The new fall season is getting into full swing with the return of Arrow. How has Team Arrow, both in front of and behind the camera, been in the 5 months since Oliver Queen went to prison?
1. Searching for Identity
The search for an identity, at first, sounds like and odd thought to have about a show beginning its seventh season. However, it is a fitting one on multiple levels. A fundamental question throughout the run of this series has been, who or what is Oliver Queen. That question gets new fuel as Oliver Queen finds himself imprisoned in Slabside. What is Arrow with Team Arrow scattered and their leader behind bars? What does Arrow look like with new showrunner Beth Schwartz?
Taking those in reverse order. If “Inmate 4587” is an indication, season 7 or Arrow will feel very much like the earlier first two seasons of the show. Schwartz talked up comparisons with season 1 in the lead up to the premiere. I’ve never gotten the reverence for season 1. While it helped set a foundation, it was a tonal and narrative rollercoaster throughout the first half season (understandably.) Spiritually “Inmate 4587” feels closest to an episode out of season 2, with its clear connecting motif and successful implementation and balancing of all the elements that were established in the first season.
The team dynamic has been the keystone to these DCWverse shows. At the start Arrow is a show without a team to orient around. The team isn’t back together by the episodes end, and that doesn’t appear to be the case in the near term. Felicity and William are in witness protection. Diggle and Curtis now work for ARGUS. Dinah Drake has become the police captain. Laurel is the District Attorney. Rene is teaching youths of the Glades boxing. All of them are barred from donning their various alter egos or else Oliver’s sacrifice would have been made in vain. Most of them struggle with how to adapt to the new environment. Diggle, having gotten out of the life last season, seems to be doing the best. Along with Dinah, who now provides an something of a counterweight institutional perspective that the show largely dropped once Quentin Lance’s character was so thoroughly corrupted through working with Team Arrow. Felicity by episodes end reasserts her identity as Felicity Smoak and intends to hunt Diaz down. While they are largely disconnected, Beth Schwartz and Oscar Balderrama script does a good job tying everyone together thematically.
For Oliver Queen, the quest for identity is a trickier one. Like the rest he has been stripped of an identity. Luckily for him, Slabside is functionally a new island for the character. What it’s doing to him isn’t exactly pretty, or heroic. It’ll be interesting to see what long term effects Ollie’s stay at Slabside has on him. It doesn’t appear to be the aggressive reset initially feared.
2. Fighting Back
That lack of identity in so many characters is associated with a lack of action. Diggle and Dinah have adjusted the best, allowing them to act when necessary. That does not hold true for Ollie, Rene, or Felicity. Once they are spurred to action, it becomes a rejuvenating moment that clarifies who and what they are.
Felicity, is spurred to action after being attacked by Diaz. It tells her what she needs to do: hunt down Diaz. It also leads to an echo of a scene from season 3 as Felicity stands up to Oliver and tells him what she is going to do, regardless of his feelings. For her part Emily Bett Rickards finally pulls of a cry face.
Rene puts his freedom at risk by helping out New Green Arrow. It was dumb, but makes emotional sense for the character. As the show has tracked the restoration of Oliver Queen’s humanity, Arrow has also tracked the changing and lasting impact of the Hood/Arrow/Green Arrow has on the populous of Star(ling) City. Rene is a big believer in that kind of symbolic redemption.
3. The Cost of Action
Action or inaction both have a clear cost for Oliver in Slabside. He lets Stanley get pummeled by Brick and Derek Sampson, which isn’t heroic. Justifying with he isn’t that guy anymore – something the character say a lot actually. When he is finally spurred to action, however, all that sprang to mind was the cost. The Oliver Queen of Arrow is a man of violence, constantly rejuvenated and vindicated by it, despite the overall arc being an education in restraint and turning away from violent action. As he pummels the inmate who delivered Diaz message with a weight disc, director James Bamford and Amell manage to elicit the same violent ill feeling the show managed early on. Viewers were simultaneously enthralled and horrified by the violent spectacle and mass murder of it all. The moment is played as heroic, a notion that is consistently linked to action in these kinds of stories, but all I could think about is what that costs the character. Not in terms of time served, but their soul and if that didn’t pushback some of the emotional progress that had been made. Is this Oliver “surviving” by reverting back to base tendencies, did those tendencies ever really go away.
Isolating Oliver and Stephen Amell has led to a more physical performance that should be interesting tracking as the season goes forward.
4. Flash Forwards and Old Things Being New
I love Lost. I hate all the mythological stuff they built up to explain things, but when they stopped answering inane fandom questions to tell character stories it was one of the greats. Which is why Arrow using what appear to be flash forwards, taking place roughly 20 years in the future, is so enticing. Their return and the use of a cross cut action sequence, Oliver’s shower fight and Diaz attack on Felicity, provide nice formal tethers to the past. This kind of remediation has been a part of the Arrow narrative from the start and now the show is finally starting to use it on a more technical level.
I’m unsure if using those 10 or so pages is a good idea with a cast this large. However, at their best these c-plots allowed episodes to have a unified motif and comment on one another. At their worst they could be like what we got in season 3 and 4, which despite some highlights were mostly not good. Future William and Roy on Lian Yu is also one of those mind boggling reveals from the Island circa season 1 or 2 that feel stupid bold.
5. New Green Arrow
The appearance of New Green Arrow fits this trend of remediation. Early trailers appeared to indicate some unnecessary parkour action, which is the signature move of one Roy Harper. Who is exactly under the hood doesn’t interest me that much. What does interest me is what this new leather bound Robin Hood provides the show. They give the show a chance to reexamine itself and the role of vigilantes without the need to justify itself and Oliver Queen.
Whoever this new person is, they’ve done their homework as they brought a list with them.
Reader Questions
1) How many episodes will Oliver stay in prison? My normal guess would be prior to the crossover (so like ep 7), however, with it entitled “Elseworlds” maybe his stay lasts longer than mid-season.
2) Are those flash forwards on Earth-Arrow? There is an “Elseworlds” story coming and it’s not like Lost flash forwards didn’t have their own twists.
