statsgirl

Is it a single panel with The Flash again, or does each show have its own panel? If it's both shows, maybe they're trying to winnow down what would be a very crowded stage. The cross-over panel was bad enough and it didn't have Candice Patton, Jesse Martin, Victor Garber, Robbie Amell, Katie Cassidy, Paul Blackthorne, Willa Holland, Brandon Routh, John Barrowman or Matt Nable. (I don't see any reason for Nable to be there since he's just occasional but they love their Ra's.) If it's mandatory, the actor would have to go, and if he/she were being killed off, all the more reason to get the last bit of publicity you can. People were right to be upset at the White Men Rule! panel. If they're anticipating a backlash, they need to figure out why fans would be upset and fix it now rather than deal with the p.r. mess and the possible loss of audience later.

I still don't mind the idea of Felicity having someone to really woo her but it's been so badly done all around. We needed more Felicity/Oliver flirtiness before they broke up so that there was the pull for the audience to want to get back to that. Except for Oliver saying he loves her, it's still all in the audience's head. Which is an additional problem because while we're supposed to feel for Oliver and his love of Felicity since he's the hero of the show, in actual fact, he's been treating her pretty badly all season. He's told her he loves her three times, each time walking away from her, he won't talk to her about his decisions, and he keeps dangling maybes but always stopping before he follows through. It's the worst 'love story' this show has done, and that's saying a lot. But the thing with Ray, between "I'm doing it for Anna ... no, I'm doing it for Felicity" and Felicity trying to save him from becoming like Oliver, isn't much better.

Well, it would be a surprising reaction to Laurel finding out who killed Sara, I'll give them that. And then Oliver can try to save Malcolm because he knows about the tape and Thea and Laurel don't. On the other hand, the argument against Sara being the BC is because she's a killer and so has no light. What would this make Laurel? The Justice You Can't Run From?

But how is there time for Laurel to find out about Malcolm, forgive Thea, and call Ra's (how would she know how to get hold of him since Sara was the one who always called her?) and have the LoA pick up Malcolm and take him away by early in the episode? Posters at sites like E!Now and TV Line are happy that Laurel is now the BC and can finally get her story going. Also known as the Scorpion and the Turtle, or the Scorpion and the Frog. I asked MG about it a few eps ago but of course he didn't answer. In all of this mess of a season, it's the one prediction I think will come true, that Malcolm is the Scorpion and won't be changing his nature. Unfortunately they're making Oliver too stupid to be real to pull it off. Ironically, Maseo and Tatsu are some of the best parts of this season. I wouldn't mind actually having more of their story. Sometimes I think Tatsu will show up and be the one to teach Laurel because that makes more sense than Nyssa doing it, so it's not going to happen. And it certainly won't be Thea, even though she's better at fighting now than Laurel is because Laurel can't be lower status than Thea. I don't know what's going to happen about Laurel/BC after this arc, but I'm dreading it.

Felicity and Wells would be interesting. I wouldn't wish him on Felicity long term, she needs someone who she could love and trust, but it would definitely be interesting for a time. The ratings for Draw Back Your Bow were the lowest for any episode this season not centered around Laurel IIRC. I really think Ray would have been more liked if they had kept his relationship with Felicity platonic. Raylicity shippers could have dreamed and those who don't wouldn't get upset. I'm still hoping they will tone it down enough that I don't have to FF through their scenes (Ray buys a clue that Felicity has feelings for someone else and offers to pretend to date her to keep Oliver away since Felicity is worried she'll give in) because they're hoping to get an Atom spin-off and Ray sleeping with Felicity is not going to help one bit. It's interesting that AK is still saying in interviews that this season Felicity will have a real choice between the two men. I guess they really think they're being good to Felicity writing it this way.

The Stupid, It Hurts might actually be the tag line for this season. Althought the only explanation for Oliver trying to save MM is if he's afraid Malcolm will show Ra's the video. (Too bad Ra's was all "whatever, Sara's dead" in ep 4.) Should have asked Felicity to scrub those recordings when you had the chance, Oliver. I don't think they can make Laurel go bad at this point and survive the loss of viewers. Besides the viewers who originally wanted Laurel to be BC right away, and still think GA/BC is endgame romantically, I think substantial number are happy that Laurel finally has a purpose on the show, and see her more sympathetically as she's dealing with Sara's death.

