statsgirl

Those panels are great. Diggle, as stand-in for the audience.

Critics' Picks 2014: The Worst New Shows is really funny. Good to have the warnings though.

I don't know how to post it here but it's the picture of Oliver and Felicity sitting at a table as if negotiating and the caption is "Now, regarding those love interests. We talked and decided we don't want it. Please,let them go" Ever since the season 3 poster appeared, there's been a run of fan photoshopped alternatives (and many of them better than the official one.)

A sentiment many approve: https://twitter.com/bruaccioli/status/512030651856748544/photo/1 "Now, regarding those love interests.

Tommy never stopped supporting or caring for Oliver even when he was angry. (Poor Tommy, too good for this world.) I'd say Oliver let Felicity and Diggle down when he disappeared after the Undertaking. He also let her down at the start of The Dodger but recovered fast. With Roy, it's more like he built Oliver up to a superhuman status which no one could live up to.

I don't think she ever really committed to Tommy even when they were together because she was always looking for someone better, whether it was Oliver or the Hood or someone else more exciting and higher status than Tommy. She said she wanted to fight for their relationship but at the first hint that she could have Oliver instead, she was all over him. I know this isn't conventional wisdom but I think what Oliver did to Tommy by sleeping with Laurel at the end of s1 is much worse than what he did to Laurel, even with the original sister-swapping so much. Oliver was a douche to take another girl along with him on the Queen's Gambit while Laurel was apartment shopping for the two of them but I've always wondered how well he knew Sara before it happened. Was she part of his social circle with Laurel and Tommy, or did he vaguely know her as Laurel's little sister? Did he see her in passing when he went to pick up Laurel and Quentin barred him from getting further into the house? Or was she a regular at his parties at Queen Manor? It can never be right that Oliver took Sara on the Queen's Gambit, but it would have been wrong to have taken any other girl too. Whoever he took he was just using to avoid being honest with Laurel, and as Laurel said, taking her sister was a sure way to blow up the relationship. But if Oliver had actually known Sara well before and had a relationship with her as Laurel's little sister, that would be a thousand times worse than if he'd only vaguely known her. What I think Oliver did that was even more wrong was to sleep with Laurel when he knew Tommy loved her. Tommy was his best friend from childhood, the one who loved him and was genuinely happy to have him back again while Laurel alternated because hating him and resenting that he survived and Sara didn't. In her fic The Curse of Cuervo, redtoes writes She doesn’t want Tommy to be the kid left behind at recess when everyone else runs off to play. She’s been that kid. No one wants to be that kid. That's what I see Oliver and Laurel doing to Tommy at the end of season 1, making him that kid, and I don't know which of them I'm more angry at because Tommy of all people did not deserve that. Oliver had turned into a stone cold killer who took what he wanted without thought for others and Laurel, who professed to care for Tommy, should have done better.

That's kind of meta for the problem that KC has difficulty differentiating Laurel Lance from Katie Cassidy. For whatever reason they let her put her own style on Laurel (her high status on the show? throwing her a bone because Laurel became less important?), maybe it would have helped KC for the EPs to keep her Katie self from influencing the character of Laurel.

Then have Felicity and Diggle flanking Oliver as the core Team Arrow, and Laurel to the other side of Diggle with Roy as he is now. Represents the focus of the show and keeps it from being too matchy-matchy (boy, girl, boy, girl, boy). Does anyone else think Diggle's head is too small on his huge body? (I've seen a lot of fanart better done than this poster.)

That's sad if she felt she had to do that. (I think she looked better before, there was a really pretty Madonna look about her face.)

Re-watching Sacrifice, the scene where Oliver tells Laurel that she's the only one who really knows him seems even more jarring than it was before because she doesn't know him, not his Arrow identity and even less who he is as a person. And then it was reprised in s2 when Laurel told him that she knows him like she knows her own name (very well rebutted in the Olicity Humor #5 video). I really don't get it, why they keep showing us she doesn't know him and then telling us she does. It makes me dislike the character even more, and worse, not trust the show. And yet, after last season, more people are saying that if Laurel becomes the Black Canary, they are going to stop watching the show, now including people on comic book sites. Given her positioning on the new poster, it looks like they are serious about making Laurel part of the team. It seems the more people push against her, the harder they try to make her central.

It looks like Oliver is back to a recurve bow, which should make purist SA happy. I'm interested to see how Batman and Lex Luthor play in. I kept wondering who that man in the t-shirt was until I realized it was Diggle. My food cravings were first trimester (that is when the embryo is most susceptible to being made ill by bad foods so it's also the worst nausea time). Second trimester he got off easy because I had the energy to do it all myself.

I agree, which is why I dislike the poster so much. Not because of the pictures (although Oliver and Roy have squished bodies and Emily looks like Emily, not Felicity), but Laurel is in there front and center, between Oliver and Diggle unlike last season when she was at the back. It looks like they're really going to have Laurel even more significant s3 and nothing good can come of that. The poster is the representation of the show for the coming year. The EPs should have had final say.

