Carrie Ann

This is sorta me. I have stuck with shows regardless of ship as long as I am invested enough in other things--BtVS, for example. NONE of my many ships worked out there, though I guess that's true of everyone.... But with shows where a ship is my primary interest, yeah, I just quit when it goes wrong.

I think it's his fight with Anarky? Maybe? I remember when they...fall through the floor or whatever happened there, I noticed that there was no edit.

I think she's definitely compartmentalizing. It's the only way to explain everything, including not telling Oliver about the boyfriend, or...just having a boyfriend, in general. It's also consistent with her characterization. But even knowing that doesn't excuse the writers from not dropping some kind of nugget to hint at her turmoil. Would have taken a half second to show her looking rough and then quickly putting on her perky mask when Oliver came in the lair, for example. Honestly I think they wrote this episode with goals in mind in terms of tone and content elements, and they didn't care to set anything up beyond that. It felt like a sales pitch. Like: here are the character dynamics we think you like, here are some big stunt set pieces, here's Oliver kicking ass, here's Russia! So Felicity was back to those great S1/2 days where her only role on the show was hero support, and her interactions with Oliver were not at all laced with angst. And, fine, because I hate when these writers try to write romantic angst because they are bad at it and it doesn't showcase the best between SA/EBR. But the fact remains that her relentless perkiness doesn't jive with what we know Felicity is supposed to be going through. So it was just kind of...perplexing.

You erased two kisses and ALSO TWO PARENTS JFC pull your shit together, Barry, god. And everyone else: stop giving him pep talks and start telling him to grow the hell up.

I agree with others that Sara is probably gone. I also think that John Jr is older than Sara and quite possibly not Lyla's kid, and that John and Lyla never got back together at all? Given how involved Lyla has been in some pretty big moments on the show (her abduction in S3), I'm not sure how they could possibly explain away her absence related to those things, but they...probably just won't. Fuck this.

I had some real fears about how badly Barry was going to come off in this situation, but somehow it was all even worse than I could have imagined. Congrats, Flash Writers! The reasons for Barry to try to return to the Original Timeline were so, so weak. It basically came down Wally being injured--but not explicitly about to die--and possibly having lost his healing ability for some unexplained reason (though Barry's resetting the timeline really had nothing to do with this), Joe being an alcoholic (which he could have gotten help for), Cisco and Caitlin having different though not worse lives (and they could have been officially brought into the Flash fold if Barry was super-convinced they needed that for their happiness), and--presented as most important--Barry himself losing his memories of his other life. But...so what if he lost them? He would completely merge with the new timeline, as he should. The writers really needed to make the new timeline either generally worse for most of humanity (or at least CC), OR way, way worse for most of Barry's loved ones. Instead, as Alan Sepinwall pointed out, they all seemed...kinda better off? Barring those things, there needed to be a big, huge, explicitly life-and-death situation that threatened more than one person in the inner circle to force Barry to choose between killing his parents again or letting X/Y/Z die. Instead, the writers went with Option D: have Barry just decide he preferred his old life, and kill his parents to get it back. OK! gr8 job, gr8 hero, gr8 show.

He actually isn't. One of his biggest complaints about Arrow in the early seasons (when he still loved it) was its unwillingness to jettison the parts that didn't work simply because they were tied to comics (*cough* Laurel), which is what makes his tweet re: the grave kind of confusing. He never did come around on her, though he acknowledged that at least they were trying to make her work better. He said on his podcast (and that later tweet) that he quit after 410, so.... I think maybe he's saying that he decided not to give it another shot when he found out they killed LL? Maybe he thought that was a bridge too far? Maybe just fed up after the spate of female-character-killing that went on last spring. At any rate--what I know he loves about The Flash is Joe and Barry or really Barry and all his dads. I think he also likes Cisco? I think he was starting to find Barry hard to root for by the end of last season, and yes, I think ~secrets~ are one of his pet peeves on these shows, so maybe it's a combo of both. Regardless, I'm a little excited to find out what pissed him off so much!

Unless he dyed his hair for this role, Wil Traval's hair is usually brown or blond-brown.

Hey Cassie: The only times Oliver was ever smiley were when the show came closest to resembling the "romantic comedy" Cassie says needs to stop? So should he...get back together with Felicity and start smiling again, OR keep brooding as he has done for 3.5 of 4 seasons? Also--every comic book show I've come across features "whiny crying and sullen faces," so like, maybe it's not the genre for you, pal.

Honestly the only way I could possibly believe it at this point is if Ross is extremely drunk when it happens. Like...black-out. Otherwise it makes zero sense.

