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JayKay, that episode was one of the very few times Oliver and Thea were fun to watch playing together. I could have Carter Bowen too. In the Felicity Versus fics, Felicity takes on the Chuck role so it's Felicity and Thea as best buds. Just wanted to warn you. Oliver is a stone cold Sarah. But the fic is still kind of fun.

They sort of did ILUs, non-verbally, with the looks at each other. Personally speaking, is having Helena back worth the price of Jason? I was enjoying the time without him so much.But my greatest hate is for Shawn, who is not only a useless character, but who brings down every awesome female character they pair him with. I really the conversations Shawn has where everyone acts like he's one of the good guys. Today it was with TJ, who was worried that Shawn and his mother were in a relationship since they were on opposite sides. No, TJ, Shawn is a murderer who works for a criminal and your mother runs drugs for a criminal, that's on the same side of the law. Now if your mother worked for the DEA, like she does, then they would be on opposite sides.

That would explain why Laurel is equivalent to Diggle, and Felicity is a teeny, tiny person, smaller than Malcolm or Thea, off in the far corner.

On the Clock Tower thread, I posted a link to a fanfic which made Felicity=Chuck, Oliver=Sarah, Diggle=Casey, Tommy is her brother, Laurel=Captain Awesome and Thea=Morgan. The one thing I didn't like about it was that Oliver is so cold and just using Felicity but if that's what Sara was like at the beginning of Chuck, that explains it.

Today is the day many internet sites are supporting net neutrality and offering links to petitions to sign. The legislation is in the US but will affect countries all over the world. The cable companies are asking for a two tier system and to charge extra. AO3;'s support. John Oliver explains.

In the Olicity Humor video, it's really funny when Laurel says she's going with the team, and the guy from Scrubs replies "No chance, Lance." On the Team Arrow thread, wonderwall has been comparing Team Arrow to Chuck. Last fall, Girlwithsixsmiles took that idea and wrote a Felicity Versus series that puts Felicity into a Chuck-like world. She only did five of them, but I think they're worth reading. (Why I am reluctant to start reading WIPs -- too often when I get hooked, the writer stops before finishing.)

It feels strange to say this but I think having Laurel not in the plot is actually an advantage because I can skip over her scenes. Skye is not only in every. damn. plot, half the times she's driving them. Can you imagine what Arrow would be like if who Laurel is was were the key to some great big thing on the show and they devoted several episodes to looking into her origins? That suggests an easy partial fix for Laurel -- have her talk about someone else's feelings for a change. The problems someone else is having in their life rather than hers. But then, it wouldn't be Laurel, would it?