Matt Nable looks like an ex-footballer, which he is. And the show hasn't really built up any kind of scary presence for him, unlike what they did with Slade from the time Oliver first met him, they just expect us all to fall in line and drink Malcolm Merlyn's kool-aid. Arrow used to be so much better than it is now. It's interesting but Berlanti's faux pas with the (male) costumes at TCA seems to be a metaphor for what's wrong with the show this season -- it's all about the cool costumes rather than the storytelling and the characters themselves. It's true for Ra's, who is the least scary Big Bad the show has had, it's true for Laurel whose costume and storyline are both WTF? and it's true for the characters from The Flash who no one who hasn't read the comics knew about.

Orion, Robert's file telling Thea he loves her anyway would be just the sort of back-patting these EPs would do, and it wouldn't make sense (as usual) because how could Robert know that Thea knew about Malcolm being her bio-dad? I think the hair is Willa playing around, although maybe when Lance goes after the whole Arrow crew, Thea needs to disguise herself to hide. I guess they would have to close Verdant. Again. I think a lot of the problems this season could have been avoided if they hadn't been trying to run three storylines at the same time: Laurel becoming the Black Canary (and to some extent Roy into Arsenal); a new character (Ray) that they are attempting to spin-off; and Malcolm/Ra's/LoA. I understand why they wanted to see if they can get a new DCU show on the air next season, and they wanted to make Laurel the BC this year for whatever reason but the two at the same time has short-changed both, just as Roy was short-changed last year in the middle of Slade/mirakuru/Sara. I think if they had spent more time on Ray, integrated him with more characters than just Felicity (I wouldn't even mind if he went to see Laurel the lawyer) and written the scenes with Felicity better instead either being 1. stalkery or 2. always there when she's crying, I think the character might have been better received by viewers other than those mesmerized by the suit. Berlanti (?) said SDCC that some characters will reach their comic book destinies and others won't So far, it looks like everyone has. I was hoping it would be Laurel who wouldn't but that seems not to be the case, and Ray is definitely becoming the Atom after all that money they spent on the suit. The only person left not to is Thea. That's sad. Me too, or at least give me some O/D/F back again. All the spoilers still have them split up. I understand the EPs desire to go beyond the O/D/F golden team but nothing else they're giving us has been as good. MG is at the Long Beach con this weekend, right? Will we get any spoilers?

This is the show where there are going to be no metahumans or superpowers, right? Is this related to the Grodd storyline The Flash is doing? Is this an Easter Egg, or something that will s how up in later seasons? It will be good to see Marc Singer again. I only vaguely remember him from the original Beastmaster, more from V and Dar's father in the newer series.

They've been playing up the Omega virus as a really bad thing the last few episodes, and the show does tend to make each season finale a worse threat than before so it makes sense. S1 had the Undertaking but that was only in the Glades. S2 had both Slade and Amanda Waller set to destroy the whole city; s3 has to go bigger and a virus over the whole countryside sounds like it. The only problem is that with all the new superheroes suiting up, there should be a lot of fighting. But the virus sounds more like stealth than beating people up, which is Laurel's favorite pastime. And would Ray Palmer be fighting as The Atom, or getting the virus as the scientist he is?

