Carrie Ann

This episode was a giant S3 throwback mess and I hated it. What shoddy plotting and lazy writing, just...everywhere. I don't even know where to begin to address it, so I'll just stick to this for tonight: This made me crazy. She said, "Remember the guy who [blah blah hacking]?" like, wasn't it two days ago? We know at least one-half-day and one night have passed since the meeting at PT--she just didn't talk to Oliver in that time? If she weren't paralyzed, I would say, well, maybe he slept at the hospital with Thea, but you know, she relies on Oliver to get upstairs in her own home. She would have at the very least needed to talk to him to coordinate that. I just can't handle how lazy the writing was in this episode.

(let's try to avoid Cranky Babies, peeps) Speaking of cranky babies, MG's Tumblr/Twitter replies this week! He seems...agitated. Not sure why he even picked this week to pop up again after being relatively quiet for awhile--sweeps maybe? But anyway, I prefer his silence, and if not, then I'd personally prefer that he simply ignore the people who send him asks/@s that are rude, incomprehensible, repetitive, etc. He gets hundreds of questions, I'm sure. Don't reward the jerks by responding to them, and don't use people's rudeness as a distraction from your own shitty choices.

That's a really good interview--interesting questions and thoughtful responses. I love KLaw and Nyssa is the only thing related to the LoA that I don't hate. My ideal scenario is that Nyssa ultimately defeats Malcolm, takes her place at the head of it, and the LoA storyline is resolved, leaving Nyssa free to drop in on the show from time-to-time without things being bogged down by the albatross of MM. Also, sweet Jesus, Katrina Law is beautiful.

I would prefer Felicity's dad to be morally gray, because that would differentiate him from Malcolm IMO, but we may already be past that point. Unless he was never actually going to go through with his plan from last week, he was pretty gleeful about however-many-thousand people were going to die. That's Malcolm-type shit, so he's already on that level for me. (And I don't consider Malcolm to be morally gray, when his only "redeeming" quality is his alleged love for Thea, but that's more in service of his narcissism than anything else and still obviously doesn't discount his actions or lack of remorse for them.) So yeah, I really don't need to be sold on another character whose indifference to human life is supposed to be complicated by his concern for one specific person.

I have some kind of mental block when it comes to identifying things by sound, so I did terribly playing along in my kitchen! Even though I knew almost all of these, I would have needed a 5-second clip for most of them, I think. I got a few that are programmed deep in my lizard brain after one second--Buffy, Alias, others that I used as ringtones for a time in my life--but in general, this kind of thing is not up my alley, so I'm very impressed with all of you. Very fun game time, and a nice change to let people guess with no penalty after the one-second clip.

Javier Grillo-Marxuach (who wrote/produced for the current season of The 100, previously on Lost, and is doing the upcoming Xena reboot) wrote a really interesting piece called The 11 Laws of Showrunning and I can easily imagine how some of them might apply to MG.

I don't see why it would ONLY exist in that version of the future, but it MAY not if they stop him.

The problem is that the writers screwed themselves over if they wanted to show that making deals/working with supervillains was the wrong choice last season, because ultimately doing so helped Oliver to save Thea, to survive himself, and to beat Ra's. There was no part of the way that storyline ended that left that up in the air or that made it clear that it was a mistake. There should have been! But there wasn't. So, yes, I think it would be super if Oliver had learned a valuable lesson about making deals with bad guys, but he didn't because in fact his experience taught him the opposite. Maybe he will learn it this season, and that would be excellent, because I hate Malcolm and am tired of his illogical presence on this show. And also because Oliver's still on a hero's journey; he's still making mistakes and isn't always a perfect hero. I don't think we're meant to think Oliver has reached self-actualization yet.

Spoilers for The 100 S2:

I haven't watched 302 or 303 yet, but I will say that I did see the appeal of Clexa last season but once the betrayal happened, I was off that ship for good, and I frankly see no way they could put them back together that would maintain character integrity or feel organic. I have...lots of concerns about that this season, actually, regarding many characters. It's bumming me out, and it's the reason I'm not caught up on what was my favorite show last year.

Yeah, I'll be honest: I'm a little baffled by this conversation. To my eye, Oliver has been a pretty model citizen/vigilante/loved one this season (for him, which I'll admit is grading on a curve, but still, that's growth), aside from two dumb mistakes (the lie about William and avoiding the hospital for a time while Felicity was there) and the near-miss in this episode. We have no idea what DD would have demanded in exchange, or whether Oliver would have ultimately agreed to it--we don't know that because the writers had no intention of ever following through on it. It was done only to show how desperate Oliver still is when it comes to saving Thea's life, and how untenable that mentality is.

Joe is psychic!

I was wondering if they were just referring to the way Thea is dying/her injuries are reappearing, because yeah, the EPs and Caity have said that Sara will have the bloodlust. But the dialogue in 412 was confusing, and they didn't spend enough time with Sara to see whether that would have happened to her eventually too, so...

Eh, we've talked about this at other times on this forum, and I think for those of us who do feel there's some disparity, it comes down to the manner of the death/violence and what purpose it serves for women vs. men. On this show, male characters--especially those who are not explicitly villains but even the villains--die heroic deaths, or they die fighting, while women are often killed on their knees, or before they have a chance to fight. Also, the deaths of two men explicitly propelled Oliver's mission (first his father's, then Tommy's), while the deaths of major female characters have not been given that kind of emotional story-weight. Except for the episodes that immediately followed their deaths, the impact of Moira and Sara's deaths on Oliver were basically non-existent, other than as plot engines. The one area I don't agree with some critics is in "damseling," because I think all the characters take turns being the abductees, or the injured parties. I'd have to go back through the history of the show to see how each of those instances play out--I'm sure that Oliver saves himself more often than other characters do, and maybe there are some troubling trends there, but I'm pretty sensitive to that stuff and it doesn't stand out to me as an issue on this show. Until now, because I do think it's a little ridiculous that the only people facing long-term consequences of injuries are Felicity, Thea, and Sara.

