Tonight’s Arrow had the ability to transcend the CW Superhero business and become something really important, or it had the potential to devolve into preachy weirdness. Which did it do? Keep reading to find out.
1. A very special episode
This episode depicted, about as “realistically” as you could expect any CW show, a mass shooting within City Hall. It showed innocent folks get killed by a lone gunman, people screaming and hiding and hysteria ensuing. It was a stark scene, and one that took actual guts to put on TV. It made me uncomfortable watching it, which should be the point.
From there, the episode asks all sorts of questions about gun control, with Curtis acting as the traditionally liberal, pro-gun control voter, and Rene acting as the more conservative, “guns save lives” voter. On one hand, the show did a nice job showing each of their positions and not taking a clear stance one way or the other. Of course, the show also went the easy way in having the gay intellectual be pro-control and the street wise ex-military man be pro-rights, but it would’ve been disingenuous to have it reversed.
Now, this is still a CW show, so there was still clunky dialogue and a few instances of characters essentially looking at the camera and saying “WE REPRESENT AMERICA IN 2017,” but you can’t expect a tiger to change its stripes. I have to give it some credit for truly taking a difficult issue and attempting to handle it in a way that couldn’t be just waved off by half the country.
2. Wild Dog
This episode used its flashback sequence not for a boring romp through Russia, but rather an informative look at Rene’s pre-Wild Dog life. There were some really nice and touching moments of this episode, showing Rene as a concerned husband and father – two roles we didn’t even know he possessed – and as a man trying to change his past.
So much of Rene’s story has been “angry vigilante” without much else, it was refreshing to see reasons as to why he is that way. He isn’t just an angry dude for no reason – as he said last week, he grew up in the rough part of town and was dishonorable discharged from the military. But this week, we were given more: we see that he didn’t let those things define him, and that he pulled himself out of that life. He and his wife got out of the Glades, had a kid, built a life replete with hockey fandom, and were trying to live something resembling a normal life.
In one episode, the show has given the viewers 100x more than we had before, and did so without making it painful to flash back. Seeing Rene’s very real, very sad experience with guns in his home also gave his character a bit more pathos, and will go a long way to forgiving him for calling everyone “hoss” and generally being a caricature of a tough guy.
3. Feeling normal
Dinah and Diggle have a chat about normalcy in their lives, and that was a nice side story for this week’s episode in particular. Dinah’s character at this point appears to be “the sensible one,” and seeing her struggle with how to live a normal life while also having insane powers, being part of a vigilante team, and dealing with grief in a new city showed, again, that she has a good head on her shoulders. Diggle is an interesting person to partner her up with, as his character is the only one that has some semblance of a life left outside of Team Arrow.
It was also an important note to land on in this particular episode, as it acted as a commentary on, when faced with things like a terror attack, how we go back to feeling normal after. For those of us old enough to remember 9/11 as teenagers or adults, it took a long time for things like flying or hearing a low flying airplane to feel normal again. This could even be read as commentary on living in the United States in 2017, where people are divided over politics, race, religion, gender, and sexual identity in ways that seemed outdated a few years ago. How can we feel normal when living in a weird fucking world?
Continued below4. Green Mayor
One of the critiques of the show that has rung really true for me is the question of Ollie as mayor. If you’re going to make him mayor, make that job count, don’t make it just something to do during daylight hours. Seeing Ollie deal with policy, public scrutiny over his political opinions, and the machinations of being mayor (down to calling next of kin of dead staffers) was the first time that the show decided “Oh shit, we need to make Ollie’s job matter.
Not to get too far off the point here, but I’ve always admired how great comics creators use the jobs of their heroes to inform the characters. Clark Kent is a reporter – he looks before he acts. Kyle Rayner is an artist – he looks for the creative solution. When Ollie became mayor in the comics, it was an extension of his left-wing politics; that part of Ollie has never been part of this show. Hell, if this happened in the comics, Mayor Queen would’ve banned guns outright.
But to see him deal with both the minutia of the office, and grapple with the big questions of the Second Amendment, for the first time we are seeing Ollie’s day inform his night.
5. The long term implications
The episode made sure to let everyone know that Ollie’s biggest victor this week was stopping the shooter without resorting to violence – perhaps the first time CW Ollie has ever done so. If the show is really committed to Ollie looking for the non-violent solution, that could open up the show in a ton of interesting ways. It would allow Felicity’s hacktivist past to enter the show in a more substantial way, it would put Rene and Vigilante even more on the outs, and it could give the show the social conscience that the comics always featured.
Especially with The Flash being super science, Supergirl being about super aliens, and Legends of Tomorrow being super goofy, Arrow needs to retain its street level, grounded nature. Giving it a stronger moral code would go a long way to diversifying it even further.
I know how this liberal pinko felt about the show, but how did you guys like it? Let me know in the comments!