I'm not in the prized young male demo... and you know what? It has no effect on buying habits other than for the boy toys like cars and sound systems. In terms of car ads, the only ones I can remember are Matthew McConaughey for Lincoln and the Dodge Ram, and I doubt the young males who watch this show are going to get either. When it comes to ordinary ads, like fast food or home items, women have more buying power. I got three other people into watching this show. Two quit this season, one over Laurel, and the third has moved to mocking it. The CW needs to listen to me. Bitter. I didn't like Laurel before, the only person on the show I didn't like, but this season, between the use of Felicity to prop her and that even the lair isn't a Laurel-free zone any more, I'm actively hating her. After Canaries I decided that if I'm going to watch the show, I have to mute or fast forward her scenes. I get the impression that people think that now that Laurel is the BC, she's not hated any more. Wrong, it's only now that I really hate her. Well, when you put it like that..... They relied far too much on the reputation Ra's brought from the comics and Batman, and didn't bother to make him consistent or even scary at first. More even than before, this whole season has been creating a huge divide between viewers who want comics! and viewers who want a good show. I think Stephen may feel that way. But he has the least say, if any. Kreisberg is off doing the Flash and doesn't see what's on Arrow, Berlanti is all about his new shows and the cool superhero costumes he took to the TCA, and Guggenheim thinks that any reaction is good, and that small crumbs like the Diggle and Felicity scenes in The Return will be enough to satisfy viewers. At this point, the EPs don't care about the professional critics, they've done their jobs in the first two seasons to get the series noticed, and now they can move on to other ones.

"You would think, heck I even thought that, but then I thought " Nope. Can't do it, what about all those pesky cases in the past where he and the firm represented himself as a lawyer."" Have him disappear for three years (time jump!) and go to a small law school somewhere, giving Jessica and Harvey plausible deniability. Then he comes back with a law degree and goes to Harvard for a Master's, thus being both a lawyer and a Harvard grad. It's frustrating that this problem never gets solved. But if it is, I guess the writers can't come up with anything else to cause trouble, so we're stuck with the same problem for the fourth season now.

quarks, I wrote out a long reply, and then thought it would be better in the Laurel thread. Brief summary: spending more time on Thea these past episodes has made her more interesting and the audience more likely to tune in to see what happens with her. Spending all this time on Laurel this season achieved the opposite.

From my perspective as a fan, sure. From the perspective of the show and the CW, not necessarily. Katie Cassidy is still the second billed on the show; she was hired to be the lead actress, and paid the appropriate salary for that position. By that perspective, she should have more screentime than anyone other than Oliver. But even with five episodes focused on her, she doesn't. John Barrowman, who is a regular this year, has the coveted "with" position which usually has higher status, and money, than the people following the first billed performer. I have no idea how much money he gets compared to how much Katie Cassidy gets, but Barrowman doesn't come cheap. As a regular this season, he's had only 40% of the screen time Katie Cassidy has had, but I'd be guessing the CW thinks he's worth it. The money her contract stipulates she gets paid is a sunk cost. From the perspective of the CW, if KC doesn't bring the eyeballs and if viewers are less likely to watch if the show is Laurel-heavy than if it isn't, it's a mistake to give her more screentime. From the perspective of the show, the same. The bottom line is whether the screentime a character gets is going to make viewers more likely or less likely to tune in for the rest of the episodes. I think Thea's storyline lately (topic!) is going to make her more interesting and people will want to tune in to see what happens with her. We'll have to see if that's true for the effort they've put into making Laurel the Black Canary. Are there more people like me? After Canaries, I decided that I would either mute or fast-forward Laurel scenes, although I broke my rule for Tommy. If she's in the lair fulltime next season, I'm considering dropping the show. If general viewers feel the same as many people here, that Laurel becoming the Black Canary and spending time in the lair is going to make them less inclined to watch the show rather than more, the show and the CW need to eat the price of how much they're spending on her, limit her role on the show, and do more research next time. I think "distracted" is the right word. These EPs have a short attention span -- they love the idea of Dinah Laurel Lance as the Black Canary but they aren't actually interested enough in her to put the time into writing her story well. Or even half-decently.

