Jim’s Thoughts

I’ll keep this short. There wasn’t a single positive thing for me to explore about this week’s episode of Arrow. It was a chore to watch, broken up only occasionally by unintentional comedy. The problems are all the same as the ones Kyle and I have been pointing to for weeks now, only they’ve been magnified.

This has become the Felicity show. Do you need proof of that? This episode had Felicity (and her dad) going up against Damien Darhk while Ollie and Diggle went side-questing. Just to be safe, Darhk dug up Felicity’s ex-boyfriend to do his super-hacking just to make sure he could be talking about Felicity during those unfortunate moments when Felicity herself couldn’t be on screen.

When they weren’t serving up cringe-worthy family drama amidst the backdrop of nuclear annihilation, Felicity and company were bombarding us with techno-magic. The techno-magic has always been a part of the show, and I can forgive it when it’s a minor plot-point, but two weeks running it’s been the absolute focus of the show. Adding sparks flying from computer monitors doesn’t make it more exciting. It just makes it cartoonish.

I could go on, but I promised to keep this short. There’s only one episode left of the season, so I’ll watch it, but if the showrunners don’t make some serious policy changes, and set the ship right early next season, I may lose hope that Arrow can ever recapture what it had in Season 2, and I may quit subjecting myself to the series.

Kyle’s Take

I’m sure the episode’s name “Lost in the Flood” refers to something else, but Arrow has been lost in a flood of Felicity for the past few weeks, if not the last year. Oddly enough there was a time when Felicity was an interesting and likeable character. Now she’s insufferable. Ollie has no agency in his own show, and there are some characters—like Curtis—who were only in the episode to spoon feed the audience how horrible a childhood Felicity must have had to come from a broken home. When someone’s on the show to “make” the audience care about your past, you’re an insufferable character.

Jim and I are most likely in the minority with disliking Olicity/Felicity, but the Magical Computer Tour has taken center stage and it’s waving off the cues for other characters. On one hand, I like how Arrow has listened to its audience—or at least a certain demographic of its audience. Ollie and Felicity were a relationship concocted by popular fan fiction; there was nothing in the show to suggest they’d ever get together (sure, Felicity made googly eyes at Ollie, but Ollie saying he cared most for Felicity the first time he said it had less emotion than Stephen Hawking’s speech-generating device). On the other hand, Olicity, and later Felicity sans Ollie, have hijacked the show. Arrow is no longer a TV show about a vigilante or super hero.

Arrow will force Felicity to equal the Green Arrow. Felicity and Ollie will get back together, because they’re “destined” to be together; let’s forget about all the other “loves” in Ollie’s life. Their relationship failed because Ollie didn’t tell her the truth about his son; let’s forget that the two have little in common, never had to work at finding common ground, or never had to work at their relationship at all. Olicity worked because it worked? Yeah, right. Let’s also forget that Ollie forfeited his relationship with Felicity for the possibility to visit his son, even though he never visited his son. It’s great when your daddy uses you as a plot device and an excuse for artificial tension between your dad and a chick he’s banging who isn’t your mom. Each layer of crap adds another layer of dislike.

How can I like a character who would begrudge a child the same childhood she was denied? I don’t know why Ollie had to make that deal with his baby momma (of not telling anyone about his kid, including his fiancée Felicity) because that made no sense, but I also don’t know why Felicity had to dump Ollie for wanting to have a relationship with his son—if we can call what Ollie did “wanting” a relationship with his son—by any means, even if that meant hiding his son’s existence. That didn’t make sense. This whole scenario was something those two could’ve—and should’ve—worked through. But that was too much work.

For the last few weeks, Arrow hasn’t been about a vigilante or super hero and what it has been about is a nonsensical, insufferable character. Overwatch is so over, and Arrow needs a change for the better. That change shouldn’t include Olicity 2.0.

Thanks for reading.