I don't see anyone here presenting their opinion/interpretation as fact, so I don't think anyone is implying that it's not okay to feel that the lie is a very big deal. Personally, I feel like the show does think the lie is a big deal--they have to think that or there would be no point to doing it--and Oliver is going to be punished for his mistake in all the ways LL and others never are for theirs. That's fine by me because he is doing a shitty thing, and Felicity is going to be rightfully pissed off about it and only her motivations will make sense--Samantha's don't (especially if she HAS been allowing Oliver to visit post-409), Oliver's don't, so I'll be happy if at least one out of three people involved in this dumb lie and its fallout is allowed to feel realistic emotions and take logical action. But I agree with @Chaser and @lemotomato that the writers basically had to come up something that was bad but not THAT bad, and that's where I believe the writers would place The Lie. Shitty but not unforgivable or insurmountable. That said, there is basically nothing they can do at this point that would make me not believe in an O/F reconciliation, or to make me hate Oliver. I've crossed some sort of rubicon with this after Season 3, and I mean, I guess if they DID manage to do either of those things, I would just quit the show.

Ah, okay, @wonderwall, I guess I've never felt like it was Thea, and tonight did nothing to change that. I think it's Quentin, and again, tonight did nothing to change that. ;)

For an episode with WAY too much going on, this somehow still managed to feel like filler, and I think it's because it was just really lackluster. There wasn't much energy to anything. The dialogue was at turns rote and repetitive in a juvenile way, or it was super cheesy or unconvincing (those flashbacks, omg), and I felt no tension or suspense at any point. Maybe I was just not in the right mood for it? But it just didn't work for me tonight. I think I would feel this way more if someone else was playing him, but Echo Kellum has this really down-to-earth energy that takes all the wind out of that Gary-Stu-ness, for me. He's very present in his scenes and comes off as genuine, so I like him despite his rather shallow characterization so far. But I would like if Felicity could have a win at PT that involved something SHE made this season, versus using Ray's old stuff or things Curtis makes. I'm confused by this--why do you feel like this episode ruled anyone else out?

Generally in English (at least in the US?), the phrase tends to indicate you believe that person was, is, and will always be the great love of your life. That's why it's sad that KC would believe that for Laurel, because the Ollie we have seen on the show and the relationship they had was not worthy of that designation, and it indicates that Laurel would be basically fatalistic in her thinking about any future dating options. That none could measure up to Ollie Queen, Douchebag King.

I love that light blue blazer/white shell/jeans look Felicity is wearing in these shots and Emily looks super pretty. /shallowpost

Echo has a Comedy Central pilot called Overanalyzers--it hasn't been ordered to series yet. But I do think he could probably do both shows; just maybe not as a regular.

Even if I thought that there was some clue to be found in the nuance of EBR's performance there--which I don't because I doubt she had any direction beyond "Felicity is sad and angry about someone being killed"--I don't share this feeling, because I saw way, way more emotion from Felicity over Sara's death and over Roy leaving town than what I saw in the back of the limo. And we can fill in as many blanks as we want to about those relationships, but if we're going to do that, then you can fill in those blanks for her relationships with Thea, Laurel, and Quentin as well. I'm not saying it's NOT someone she's very close to, but I am saying that IMO she would definitely react that way if Lance was killed, for example, especially if he died in a particularly heroic or tragic or vicious way.

The X Files numbers are absolutely insane. When my husband started watching this fall, I ended up looking up info on a lot of the episodes to see who'd written, directed, etc., and I would quote him the ratings to compare to present-day, laughing about how nothing gets 20 million viewers these days. (And granted, it didn't in its initial airing, but times have changed, so I think it gets credit.)

I don't know, man. Octavia's rage at Bellamy plus the news about Ricky Whittle getting the lead role in American Gods has me pretty worried about two of my favorite characters. (I mean this show is full of awesome characters, so that still still leaves three other favorites for me, but...I'm just gonna keep my fingers crossed that things don't go as badly as I fear they might.)

I feel like I should mention, since I ding the writers constantly for screwing up the nuance of scenes/dialogue (usually by making things too broad or overly dramatic), that I thought Oliver's dialogue in that last scene was exactly right. Starting by saying that he heard the doctors' diagnosis and that it's not "healthy or productive" for either of them to live in denial was perfect for what came after, because it made clear that he wasn't being willfully naive or blindly optimistic about her prognosis, and it took any pressure off of Felicity to sort of play into that. And it made it clear that he WAS being realistic; that he understands the current science and medical advances, but that those don't always seem to apply anymore. Given that weird reality, his last line about searching for a way to make her walk again was pretty awesome, because it's not just flowery claptrap. In four or five lines, they managed to convey so much about that character and relationship, and put a nice stamp on where they are with this storyline, as well as pointing the way forward. Props to the writers of this episode for putting that extra ounce of effort into the dialogue that some of their colleagues can't be bothered to do.

Two things: I think Lyla only moved to give up the codes once Dig gave her a very significant look and said, "Do it." AMA did a nice job conveying that she'd perceived some message in that because her face and body language completely changed. I think she knew he was working some plan, because he would never tell her to give up Rubicon. Also, I think it's very possible that Lyla is going to be tapped to take over ARGUS now, and we got that dialogue from Waller as a lead-in to that move. Just a guess. I thought the direction of this episode was pretty stellar, and I was pleased to see that the director was a woman, and this was her first episode of Arrow. I hope they bring her back, because I really appreciated all of her touches, from the shot-framing to the clarity of the fight scenes.