"It's going to take days (to decrypt this)." "Better get started then." Oliver doesn't pay Felicity enough to be that rude to her. Which leads to the question, does he pay her at all? Flashback Malcolm "For years we've been forcing the city's worst to do what is best; leverage them to help save this city." I'm really slow. I've just realized that The List is not a list of who is in on Malcolm's team, it's a list of identified bad guys that Malcolm and Robert and the others have been squeezing to 'donate' money to try to make things better in Starling City. I've always wondered, why didn't Rebecca call 911 instead of calling Malcolm again and again since he wasn't taking her calls? Laurel saying that you don't sleep with your sister unless you are blowing up the relationship is more self-awareness than I'm used to from her. And then she gives Oliver her picture to take with him on the boat, that's the Laurel I'm used to. When Felicity interrupts Oliver and Laurel at the bar, it shows why EBR is more of a favourite than Laurel – she works harder at making her character interesting. It's so Felicity to know what to '86' someone means, and to keep explaining it. Good of Felicity that she's trying to get Diggle back on the team but Oliver really does treat her like a little puppy. Oliver is sitting outside the casino in his normal clothes. If anything happens to Felicity, he's going to take five minutes to change clothes first? She could be dead by the time you get there. There is a beautiful bit of cinematography in the scene where Oliver is sitting in the dark on the floor of the lair, and Felicity comes in, turning on the lights one by one. It creates an image that Felicity lets the light into Oliver's darkness Diggle's apartment is in the sixth floor. Part of how he stays in shape? Laurel: Tommy I love you and I think that you still love me so that whatever problems you think we have, if we face them together... And then she goes to Oliver. Not a very impressive love, is it Laurel? Susanna Thompson has a number of expressions cross her face when Malcolm tells her the Markov device is ready. Katie Cassidy should take lessons. Another Ted Kord fundraiser, and Moira assumes that Robert is having another affair. Theirs really is a complicated (sick) marriage. Moira pushes Robert into stopping Malcolm's plan, which gets him killed. That's why Moira says in the present that she's the one responsible for Robert's death. Diggle: I guess you do know where I live. Oliver : I've always known where you live. (So basically he's saying he knew where to get Diggle but didn't want to. Between his treatment of Diggle unless he needs him, ditto treatment of Felicity, and getting between Laurel and Tommy, Oliver isn't really a nice guy at all) Oliver is careful to turn on the voice modulator before speaking to Walter. It's a nice bit of consistency that The Hood does growly voice when talking to strangers but uses the voice modulator when it's someone who knows Oliver Queen. Weren't her reasons 1) that their friends who had been dating for less time than they were moving in together and 2) there was no place to have sex without running into a parent? Granted, those are pretty lousy reasons for moving in together but they seem legit. Or did he mean that this was the next step of her plan to get them married and she wasn't being honest about that? I think it's true but it seems more aware than Oliver usually is.

The reveal for Ward though is I think they should do that for Laurel, but they never will. But as long as we're talking Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., I think a better comparitor for Laurel is Skye, who everyone on the show says is awesome (and who is disliked by a lot of the audience) and who has story line after storyline revolve around her (like Laurel), and who is played by I think the worst actor on the show. (I think Brent Dalton is a better actor and I liked Ward except when he's with Skye..) I think both Skye and Laurel need the focus off of them, majorly, for a while. City of Blood was on TV this evening. I think in terms of Laurel, it's the best episode she's had because she's sympathetic at the funeral,, likable becuase she acknowledges that Qentin was right not to believe her when she wasdrinking, and smart about bugging Blood's office. Really good so far. And then the writers put her in the middle of the Arrow cave where she was the only one who could get through to Oliver, and after he told her to stay behind, she followed him sso that she could save him from the mirakuru soldier but really she stalled the plan so it didn't come off and ended up causing more trouble. If only they would havce stopped at her giving the information about Blood to the Team, I could have liked her.

Yes to everything else you're saying too but this was the one that really struck me when I saw the scene. How is it that they barely said anything to each other, but I thought they would have made a much more viable couple than Oliver and Laurel? More compassion? More interest in the other person? She seemed a better person than Laurel? The EPs need to figure that out because unless they do, they'll continue mis-writing Laurel.

Not liking the Stavros/Lulu embryo story but at least it's better to just take Lulu's egg than what he did with Laura back in the day to create Nik. (Although why only one egg? Doesn't he know the odds of an AI egg not taking?) Not like Victor as head of the WSB but I am enjoying the evil Cassadines back. Between Thao P.'s Victor and Kathleen Gatti's evil Dr. O, it's like being back in the glory days of GH. RKK, stop over-acting. Even psychotic villains have limits. So I guess it's win one, lose one. The disturbingly adult kids is all lose. For a minute there, I was trying to figure out how Sam could have a cousin-to-cousin talk with Spencer until I remembered she was related to Nik.

I guess a lot of people were upset at the fake-out in the finale because the EPs keep saying that no, it wasn't all a lie and yes, they will be dealing with that as soon as the new season starts. So they're going to tick-off the 'Oliver's feelings for Felicity?' box and then withdraw to post-horrible-date, and maybe move forward the rest of the season. Meanwhile there are lots of villains and adventures for our gang. I think it was Aristotle who said that you should read a book twice (or story in his case), once to find out what happens and then again to appreciate the storytelling.