The show is way too crowded. I think it goes downhill when there are more than four people in the Arrow cave, and I insist on two of them being Diggle and Felicity. As much as I liked Sara, Diggle and Felicity got pushed back when she and Roy joined, and the advantage of Sara was that she could be a recurring character, moving between Team Arrow and the LoA. And now it looks like Thea is going to join too. I don't see what Laurel's story is going to be able to be after this origin arc is wrapped up because it seems like there is nowhere for her to go now. Even Felicity has an outside story with Ray. Diggle has ARGUS and HIVE and Thea has the club but there's nothing for Laurel. It seems like they have no interest in her being a lawyer any more. Is she just going to hang around beating up bad guys all the time? Help Ted Grant run the gym? Even if they have put in a bunch of origin stories for this season for Laurel, Ray and Thea, in the end, it still have to be about Oliver's journey, and it has to be about him running his Team. I don't see how it can work being the Oliver&Laurel show. I still have hopes that the next step for Laurel is going to be off the show, whether in Nanda Parbat or somewhere else.

From the The Return (3x14) thread: I think Tommy's death would have worked to push her into vigilanteism even more with the Oliver booty call because it would have made her feel more guilty and ashamed that she'd thrown away Tommy's love like that. Unfortunately, they had her put the blame on The Hood for not saving him (from a rebar through his body?), and when she realized her mistake, she got lost in a bottle. They could have had her fight for justice on Tommy's behalf at three different places -- when he died, when she stopped blaming the Hood and started blaming herself to atone, and when she stopped her addiction. Unfortunately they did none of these. Even if they were too busy setting up the finale with Slade and Sara, they could still have had Laurel take boxing lessons to work out her anger, or mention she's doing something to help the disenfranchised in Tommy's name since he had helped her save CNRI. It would have taken maybe 30 seconds and set up her rise to BC in season 3. I don't think they should have killed her off necessarily (even if it would have improved my s3 of the show) but when they realized there were so many problems with the character, they should have changed her direction and kept Sara. As the EPs said at SCCC last summer, some characters don't reach their comic destinies. Laurel should have been one who gets a different destiny than in the comics because even now that she's on the Team and wearing the black leathers, she's still a huge problem for the show in terms of what to do with her. (As is her costume, which will never be not ridiculous. Does KC have blackmail pictures, that they let her decide on fingerless gloves so the Black Canaries nail polish can match her lipstick and look more feminine? How can I ever take a character like that seriously as a vigilante?) That the s2 Laurel story was a mess and makes it harder to accept what they're doing with her in s3 is inexcusable even if they did concentrate on Oliver's story instead. I mean, there are 3 EPs and a bunch of writers and story editors. Someone should have said "Hey, what are we going to do with Laurel? Shouldn't we be setting up her future now? I've read that Benjamin Franklin was so impressed with the Five Nations councils that he wrote some of their ideas into the American Constitution. One of the things they did when making an important decision was to select two people to speak for generations in the future. In the Arrow writers room, if Laurel is really that important in the show's narrative, they should have had someone speaking for her story.

replying to the Laurel story arc on her thread

I suspect he was getting a lot of "give me a reason to watch this episode since you've destroyed Olicity" tweets.

This thread is funnier than the Clock Tower one. I think it's going to be hard enough to see outside of the Atom's suit without turning the face plate black. Maybe if they acknowledge how dangerous Starling.. er Star City is, Ray can identify himself. Wasn't 219 going to be The Flash backdoor pilot? Then they got lucky and the show was picked up for a pilot from 209/210. So I think they're going to try to make 319 a backdoor pilot for the Atom, with a lead-in from the Flash episode. I don't know how many new characters they can introduce though because both Starling and Central City have their own superheros already so Ray is going to have to go to Coast City for his base or it gets too messy, and Coast City will have it's own characters. Maybe the Arrow EPs are delusional if they think they have built enough of a superhero show with Thea, Laurel and Roy now that they can ship EBR off to the Atom permanently. If so, I think they're delusional. And also that there are enough people who favor Olicity,including reviewers like Robert Doughtery and Alan Sepinwall, that it will be hard to switch to Raylicity. It's possible. The Scarlet Pimpernel did it better though, in 1903. If Felicity is working with Ray at the time, maybe she escapes because Quentin doesn't have any evidence on her. I"m probably just delusional though, thinking Felicity is still an important part of Team Arrow. I laughed all through this, writersblock, but sadly, it's still better than what I expect to get on the show. I just want to say how much I love the idea of Slade kidnapping Felicity as the cliff-hanger. Just as long as they don't find her through the summer, I don't want that to appear in the 3.5 comics too.

