Arrow, Season 8, Episode 1: Starling City
Well, that was... unexpected! Arrow's eighth season abandons any sort of down-to-earth gritty vigilante tone and goes straight for a superhero style sendoff. And for all of its ups and downs, I'm not going to knock too much on Arrow as a whole. Despite its problematic writing and pacing, Arrow has been an interesting ride with great heart and great actors who clearly care about what they're doing. And just like how I feel when Gotham ended, it's going to be such a strange beast when I finally watch the last episode of Arrow and realize that CW's longest-running superhero show has reached its conclusion.
And for a show that was so anti-fun, so emo and gritty and outright embarrassed about its comic-book origins that it even mocked the name "Green Arrow" and "Star City" in its first season, CW and Arrow as a whole has managed to find an interesting balancing act between a more down-to-earth superhero show and all the drama that comes with it, while also being a superhero show that exists in the same world as the wackier hijinks of Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl and all of Arrow's other sister shows.
And yet there's an undeniable sense of rock-solid history. For all of the retoolings that Arrow's done, for all the secret siblings and secret past enemies that it's done, Arrow's never actually disrespected what came before it. For all its warts, season one of Arrow was a pretty solid season, and it's very much appropriate for the season premiere of Arrow's eighth season to begin with what's essentially an Elseworlds concept. Something that really could've felt like a retread ends up tugging on nostalgia scenes and a constant sense of "wait, what is going on?" Obviously, Oliver Queen is on a quest from the Monitor to do something to avert the incoming Crisis on Infinite Earths (which is actually airing at the time I'm writing this and I'm basically shut myself off from all internet searches relating to DC stuff to avoid being spoiled). But is it time-travel? A what-if scenario? A Flashpoint-style alternate timeline? Turns out that 'our' Oliver is going through Earth-2's Starling City, looking at a glimpse of just how much he has touched the lives of those around him and just how differently things might've gone if Oliver Queen hasn't returned from the island as the Green Arrow. Of course the specifics of this theme ends up being blurred a little as the actual revelation to the audience that this is Earth-2 ends up being made, but it's still neat nonetheless.
Oliver is quickly joined by 'our' John Diggle (who arrives courtesy of STAR Labs help), and Earth-2 Laurel ("Not-Laurel" from the past couple of seasons), who are known quantities to longtime viewers, but it's nice to see the return of a lot of familiar actors for Arrow's swan song. There is the unfortunate absence of Willa Holland (Earth-2 Thea died in a car crash while mourning Oliver), Paul Blackthorne (Quentin died in Laurel-2's backstory) and Emily Bett Rickards (Earth-2 Felicity is running her own goddang tech company) but seeing old friends Colin Donnell, John Barrowman and Susanna Thompson reprise their roles as Tommy Merlyn, Malcolm Merlyn and Moira Queen is genuinely heartwarming. There's an instant chemistry between these members of the cast, an as much as part of me is going "wtf is going on", the scenes in the Queen mansion tugs at the heartstrings pretty well as the characters do feel like a dysfunctional family reunited.
Speaking of which, y'know what's great? The fact that John Diggle basically knew what Oliver signed up for, on what's essentially a suicide mission to maybe save multiple universes... and his first instinct is to just grab an interdimensional portal and help his best buddy out. That meeting as Diggle tells Oliver that, no, they're not splitting the duo up is pretty heartwarming, as is all the nostalgia-tinged reprise of their first meeting.
Speaking of which, y'know what's great? The fact that John Diggle basically knew what Oliver signed up for, on what's essentially a suicide mission to maybe save multiple universes... and his first instinct is to just grab an interdimensional portal and help his best buddy out. That meeting as Diggle tells Oliver that, no, they're not splitting the duo up is pretty heartwarming, as is all the nostalgia-tinged reprise of their first meeting.
Speaking of a family reunited, we've got Diggle and Oliver basically giving a huge shout-out to their original meeting as Diggle replays through their original season-1 meeting and tells Oliver that the same trick isn't going to work on him again. Honestly, there's a lot of shots, particularly early on, that's just obviously evocative of the show from eight years ago, and y'know what? As someone who joined in relatively early on (either late season two or early season one was when I binge-watched the series) it freaking works. And the bizarre context to justify the returning actors means that everything has this neat, odd sensation of being nostalgic while also not feeling too much like a retread.
Oliver's tasked by the Monitor to obtain some mysterious sci-fi plot device, the dwarf star particles (which the Monitor couldn't have gotten himself despite being a godlike entity? Eh.), while a "Dark Archer" is menacing Starling City. Turns out that the Dark Archer isn't Malcolm Merlyn but Tommy; Adrian Chase (!!!) is 'the Hood' in Earth-2; and we get the little bonus surprise of Earth-2 Rene and Dinah being random flunkies of Tommy. And while there's a degree of seriousness to things, this episode is clearly leaning heavy on fun, because the action scenes are pretty fun, there's a snarky sense of things of Oliver and Diggle clearly not really giving too much of a fuck as these senior vigilantes and superheroes, so how they interact with the far-less-experienced Adrian Chase or how Oliver quickly disposes of Rene and Dinah and then immediately snarks about how they had a better teacher in Earth-1. Or how Oliver keeps snarking to Adrian about the memetic "ten steps ahead of you" that Earth-1 Adrian kept repeating in season five... it's fun.