I think it's the problem of trying to juggle spoilers in the age on internet and social media. On one hand, they don't want to spoil anything that will make a real difference in viewing so they spoil stuff about the date and relationships. And then that gets focused on and emphasized so they have to draw back. It's a long time between SDCC and the first episode of the season. I trust Berlanti's opinions the most because he is the one farthest back from personal involvement with the show. AK wrote the comics, MG is doing 2.5 so they are very close to their vision of the show. If anyone is going to say "Laurel is not working as BC", it's going to be Berlanti.

But why settle on anger? It's been five years and she's moved on in her life, she's gone to law school, graduated, and now she's helping the poor people of the Glades who can't afford regular lawyers' fees. She should be hurt and maybe a little angry but the kind of anger KC portrays is out of place. Everyone knew that it was her sister on the yacht with Oliver Queen. But they wouldn't have known that he was dating Laurel at the time. As far as they knew, Laurel lost her sister when her sister went on a trip with Oliver Queen and the yacht sank. Nothing to be embarrassed about in front of her co-workers. She was treated badly by her boyfriend and her sister, but not horribly. They could have been much worse to her. She was justified to be angry at her father from not telling her Sara was alive, actually she should have been more angry at him than she was. I agree, it was a "pay attention to me" tantrum rather than the deep angry and abandonment she should have felt. Maybe to some extent. But they butchered Thea's too, and Willa Holland made me like her. Laurel has had a ton of chances to be redeemed as a character and nothing has stuck.

That CNRI scene is what lost Laurel for me. Everyone in the room was watching the TV but she just picked up the remote and turned it off. Maybe they were going for 'upset' but what I got out of that was self-centred and selfish. Could they have salvaged her in later episodes? Maybe. But between that scene and how she treated Oliver at the courthouse in the next episode, they buried her character for me. This I sort of understand. When she thought Sara was dead, she was sad and sorry that she had lost her sister. But when she found out Sara was alive and had been hiding from the family for 6 years, all the resentment and anger came back. Worse, her parents were all over Sara, so happy she was alive, and ignoring Laurel. And Laurel has always insisted on being the centre of attention. So while I sort of get it, the writers definitely over-did it (did they want to justify Sara going to Oliver and sleeping with him again?) and along with Laurel's concern about Oliver's scars and indifference to Sara's, it does make :Laurel look very shallow.

Isn't it a trope that guys beat each other up before they become friends? It happened with Oliver and Salde, and metaphorically with Diggle. What I remember is him saying that Oliver's only remaining familiy is Thea (no uncles? aunts? cousin?) and Malcolm's only remaining family is Thea, so that makes the three of them a twisted family unit.

Felicity spent weeks sitting by the beside of a comatose Barry. She obviously cares about him. If he wakes up and suddenly has super-speed, she deserves to know, especially since she's keeping all sorts of secrets about Team Arrow herself. She's not going to freak out. Isn't Felicity's role on Flash 1x04 to help Barry and his team members deal with the whole superhero thing? Probably they figure out she was trying to tell them that Malcolm is still alive, so I'm not getting my hopes up either.

