph Lundgren as Kovar was also a good villain as a physical and metal force for Oliver to have to overcome. My big problem with the flashbacks this year is the same overall problem I had with the last two: there’s no real sense of time. I never got the feeling that a full year has gone by while Oliver was in Russia. Perhaps a few months at best.

Keeping that in mind, Oliver was really only off the island for, probably a year and a half or so. That would have his total time there, given that Seasons 1 and 2 were full years, to just three and a half years. Perhaps there is more time in the earlier seasons that we’re not privy too, but I find that a bit hard to believe all things considered.

The flashbacks started and were strong throughout, if sometimes a bit clunky and short, but they ended rather poorly. The long hair and beard were a disguise? Really? That seriously weakens the early episodes, where Oliver has PTSD of the hard rain and the trees banging against the windows. It wasn’t an act, since we saw it from his POV.

While it would be a bit strange and odd, a much better way of going about it, and the way that just makes sense, is for him to defeat Kovar and be too late for the boat. Now he really is stranded on the island and has to hone his skills as an archer. He has to survive on his own, creating that dreadful atmosphere as well as trying to cap his lessons in survival from Yao Fei. Then, a year so later, he gets rescued and goes home. Remember: it’s been said that the crusade Oliver had was planned out while he was on the island. Yet now we have to ask: when? On the plane ride from Russia? The two days he spent there? It weakens Season 1 just that much.

Still, I will say that now loose ends are tied up. It really does feel as if this 10-year journey for Oliver was put to rest when he embraced William and for just a moment, a small moment, was a true, loving father to his son. Nothing else mattered right then and there. I think that makes it all worth it, all the plot-holes and some inconsistencies. Perhaps now we’ll see that more jovial Green Arrow that people have been clamoring for.

Thematically, the fifth season of Arrow stands as its strongest yet. With a single villain staying around for the entire season, one meant to be a darker image of what Oliver could’ve been if he kept going down the path alone without Diggle or Felicity, it helped keep the show’s plot straight and resonant throughout its run. The new characters introduced were fun and welcomed additions to the cast. The crossover was good as ever, and it certainly had some of the best acting of the series overall. Fight choreography is back where it should be, and it’s midseason finale, “What We Leave Behind,” is one of the series’ best.

Welcome back, Arrow. Keep up the good work.