Carrie Ann

I will be very happy with either of these options.

Ah, for some reason I got my shooting dates mixed up and thought the hospital stuff was for 409. So we think something happens then, and Felicity's hospitalized for the duration of the winter hiatus?

EBR has been notably absent from BTS pics posted this week (except the old one posted by KC) (unless I missed some?), wasn't at the hospital shoot, and has been live-tweeting movies during what I would consider shooting hours. I'm not saying Felicity was definitely kidnapped, but...she was, right?

I thought it was funnier that KC was in her standard pose there, arms crossed.

I wish E2 Star City had no vigilantes but really needed one! Even a third-rate one! And LL could answer that call. Laurel Lance, always trying to save the world! Even other worlds! So brave and selfless. Single tear! BYE!

That episode was really lackluster, despite the glimmers of life Constantine, DD, and Curtis brought to it. I have so many complaints about LL that I'm just going to shelve them and say: tbh, the show has done a terrible job of making it seem like using the LP is a bad idea. If you know what to look out for, and you get your old pal Constantine to do a li'l spell and tug your loved one's soul out of the hot tub, it seems like no biggie. I mean, I'm glad Nyssa spoiled the one in NP, but I thought there were more in the world, and...at this point, I would definitely use them. Sara seems to have her soul back, the EPs comments about it make it sound like the lasting effects are similar to PTSD with a dash of bloodlust. Better than being dead! What a stupid waste of a storyline this has been.

But seriously, has anyone considered--while Sara is running around the city alone, killing people, missing her soul; while Thea lies in a hospital bed after nearly being killed herself--has ANYONE stopped to consider the REAL victim? Has anyone stopped to consider how LAUREL feels?!

Yeah we've talked about the way Barry is over-celebrated on TF while Oliver is over-punished, but there's another sort of parallel/reversal there too, where on The Flash, only Barry's feelings matter. Sometimes it can feel like we only get Oliver's feelings on things and are left to guess at others' (Felicity's last season, as we've been discussing), but in general, the show is pretty clear that all characters are allowed their own feelings and motivations and reactions, and those can last for several episodes or even seasons (see: QL). But on The Flash? Pretty much only Barry's feelings matter, and he's the only person allowed to feel and express the whole range of human emotion. Everyone else conveniently gets over their icky feelings--see Iris SO easily accepting that Joe told her her own mother was DEAD for her whole life, along with all the BS last year. On Arrow, if that happens, it's usually Oliver who is expected to just get over things and get with the new program. The only time I can really point to that someone else had a quick acceptance of something that could have dragged out was Thea learning the truth about Oliver last season. And in general, S3 was weaker on allowing characters to have proper emotional responses (the team's mourning of Oliver's death was completely botched), but I will choose to see that as an anomaly.

I'm so glad you all agree that iZombie is great this season. I liked it last season too, but it was a sort of slow build, and really kicked into appointment TV for me in the last three episodes or so. I'm so impressed at how they made me fall for characters like Peyton and Major when I found them totally lifeless (haha) in the beginning. Also, yeah, Ravi is the real dreamboat in the cast.

This is my problem with The Flash too, but not just because of time-travel or E2. The show just doesn't care or doesn't bother to deal with emotions beyond a single episode. So Caitlyn is already moving on, even though we never actually saw her grief. Ditto for Iris re: her grief (and her anger), minus the moving on, but plus the completely-unconflicted pushing of Barry to date Patty. No one is mad at Barry for nearly ending the world and getting their loved ones killed--okay! Barry's dad leaves town as soon as he gets out of prison, single tear, bye! Cisco has been hiding something from the team for months, no one is concerned, okay! There are ZERO emotional stakes on this show, so I find it hard to give a damn. I'm grateful that's not (usually) the case on Arrow, and I hope it's not on LoT either. That said, this was the first episode in a long time where something like that didn't actively piss me off, so yay!

I mean...in some ways, I think she should, but mostly, I feel like it's been at least eight years. She was aware that he cheated on her repeatedly with many women, and she chose to take him back every time. If anything, I hope that learning this would make her truly realize that she'd romanticized their connection/relationship and that it was NEVER what either of them thought it was. It would be great if the writers used this as an explicit final nail in that coffin. And really? If he can let go of her bringing her sister back and putting innocent lives in danger for a week, then she can let go of something he did eight years ago that would have been no more significant than any of the other times he cheated, if not for a child he wasn't aware of.

Arrow was nominated for the People's Choice Award for Favorite Network TV Sci-Fi/Fantasy Show.

He got distracted by freeing Quentin and telling him to get out of there. That's literally as long as it took. But I think we're probably at agree to disagree at this point.

Y Y Y Y Y Y

Well, I think there IS a way, and I've tried to make clear that this is just my opinion. Personally, I don't require a full background and life story of every baddie in order to believe that they might be able to bring down Oliver, and particularly not in these instances, for reasons I've already stated a few times. I think maybe what's happening is that, in previous seasons when Oliver's been (temporarily) bested, he had to get himself out of the tight spot, so we ultimately got that affirmation that he was still the superior fighter. (Or we just didn't care if Dig was the one who saved his ass, because he's Dig and we love him.) For me, nothing I've seen made me feel like Oliver couldn't have gotten out of it himself if he needed to, so that hasn't bugged me, personally. What has bugged me, and what may also be contributing to this overall feeling that Oliver's fighting prowess is being lessened, is the amount of time. People are right that in 402, in the big opening fight scene, Oliver stands above it all and watches while the other three do the fighting. It's stupid. That doesn't make me feel like his power has been lessened; it makes me feel like the show is selling something else right now, and they're selling it way too hard.