On the sister-swapping: Taking Sara on the boat was very wrong but both Oliver and Sara were selfish and immature. Sex with Laurel in s1 was part of growing up and realizing that the Oliver who came back from the island was very far from the Oliver who landed there. And while I can understand getting together with Sara in s2, that put not the just nail in the Oliver/Laurel coffin, but a jackhammer and a ton of nail, and then pouring concrete on the tomb. There is no way he can get together with Laurel again, not even if both Sara and Felicity die and they are the last people left standing in Starling City. I took a course this summer on how the brain makes decisions, and at the empathy section, I got all excited because it fit Oliver so well. (You know you're watching too much Arrow when....) Bear with me a little while I explain. Or just skip this paragraph. People (and higher level animals) have mirror neurons which means that when we see someone else doing something, we imagine ourselves doing it and we feel what they feel. Singer et al (2004) did a study in which subjects did a trust experiment with confederates (people working with the researcher but the subjects didn't know that) in which the confederates either played fair with the subjects or cheated them. Then the confederates were put in a situation where they experienced pain. (Not real pain, just pretend. We've progressed from Milgram's day.) If the confederate played fair, both male and female subjects experienced higher activation in the part of the brain that feels empathy when they thought he was feeling pain. If the confederate cheated the subject, female subjects again had activation in that area although less than if they had played fair. But for male subjects, they didn't experience that. Instead, what they got was activation in the reward-relate areas which matched up with their desire for revenge. What does this mean for Oliver? When he got back to Starling City, he was a mess. Cold, without feelings, close to psychotic. yes wooden. Nothing got through to him, not Moira nor Thea nor Tommy. Pleasure part of the brain? Not working. Except when he's crossing names off his father's list. Punishing bad guys would light up the pleasure parts of his brain because those guys deserve to be punished. So I think he would take risks, bad risks, stupid risks, but not because he had a death wish, because getting the bad guys and punishing them would be the only thing that makes him feel good. Later, when Diggle and Felicity join him, Oliver was able to open up to them and Tommy and he would start getting pleasure out of being with other people, but when he first got back, it would be only about The List and crossing names off.

Barry was always very clear that Iris was the one he cared about. His offer to Felicity acknowledge that it was second choice for both of them. At that point, Oliver didn't have those sorts of feelings for Felicity, or if he did, he refused to acknowledge them. Now I presume that Felicity knows he has feelings for her, and she certainly has for him. I can see Barry going along with it if he wants to keep Iris for knowing about his feelings for her because she's got a boyfriend, and Felicity goes along with it as his beard. Otherwise, all kinds of awkward.

I found out that Stephen Amell's appearance on Heartland are on the internet. He played Nick Harvell, "the hottest jumper on the circuit", and it's funny in his first episode (1x02) where the two teenage girls are falling over themselves with their crushes on him. (I would have been too.) He's also in episodes 1x10, 2x03, 2x06 and 4x06. They're all on the CBC website but I don't know if it's available in other countries.

Thanks for that video. He's as good with fans as he is on the show.

She's just there until Ray Palmer recruits her to run the QC Applied Sciences Division, which I would guess would be episode 2, ep 3 at the latest. It may seem strange that all she could get was to work at Buy More but even with an MIT degree, it can be hard to get a job in the tech industry. I know someone who had to move to Thunder Bay (Northern Ontario, pop 120,000) because she couldn't get a job in one of the major urban centres even with her degree. Usually on TV shows, they're given the scripts for the next episode when they start shooting the current one so they have a chance to prepare (i.e. started shooting 306, got script for 307). Man, I really hated that story. With all their money, would it kill Robert and Moira to let Thea have a cat? Lousy parents both of them. Back to spoilers -- nice parallel with Sara and the Canary but back in s1, I don't think they were thinking of Thea as Malcolm's daughter yet. Thea is shown using a sword. Did Speedy use a sword?

For me, I hated how many women Oliver slept with. Yeah, it showed that his relationships when he got back were kind of shallow (except for Sara) but two seasons of that is more than enough. Even James Bond quit hitting everything in sight lately. I agree, the stunt work, villains and action are the mainstay of the show. But it would get old fast if there were no character development, for the characters either individually or in relation to each other. An example of it being done well was by David Zabel on ER when he was writing Luka and Abby getting together. There was a ton of buzz and comment about the couple but in terms of airtime on the show, it was only two very brief scenes per episode.

The Humor videos are great. I especially like the reaction to Laurel shooting the bow. The only Laurel-as-Canary I can see, Frea O's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Wig Bonus Pink Canary and Red Canary.

Oliver's gotta learn his lessons.