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I’m assuming filming is scheduled with plenty of notice for the cast who have to fly in to town. She would’ve known as soon as she got the shooting dates that filming of 718 didn’t overlap with the con. Why leave it until almost the last minute to cancel?

I’d only be willing to give a spin off show with Mia Smoak as the lead character a chance based on what other characters are included and how Arrow ultimately ends. A show that includes Dinah and Rene and an ending for Arrow that is ultimately depressing will lead to it being a nope from me.

Thus beginning the flock that becomes the Canary Network!

Oh dear God, no. I read the “Dinah gets some life changing news” portion of the episode description and noped away. It didn’t even register that she could also be in the Team Arrow and SCPD parts as well. That has the distinct possibility of being way too much Dinah for me to sit through.

I’m beginning to wonder if they can’t separate the dislike for their character from dislike of them personally. I dislike Dinah a lot and I wouldn’t be at all unhappy if she moved away from Star City but I don’t have any particular feelings about JH, one way or another. KA, on the other hand, has been awful as both Dragon and as a real life person. He came into the show and has been mostly unpleasant to fandom from day one. I’m assuming he did it for reasons but I blocked him and his personal hashtag on Twitter awhile ago and moved on.

The writers are aware that Dinah is not a well like character when you consider the not so subtle lines of Rene telling her to “keep doing what you’re doing, haters gonna hate” and Captain Singh telling her she can “change hearts and minds” and would avoid going down the path of having her blame Oliver for something...again. But then I remember it’s Arrow and they often double, triple, quadruple down and go with the most irritating and/or infuriating choice.

Maybe she was expecting Dinah’s throat slash to get more attention than it did has and thinks the lack of attention is due to haters hating on her personally rather than fans just being more excited about Mia and the Olicity Baby reveals in the episode. I also wonder if she’s a little bit annoyed that Kat, Ben and Joseph have been so warmly embraced by fandom and she’s struggled to achieve the same thing.

A lot of questions have been submitted asking why Oliver, Felicity & Diggle feel like they’ve become supporting characters to Dinah, Rene and Curtis in the show. The EP’s have a problem with NTA that they didn’t resolve in S6 and are choosing to ignore and not address in S7. Doubling down on the amount of present and future Dinah and Rene I’m watching definitely isn’t helping to change my dislike for them.

I have to say it’s really hard to maintain a level of enthusiasm when the city in 20 years time is described as heart wrenching and dire and the bleak future can’t be prevented. At the moment the present day timeline is pretty joyless and the future timeline looks hopeless. In any case, I hope they start moving the plot along a bit faster because it feels like it’s standing still with whatever is supposed to be going on with the Dante plot and the slowness of the future mystery reveal is currently more aggravating than intriguing to me.

This is exactly why I feel so disengaged from the show now. It feels like they’re trying gaslight me into thinking every terrible plotline I sat through in S6 was misunderstood or should be forgotten along with the lack of support shown to Felicity in early S7. I understand why they’re eager to put the awfulness of S6 behind them, but they could put a little more thought into fixing the characterisation and relationships they broke rather than glossing over it like nothing happened at all. Not addressing any of the lingering S6 issues is annoying me far more than it probably should and it’s impacting how I view S7.

Quite a lot of what’s been teased for 7B sound like plots they’ve done in previous seasons with a minor twist in some way. The Ghost Initiative is a rebadged Suicide Squad, the Birds of Prey inspired episode is a do over for the one they did in S2, just with a different team up, and the new Green Arrow plot could be a cutdown version of Oliver’s origin story, now with Emiko taking his place and Rene as her partner in place of Felicity and Diggle. Hopefully they’ll starting giving out some clues and connective threads about how all of this is supposed to fit together because at the moment it feels like they’re treading water without any real direction.

Based on the replies under Beth’s tweet I think she’s getting on the last nerve of a lot of people. No one is expecting spoilers that reveal entire storylines but she really needs to figure out the art of teasing to create buzz.

It sounds like the most random grouping of characters for an episode. If you asked me what the overarching plot was for this season, I don’t think I’d able to tell you. There was the prison plot stuff, the capture Diaz stuff, the Longbow Hunters who show up and disappear at random intervals, surprise half-sister Emiko whose mission is currently undefined and the flash forwards that tease a dystopian future and a turned evil, presumed dead Felicity and a missing Oliver. Maybe I’m not paying enough to attention because I’m finding it really difficult to keep track of any connecting threads.

They carried that pattern on for so long that I now find it impossible to believe that Oliver would ever return to being friends with them. Mystical resurrection pits, I can believe. Magic villain, sure. People who can fly, shrink and run super fast, no problem. Everyone being firm friends with NTA after the events of S6? Uhmm...nope. Oliver definitely earns his superhero title for me in even attempting that amazing feat. :)

Synopsis: Dinah tasks Oliver.... Me: Nope, don’t want it. I really cannot with smug, smirking and unbearable Dinah. I can’t believe that they’ve somehow interpreted the dissatisfaction with Dinah, and NTA in general, as let’s double up and give you a present AND a future version, all at the same time.... and, wait for it, we’ll promote Dinah to Police Captain and turn her into Oliver’s boss!