I understand why people didn't recognize Oliver when he came back 2 years later, scruffy, in a hoodie and looking very different from the clean-shaven billionaire playboy. I still don't understand why no one recognizes Malcolm Merlyn, who was all over the front pages for killing 500+ people and causing millions of dollars worth of damage, and looks exactly like he always did. The fact that Laurel's time is anywhere close to Diggle's, or ever Roy's given that he's been on the Team for a year, is so, so wrong. That's the whole problem with this season, that Marc Guggenheim is the show-runner. As a writer, I think he does well, really well sometimes especially with emotional beats (he and Erik Oleson also wrote Left Behind), but as a show-runner, he sucks. Two completely different skill sets, and when a good writer gets promoted to producer and then to show-runner, it's the Peter Principle in action. Season 1 Laurel ping-ponged between well-adjusted at CNRI and with Tommy, and bitter with Oliver, which was part writing and part KC's one note acting. the only time I liked her was in some scenes with Tommy. I understand the emotional kick to kill Tommy but could they have still been thinking that Laurel was going to be Oliver's love interest again? that KC was a good enough actress that she was worth keeping on the show instead of Tommy? As much as I love seeing John Barrowman on my screen, this season's storyline with MM has been a complete WTF? and I'm now wondering if it would have been better to have killed him instead of Tommy. Or my favorite, kill Laurel while could have sent Oliver into the "to honor my friend" mode, caused conflict between Tommy and Oliver which would have been really interesting when Thea's bio-daddy was revealed, and let us keep Sara as the Black Canary. I agree about throwing the shiny glittery Felicity stuff in our faces to distract us and make us like whoever she's propping at the moment (Laurel and Ray this season) but MG believes in "star-crossed lovers" as the OTP so this is either 1. a way of appeasing people who don't like this season of O/D/F at odds or 2. his way of stating that Oliver/Felicity is the OTP.

Merlyn sending Oliver to duel in the first place doesn't make sense, but saying Oliver failed because he hesitated is ridiculous. Why would Oliver say he hesitated when he didn't? Because then they wouldn't have an excuse to bring Manu Bennett for 4:5 minutes of screentime? (I wouldn't be surprised if he too declines to come back after this. I blame it on the bad wig. People took a look at that and averted their eyes before they got far enough down to have a look at his face. David Larrabee syndrome (from the Sabrina remake): You've been forwarding me the company reports for years. You just assumed I couldn't read. If you include the Flash episode, Diggle has more but on Arrow, Laurel has beaten Diggle and is neck in neck with Roy. I expect her to pull ahead in the next episode. The dark horse is rounding up on the outside and going for the lead. To open up a space for Laurel to become the Black Canary. We have a hard enough time accepting her now, would anyone have accepted her if Sara was still around to show how it's done? I can see her wanting to take over Robert's desk, even if Walter was running the place by that time. And it would explain why she left Oliver's access still on the computer, she didn't want to take away even that bit of his presence. I've kept the most ridiculous things when someone close to me died.

I hope this is the right place to post this. I was looking at the show's website, and there's a lot of really interesting information about the real Camp X, also known as HYDRA, which trained Allied agents as varied as Ian Fleming and David Ogilvie (Ogilvie & Mather ad agency) and the FBI and the Office of Strategic services, which later became the CIA. http://www.cbc.ca/xcompany/dispatches/the-real-camp-x-10-facts-about-canadas-elite-spy-school

I thought the show was really well done, which is should be given the producers. But it's too emotionally violent for me. I know that's war, but I kept saying "No, don't kill him! Don't kill her!)

That picture would have been the perfect creepy Christian Grey.

I don't mock anyone's accent (I grew up surrounded by them) but Stormare's garbled the words in the opening scene. I've seen it in a number of reviews that people are trying to figure out what he said. I feel that if you're going to be on a TV show, the audience needs to understand what you're saying. They should have had him dub over that speech.