Okay, I just fundamentally disagree that Oliver can't be temporarily beaten by people who are smaller than him. It's not like LL being able to toss large LOA guys around like ragdolls (or fight at their level in any sense). In both of these cases, it was the weapon that ultimately hurt him, not the person wielding it. It happened in previous seasons, and then he'd go back to the lair, regroup, restrategize, and beat them. Basically: I think we're not seeing as many moments of OQ being badass, AND I find LL and TQ's skill level and expectations of equal treatment eye-roll-worthy, but these two moments don't represent either to me. I don't see Oliver's abilities being lessened here, and definitely not in service to propping another characters' skills. That's all I was saying. Maybe over the course of the season, we'll see more of this, of Oliver always being the one who the villains get the drop on, and then I too will say "enough!" I just think OQ is getting short-shrift because the show is giving him less time in their fight scenes and giving it to LL/TQ, and therefore he's getting to have fewer moments of doing cool shit. It sucks.

Yes, exactly. I've been having a hard time figuring out why this isn't working, when ensemble fighting teams have always worked for me before, and yeah, it's because these four aren't differentiated enough. It's not like Leverage, it's not like BtVS or Angel, hell it's not even like TMNT, where they each had their own weapon. I mean, you could argue that they sort of do, but they don't really highlight that on the show and even if they did, Oliver is proficient in all of them, so once again.... The only thing that really differentiates them is their skill and experience level, and the show is disregarding that.

I might be remembering wrong because sometimes my eyes glaze over during fight scenes, but these two examples--of Anarky and Liza getting the better of Oliver--don't really track to "making others look better," IMO. In the first case, the point wasn't to make it look like Thea was stronger or more skilled than Oliver. Anarky went after Oliver harder because he IS the bigger threat*, and he got him with a device that would take anyone down. The purpose of that scene wasn't for Thea to save him and have her hero shot. It was so that she could go WAY overboard and set this dude on fire so Oliver sees that she's screwed up. And in terms of Liza--I thought that was the best way for that to go. She didn't get the upper hand by fighting Oliver. He defeated her by tying her up, so he thought she was no longer a threat. She escaped and got a knife in his back while he was distracted by Lance. (S3 Oliver probably would have told Quentin that they couldn't be friends anymore because he was a distraction, lol.) She didn't overpower him. And if anything, that happened in order to give QL the opportunity to redeem himself. Again, not to show that any other team member is a better fighter than Oliver. So my problem isn't that they're weakening Oliver in service of other characters. I think we're just not seeing as much of him as I'd like. Over the course of this show, the action scenes started at 100% Oliver doing cool shit, went down to maybe 90/10 O/D for a very long time, then 75/25 O/Other people, and now we're at MAYBE 50/50 Oliver/Other people. So it feels like he's getting the short end of the stick, when really it's just that they're not doing a great job of keeping Oliver centered. And they are way overcompensating on trying not to make it seem like anyone is a sidekick. That is ludicrous. I'm sorry the show screwed up by framing the One True Black Canary's journey this way, but she IS and should be a sidekick in this story. *ETA: I actually re-watched this scene, and Anarky immediately takes Thea out with the taser, then very competently fights Oliver down the hallway until he tases him, and then Thea reappears. Oliver is down for a period of time, just like Thea was after she was tased.

Ha, especially because I kinda thought a bonus to them skipping ahead would be to catch up to 2016.

Okay, I had this S4 fic idea that I'm never going to write where Felicity would be in a van/limo/something, where Oliver thought she was safe, and then the vehicle would explode and he'd think she was dead but really she was just kidnapped. I could totally see a variation on that happening here, where they get in the limo, then Oliver has to get out for some reason and DD drives off with Felicity, cue production card, begin hiatus.

I wouldn't really care about the proposal being public, because it's a show that likes to do Big Moments, so something small and intimate would be more than I could hope for. But this...doesn't look right. It's all just too fast. I mean, that all happened in like 5 seconds. I hope there is something more to it, whether it's a total fake-out (in that they staged this to throw us off) or just a fake-out in-show...I don't know. I feel ungrateful saying this, but yeah...I hope this isn't IT.

You don't think that Felicity's tears and Oliver's smiling glad-handing were in the script? Because I definitely do.

This is apparently a worldview shared by the Flarrowverse EPs, because they believed Iris was a hypocrite for being mad at Barry and Joe and Eddie because she "lied" about her feelings about Barry that she wasn't aware she had. Any lie is as bad as another in their view, and you have free rein to lie if someone has ever lied to you in the past! How convenient. Anyway, I was resigned to this "resolution," and maybe it'll even be for the best, because if we "resolve" whatever coldness there is between O/L, then maybe we never have to have any meaningful scenes between them? Ever again? Maybe? Like, what would they have left to ever talk to each other about beyond surface level? I do wish that the overall feeling was of LL apologizing for her mistakes instead of what feels like OQ apologizing for...whatever it is he apparently did wrong this time, but that will never happen.

I wonder if this message ties into his having her sign off on inheriting/becoming CEO of PT or part of PT or whatever non-SEC approved action that contract covered. Like, maybe he was planning to leave town, or was planning to do something dangerous (like playing around with shrinking technology), and was tying things up in advance, just in case. Not sure how she would have found that message if not for mini-Ray guiding her to it, but I assume he didn't anticipate that the building was going to 'splode, so maybe there would have been a trail to it in that case.

Here's one from The CW's Arrow Tumblr. The caption kinda sums it up: "A team-up some of you have been waiting for." I mean...whoa, chill out, try to contain your excitement, CW PR intern. Also, LOL, it really does look like he shot the anchor to the moon again. Stunt people, come on.