Ironically, one of the reasons his hope was crushed was because Laurel refused to listen to Oliver, and Moira, and Quentin, and stayed at CNRI to collect papers. If she had just stayed away, as they all told her to, then she would still have been alive. It's never not funny that all of Tommy, Quentin and Oliver all knew that she would be there. Although I would argue that it was crushed as soon as he slept with Laurel because I don't think Tommy would ever have got over that and so Oliver could have had Laurel but he would have lost Tommy. I don't remember who said it at TWoP but it was brilliant .... as they were pushing Windows 8 so hard, this would have been the perfect episode to promote the could and point out that Felicity had uploaded all their files on to the cloud so it didn't matter if the lair computers were destroyed in quake. If it had been cut, we wouldn't have had Oliver tell Laurel that she is the only person who knew what he was really like, and how the island stripped away all the extraneous stuff and brought the man she saw. Since the whole season has been telling us that Laurel hasn't got a clue about who Oliver really is and that he was fundamentally changed on that island in a way he wouldn't have been if he hadn't gone there, cutting that line would have made both Oliver and Laurel look better. With it in, they both look delusional. The only thing that scene showed, beyond Oliver thinking he could have a life with Laurel only if there were no Hood activities, is that when Oliver is doing his Hood activities, unlike Diggle, Felicity and Tommy (who hid the basement lair from the inspectors and Lance) all of whom help him with them, Laurel holds him back.

It's interesting that that's what SA perception is (because I don't think he's actively lying or trying to upset the fans because that would be stupid and counter-productive). I don't think it's necessary to have the lead female working with the lead male on cases, for example, Worf and Dax (one of my fave OTP's) often were involved in different storylines in an episode. The difference between them and and Laurel, however, is that we were always aware of how awesome Dax was. You make a lot of good arguments. But 1. If they are wiling to give up on their original vision of Laurel/BC, why don't they write to KC's acting skills? She's good at the bitter, the snarky, the entitled, none of which belongs to the Dinah Laurel Lance who is trying to save the world that they keep feeding us. 2. Why do they keep going out of their way to give Laurel more stuff so that we will love her? The addiction arc was time that could have been spent on other characters (like Thea or Moira) since Laurel didn't really learn anything that changed her, it wasn't an island (in spite of what the EPs said), and KC couldn't pull off the addict acting. They told us that the ToD scene was 'Emmy worthy' and that we would love her for her actions when she found out who the Arrow was, and then they put her in the lair. They must think highly of Laurel or else they wouldn't keep trying to make us love her.

The big storyline for Thea will be her relationship with Merlyn, her training, hiding it from Oliver, Oliver telling her his secrets (SA said that one), and probably her decision whether to join Oliver or stay with Merlyn. The DJ love interest looks like she's going to be running Verdant again. Becuase it's so tied in to future developments in her relationships with Oliver and Malcolm, I don't think there is much they can spoil about it.

The question is, how was SA playing the Oliver smiles in the first two episodes?. Was he playing Oliver as genuinely smiling with Tommy, or was he trying to portray Oliver as playing a role of the prodigal son and friend while being shut-off and cold inside? Only SA can give the real answer to that.,

To me it looks like Oliver is putting on a show to fool Tommy and his family so they don't find out. Laugh, clown, laugh. I don't think SA is lying.

She never really committed to him until the very end and I think he knew it which is why he stepped back when he saw her with Oliver in Home Invasion and believed that the combination of Oliver = the Hood was something he was never going to be able to beat. He was always waiting for her to prefer someone else, Oliver, the Hood, someone else better than him. And then she proved he was right when she went straight to Oliver when he broke up with her. Yes, he was her little puppy dog because he'd loved her for a long time and she took advantage of it.

I've been on the wrong side of a pairing when the show-runners changed and so did the OTP ship but this is just very, very wrong. I too think it's better to know if your pairing won't happen in the near future if it's not going to work out. Learn that TV is an inconstant mistress and move on. That's the reaction I see from everyone who got into the show without going through the comic book fandom first. I thought it was true He was talking about Present Day Oliver, and as far as I can remember, while there were polite social smiles that weren't real or smiles that were expected of him but didn't go past the lock he had on his emotions, that was the first genuine smile he gave and it was because SA broke character.

That's what I meant. Laura didn't want it to happen but she got Nik out of it. And NIk has proved that you can overcome having Stavros as your biological father. Lulu doesn't have any viable eggs left (until they retcon this), and she's only got one embryo left which may not take when its implanted (the first one didn't). Given her baby rabies, is she going to destroy this embryo of hers just because it has Cassadine DNA instead of Corinthos DNA? I believe in abortion if that is the better option in the situation but I have eggs left and Lulu doesn't, and I don't want any more children and Lulu does. This is her only chance to have third biological child(which is what I meant by 'a gift') so all the freaking out about Stavros! is the father! seems stupid to me.

Maybe that dress is Oliver's secret weapon in the meeting -- distract them all and swoop in and win the game.

In Montreal last weekend, one of the audience said how great he was for doing all that stuff for charity and he said he's the same person he was before but now he has a platform. and he can do more. He's pretty much exhausted from all the hours working on the show and falling asleep in airports going to cons for the fans and Q&As and promotions on his FB page. I'd like to see the people who think he's got a giant ego spend one week in his shoes.

Other than Mikos, the Cassadines never seem to stay dead. (Kristina I is not Helena's and I refure to acknowledge the woman on the island.) I doubt either Stavros or Victor is dead, or maybe I just don't want them to be because even with all the scenery chewing, they're more fun than any Cornithos storyline. I really, really, really don't get Lulu's horror that her second last possible embryo has Starvros' DNA. So does Nik, and she likes him. Just take the baby as a gift and raise him normal. Robin looks so much better with that haircut. I really do like Patrick but if he's hitting on Sam knowing that Jason could be alive, he's going to deserve what he gets.

He said that there is only one woman in Oliver's life next season and that's Felicity.

Tommy at least felt a bit bad about sleeping with Laurel, even after everyone thought Oliver was dead. Laurel was all "I deserve to do what I want since I have the moral high ground because you cheated on me with my sister."