And, sure, there's a lot of inconsistencies about everything that goes on here if you think about it too much. Isn't Earth-2 Green Arrow supposed to be Robert Queen? What about the 2040 timeline, or whatever? But eh, at this point I think as long as the priority of the writers is more about giving Oliver a good send-off while wrapping up all the hanging plot threads from the past seven seasons. Which, okay, I can respect.
And, of course, the dramatic ending of Oliver managing to talk Tommy down from unleashing the Undertaking is well-delivered and emotional, and then, of course, we get the absolutely surprising twist that the destruction of the Earths is happening a lot earlier than we expected, because Earth-2 gets completely vaporized by an anti-matter wall, killing all these Earth-2 versions of characters we know and love... and, man, that Moira goodbye is one hell of a gut-punch, huh? Oliver, Diggle and Laurel-2 manage to escape back to Earth-1, but the stakes are real, and we're going full-in on the insanity of a comic book crossover plot presumably for the whole season. And that's without us going into the actual ramifications of Earth-2 being destroyed! I can't keep track of all the alternate-universe Flash characters on the top of my head, but there's like, a significant amount! Harry Wells and Jesse Quick for sure!
It's actually a massive gut-punch, since Earth-2 is actually a locale we've been through many times, perhaps the most out of the various alternate Earths in CW -- it does raise the stakes a fair bit, even if we know that the heroes are going to win in the end, the loss of Earth-2's a huge one!
And, sure, there's a lot of inconsistencies about everything that goes on here if you think about it too much. Isn't Earth-2 Green Arrow supposed to be Robert Queen? What about the 2040 timeline, or whatever? But eh, at this point I think as long as the priority of the writers is more about giving Oliver a good send-off while wrapping up all the hanging plot threads from the past seven seasons. Which, okay, I can respect.
And, of course, the dramatic ending of Oliver managing to talk Tommy down from unleashing the Undertaking is well-delivered and emotional, and then, of course, we get the absolutely surprising twist that the destruction of the Earths is happening a lot earlier than we expected, because Earth-2 gets completely vaporized by an anti-matter wall, killing all these Earth-2 versions of characters we know and love... and, man, that Moira goodbye is one hell of a gut-punch, huh? Oliver, Diggle and Laurel-2 manage to escape back to Earth-1, but the stakes are real, and we're going full-in on the insanity of a comic book crossover plot presumably for the whole season. And that's without us going into the actual ramifications of Earth-2 being destroyed! I can't keep track of all the alternate-universe Flash characters on the top of my head, but there's like, a significant amount! Harry Wells and Jesse Quick for sure!
It's actually a massive gut-punch, since Earth-2 is actually a locale we've been through many times, perhaps the most out of the various alternate Earths in CW -- it does raise the stakes a fair bit, even if we know that the heroes are going to win in the end, the loss of Earth-2's a huge one!
The 2040 storyline is... it's honestly kinda there. It's competently acted and I suspect we're going to have some time-traveling payoff and shenanigans come Crisis time, otherwise why even keep the future cast around, still? Anyway, it seems like we're covering one of the bigger questions in season 7. If Connor Hawke is actually Bronze Tiger's kid adopted by John Diggle, whatever happened to JJ? Turns out that he's the Deathstroke of 2040. As much as I'm too tired right now to figure out how this stacks up to the information we know about the future timeline of the Arrowverse, at least it gives us time to flesh out the characters of the future? Mostly we learn that Mia's stubborn, and after a brief moment of allowing Connor to play things 'his way', Mia doubles down on her one-woman-show.
Anyway, I'm not the most impressed with the 2040 storyline, which feels like filler more than it did in the previous season, but I'm definitely a fan of the present-day storyline!
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Obviously the big easter egg is the Batman mask on Lian Yu at the beginning, replacing the Deathstroke mask that was so prominent in the first two seasons. Which leads to some questions. Is this a parallel to the fate that Batman's taken in Earth-1? Is this just a little wink-and-nod acknowledgement to how so many Batman elements crept into Arrow? Or just a random cool easter egg?
- Adrian Chase also name-drops Bruce Wayne, attributing a Sherlock Holmes quote to good ol' Batsy.
- A huge chunk of the first act is basically a huge, huge homage to Arrow's pilot episode. I'm not going to point out every single detail.
- Walter Steele gets a bit of a shout-out when Oliver is confused where Walter is before realizing it's Malcolm that Moira remarried in this Earth.
- Earth-2 Thea died specifically of a Vertigo overdose causing a car crash on her 18th birthday, which is a reference to "Trust But Verify", where Thea also had her 18th birthday, a Vertigo overdose and a car crash. It just wasn't fatal on Earth-1.
- The way that Oliver gets chained up by "Dark Archer" Tommy and the whole sequence that follows through is basically a (far looser) homage to the climax of season one where Oliver and Malcolm went through a similar confrontation.
- Adrian's nickname for Laurel is "pretty bird", which is the nickname that comic-book Green Arrow uses for Black Canary.
- In the comic-book version of Crisis on Infinite Earths, it's Earth-3, the 'evil counterparts' Crime Syndicate Earth, that got destroyed first. Earth-2 isn't quite the one-on-one evil counterparts world as the Crime Syndicate's Earth, but it's close enough to that!
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