Arrow S04E23 Review: Cathartic

Arrow, Season 4, Episode 23: Schism

Over the past two or three weeks, I've talked about various season finales. I praised Agent of SHIELD's season finale. Legends of Tomorrow was functional and entertaining, if not particularly good. The Flash had some nice fights, but ultimately a bit of a flop due to a lack of proper buildup. Supergirl was just a blah piece filled with mostly a lack of tension.

Arrow, despite the stream of great episodes we had for the past two or three episodes, ends up flopping in its fourth season finale, delivering what I think is the weakest season finale in this half-year's worth of superhero shows, which is honestly surprising because considering how bad the lead-up to Arrow's sister shows were, they at least had the decency to give season finales that are at least entertaining, if nothing else. This didn't even manage to do that. The ending of this episode was wholly unsatisfying, and, yes, the whole theme of the episode was about the duality between the good and bad within Oliver's soul or whatever, but that doesn't mean that the episode itself has to struggle between being good and bad.

For the big looming threat of Damien Darhk setting off nuclear Armageddon (again), there was a distinct lack of tension throughout the entirety of the episode. One of the biggest things, really, was how we established last episode that Damien Darhk is so powerful now with his soul-empowered magic that he can 'suck out the oxygen within your lungs' or whatever, but fails to really pose that much of a threat. Even after Thea threatened to kill his daughter and after he got his daughter back, Darhk doesn't even make a move to take out Oliver or Thea, or even one of the three non-combatants in the room. And even if Oliver's mysterious white magic was the reason why his arrows suddenly worked on Darhk when he oh-so-narmily became a beacon of hope, there really was no reason why his powers only knocked the crowd of civilians down for like two seconds. 

Having a crowd of civilians stand up for your hero might be a great symbolic moment, but honestly here it looks stupid. They did it better in the old Spider-Man movies, and, hell, even recently in Supergirl. Oh, sure that big crowd of random civilians can somehow be enough to change the tide of battle against an army of Ghosts -- who are ex-military and have been shown to at least be a match for normal policemen and ARGUS mooks. Yeah. That was just anticlimatic. And the beatdown between Oliver and Darhk is just... wow, lacking of tension whatsoever. It's just boring, with the far camera shots and the general genericness of just two dudes punching each other. Hell, even the battle with the Wrecking Crew a couple episodes ago had more tension than this!

And the fact that a good chunk of the episode is devoted to random heart-to-heart moments instead of, y'know, trying to defuse the city... the speech from Curtis to Oliver about how the Green Arrow inspired hope in him is one thing. Oliver going to stop a single riot in a single street is another -- it makes Supergirl's big broadcast thing actually look super-sane in comparison. And to have all these random soul-searching subplots... of course Diggle is going to come back. Of course Quentin isn't going to run off to a bunker and he's going to come back and help. Of course Malcolm Merlyn is going to show up rather randomly. Of course Sheldon Cooper will see the error of his ways and get killed by it. There really was too little time devoted to any of their individual characters, and what little we get for all of them ended up being overly mushy and just dumb. 

And, yes, while the writers might try to go deeper and have Oliver be an inspirational hero, surely there are better ways as opposed to giving random, generic sappy speeches and getting an army of civilians to fight against an army of ex-military brainwashed people? And to have Oliver kill Damien Darhk at the end seemed to kind of backfire over the whole 'the Green Arrow is DIFFERENT than the Arrow' moral that we had throughout the season. I mean, it's not like that Darhk didn't deserve to die, but it's the same problem I had with James Gordon over in Gotham with him killing Gallavan. And for Oliver it's even worse because he spent entire seasons repenting from being a killer. At least have the decency and have Diggle or Thea or Malcolm be the one to murder Darhk, if you really want to get rid of the character that bad. Or, hell, at least have Oliver kill Darhk out of necessity to save his city instead of killing a clearly-already-defeated Darhk.

The ending doesn't really add up either. Having Quentin and Donna head off for a bit of a holiday is one thing, but to randomly just get rid of Thea (because she's afraid of becoming too dark) and Diggle (even though Lyla totally understands about his big mopey problem) and leaving just Oliver and Felicity felt hollow, turning the victory into a more Pyrrhic one than it should've. Really, if Oliver Queen could inspire so much hope and all that, he really should've been able to at least inspire his closest allies. Even the bit with Oliver getting sworn in as mayor felt empty. There is a lack of sense of character progress, not when Malcolm Merlyn can just merrily walk around with a smug smile for no real reason.

Felicity, too, was in full happy form with absolutely no fallout from redirecting the nuclear bomb to Havenrock, which really makes me wonder why they even went with that decision at all. When she, of all people, should have more reason to leave compared to, say, Thea. 

It doesn't help that there's an insanely increased amount of time devoted to the flashback, which basically ended up with Reiter dead, Taiana dead, the refugees on the plane dead, and Waller going in to tell Oliver that 'killing is the way to justice', which, yeah, I get that it leads to Oliver's mindset in season one, but it's still pretty dumb to drag this stupid flashback through twenty-three episodes and just... y'know, ending stuff so abruptly. Would the flashbacks have hit harder if the story between Taiana and Reiter were told in a single interlude episode, or if the flashbacks themselves ended in the mid-season point? Really, season four had the worst flashback among all of Arrow's flashback sequences, and the writers could really stand to drop the whole thing entirely in the next season.

I dunno, it's very disappointing, really, and I honestly think it's a notch below even Supergirl's finale.