Making crack guesses about Felicity's new boyfriend feels like bitterness? I thought it seemed like...fun. Anyway, I'm still pulling for Barry, and despite the Flash spoilers re: 301, I still feel like time travel wonkiness makes it possible? And Barry would know it wasn't "right," but Felicity wouldn't, yet, or something? But I know that's a long shot. I do LOVE the idea of it being Deadshot. He was a cop on E2; it would make sense that he would be more straight-laced in other timelines too. Eddie, also great. Point is: I'm rooting for anyone who would be silly and gimmicky over anyone I'm expected to meet and immediately care about and "root for," as WM suggested.

I haven't read that fic, but it's pretty common that Actor AUs are basically RPF in disguise. Why people do this instead of just...putting it in the RPS tag, I do not know (jk I do know). Again, no clue about this one, but it sounds like it feels a little that way, probably unintentionally. (RP ships are almost always NOTPs for me, so I tend to skip Actor AUs because I get that feeling often, and it turns me off.)

No Paul either, right? So...maybe not everyone was in the room yet? I hope?

My, my.

Yes--I liked the very, very brief glimpse we had of Oliver as mentor with Roy (until he gave him v bad relationship advice), and could potentially like more of that. But in practice--this is too many people at once, and aside from Curtis, these characters have no link to anyone else on the show that would make me care about them for any reason. I think TPTB have some agenda here in introducing so many new costumes (probably some combo of setup for LoT/other spinoffs, merchandising tie-ins, reeling back in the comics faithful), but I don't care about any part of that. So I'm hoping that 5A really contains the bulk of that work, and once they feel they've accomplished those goals, maybe the show can go "back to basics" and just be Arrow again, like they keep saying? I mean, no part of that promo resembled S1 to me, but...okay. Anyway, I think I probably just woke up grumpy today, but I'm just not feeling this.

I...am pinning most of my hopes on 5B at this point, and am just gonna hope I get through 5A with my interest in the show intact. I don't feel pessimistic, exactly, just realistic: I have never liked it on any of my shows when a new team, or even one new Scrappy Doo team member, shows up and we're supposed to be immediately charmed and engaged by them. That's just not how it works. If these guys (aside from Curtis) end up as not much more than background field assistants, then great! But in Season 5? I'm not interested in 3-4 new characters. I'm interested in developing the underdeveloped relationships between the characters I already care about, like T/F, Q/T, Q/D, T/D, and at this point, F/D. So...yeah, that promo did nothing for me and probably none of them will until maybe, hopefully, the midseason hiatus?

I wonder how they're going to play this so that it doesn't seem like Barry is still being selfish by choosing between which "happy ending" he wants more. Like, okay, Iris and your other friends aren't in your life, and everyone's lives are different in other ways (and maybe they're even less happy!) but now your mother is alive and had another 15 years on this Earth, and you're going to choose to take that away again. There better be a pretty compelling reason beyond just "I liked my old life better. :-/"

I mean...at least in this example the parallel is semi-relevant? J/K this is a super terrible campaign and the WB should be embarrassed.

Since the deleted scene didn't reference Moira, I don't see how including it would have revealed more about Oliver's motivations or thought processes than the previous Queen Siblings are Idiots and Sometimes Hypocrites scene from 414 (?) where GuggenThea made the "protecting William" argument in the first place, and Oliver agreed to it. If viewers wanted to find the Moira connection it was already there. The only redeeming aspect of the deleted scene for me is to show that Oliver was still thinking about it re: Felicity at all, but him deciding to put it in the rear-view, basically, does not improve or even clarify my view of his choices in that storyline or the storyline in general. Wish we could just have a complete do-over, ugh.

Forgive me.

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I was wondering the same thing. I'm guessing she won't be in it much, or at least the scenes she's in will be very contained--one set, the same scene partners--so they were able to schedule them all together at the end of this week.

All the messaging this hiatus seems directed at making a specific type of viewer excited--those who care most about the stunts and action and have been disappointed by the past season or two in that regard, because I think that's who they're most concerned about getting back on board right now. Hope this isn't considered fan talk, it's just those are the only things the EPs have been discussing in a positive way (new costumed characters, badass fights, back-to-gritty-dark-basics or whathaveyou), and the talking points have been repeated enough that it's obviously not incidental. We have very little information about any of the series regular characters, and what we do have is all negative (except for Felicity's great love story, of course!!!). So if you watch the show because you care about the main characters and their relationships, they aren't really giving you anything to get excited about. If you want to see costumes and fights, have they got a show to sell you! How things will feel when they actually play out on screen is a different story, but right now, I think the PR message is pretty consistent.

I don't get why they even care about getting us to pull for ol' GoodGuy McStraightShooter when it's obvious they don't intend him to be a long-term LI (given that we won't even see them get together, they'll apparently just already be together when we meet him), unless they just want us to care about him so that we will feel like Felicity has a real choice to make (again) between GG McSS and Oliver (again) OR so that we will give a shit when they kill him off. Both options are unappealing because like @apinknightmare said, it's all just really unnecessary relationship drama which is not the writers' forte.

This has happened literally never in the history of shipblocks on television, but best of luck to you!