There are so many plot issues and logic leaps when it comes to Diaz. First he was a 3D printing low level drug dealer. But wait, he’s actually a minion of Cayden James who didn’t seem to have any plan to escape Cayden’s master plan to destroy Star City. Swerve again, he’s now a criminal mastermind who was pulling the strings behind the scenes all along and somehow tricked a computer genius with a doctored photo. How, you ask? Nevermind, everyone just let that slide on by, okay! I really do not understand why, out of all the villains they’ve had, they chose to keep Diaz around when a large portion of his characteristion just doesn’t make any sense. The only thing I can think of is that it’s a writing exercise to try and fix what didn’t work in S6, but it isn’t making the character any better.

I’m assuming they would’ve known when planning out the season that 709 would be the crossover. If that is the case, then they could’ve considered shortening the prison arc a little and reduce it from seven episodes to six episodes. The prison storyline still would’ve had weight to it if it ended in 706 and it would’ve given them more time to play out all of the reveals by spreading them across 707 and 708 before launching into the crossover. Some of prison parts really felt like Oliver was wandering from one part of the prison to another part of the prison. Oliver spent several episodes devising ways to get to a level two in the prison to obtain information about Diaz, only to end up not getting any information about Diaz.

Someone on Twitter had calculated screen times for the crossover and Nora Fries only appeared for about 46 seconds. I’m not sure that the character was meant to be any more meaningful than a comic book Easter egg and it provided an opportunity for Stephen’s wife to cameo in the show. If Nora Fries hadn’t been a character in the crossover I don’t think it would’ve made any difference to the overall plot.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Carina has a new show set to premiere in January so she’s now promoting a (probably very short lived) period of positivity...that only seems to apply to others and not herself or the extended Jar. I’m always surprised that she so freely discloses personal information about Emily when it’s clear that she doesn’t like to overshare her life. I’m confident that if name dropping was an Olympic sport, Carina would be undefeated and take home the gold medal every time.

The flash forwards could’ve been okay but the problem is that I currently have minimal interest in the characters they’re choosing to focus on. I cannot stand Dinah and she’s the character they chose to bridge the gap between the present day and the future, which means I get a double dose. Grown William is kind of dull and and I’m not really sure why I should care about adult Zoe when I barely saw kid Zoe. With Roy, I can take or leave him and with Maya, my level of interest will be determined by who she is revealed to be. If everything in the flash forwards is a big misdirect and it ultimately means nothing, I’m probably going to be annoyed that they wasted time on it. If they try to undo it in the crossover, I’m probably going to be annoyed that they wasted the remaining episodes of S7, plus however many episodes of S8, on a story that ultimately goes nowhere. If they learned anything out of the S6 team war debacle, it should be that the audience won’t just go along with a storyline that makes little sense and isn’t well executed.

The show would genuinely shock me, and not in a good way, if this was a twist they decided to pursue. I have absolutely no idea how they would get from “you are the love of my life, Felicity. That will never change” to “gotcha! Oliver and BS have a future kid!”.

I think I’d be just fine with the flash forwards and their bleak outlook if they were populated by characters I actually care about. The flash backs weren’t particularly compelling to watch after S2, but at least they had Oliver as the anchor point and I cared about his story. At this point in time, the flash forwards are populated by a bunch of characters I’m not invested in at all, they’re teasing the “death” or villainy of characters I am invested in and Dinah (my least favourite character, ever) is being used as the bridge between the present and future casts. If they’re going to be a feature of the show for the foreseeable future, I hope they figure out a way to make them more interesting, or at least speed up the drips of information they giving out, because at the moment I find them tiresome to get through.

The problem for me is that filling up the flash forwards with characters that are new, that I don’t really care for (looking at you Dinah) or that I’m not particularly invested in makes them feel like a chore get through, especially as they’re painting such a bleak future and they’re revealing information so slowly. I hope they haven’t planned to do a full flash forward episode like they used to do with the flashbacks.

After how much screen time JH gobbled up in 708, I’m now wary about what her excitement might mean for an episode and for how much she’ll be in them at the expense of any other character not named Oliver. This season Rick has taken a different approach with René to a point where he’s easier for me to watch. But JH has somehow managed to make Dinah even more irritating and smug this season than she was last season.

I would’ve been onboard with the flash forwards if this had been the story plan. Even the grimness of the future wouldn’t bother me, but adding in future Dinah is affecting how I much I might’ve enjoyed them. I don’t know what their thought process was in doubling up on character that hasn’t found a solid fanbase. Present Dinah and future Dinah in a single episode is way too much Dinah for me. They really need to use her more sparingly. If she’s got a lot of story in the present, then scale back on her scenes in the future and vice versa.