statsgirl

That's an interesting thought. No matter what they're telling us (Oliver saying in Sacrifice that five years ago Laurel was the only one who saw who he really was; Laurel telling Oliver she knows him better than anyone else does) what they're showing us is that neither Oliver nor Laurel really knew the other person. She seems to see things in black and white. Tommy was not worth her time (in spite of the fact that she'd slept with him) until he proved himself with the fund-raiser and then she put all sorts of expectations on him; Oliver was a sleaze and the Hood a hero until Tommy died and then the Hood was a killer; now that she knows that Oliver is the Arrow "it makes her love him even more"( Katie Cassidy). Kreisburg said that when we saw what she did when she found out that Oliver was the Arrow would make us love her, and those who already love her love her even more. I don't understand that at all. ETA: From the Arrows Through the Heart thread This makes me wonder -- why is it so hard for them to write Laurel? All the spaghetti they've thrown at the wall for her, and so little of it has stuck. Crusading lawyer, no she blackmails to get her way; Tommy and losing him; addiction arc; Sara conflict... none of it seems to work for her, or make love or even just respect her. Why?

http://tvline.com/2014/06/03/nashville-season-3-spoilers-juliette-pregnant-hayden-panettiere/ That sounds to me like having been used to set up The Flash, Felicity/Barry is now pretty dead.

Let's hope they're serious about the fanbase and not just messing with our heads for the tweets.

"That's what I'm here for sir, that and answering patronizing questions." Oh Diggle, never change. Floyd Loughton tattooing the names of his victims on his body was so creepy. I liked him better in season 2. Why did Oliver need the bullet from the wall when he already had the one he was shot with, and it was in better shape? i liked it when Quentin and his partner went to talk to Walter and Moira about the two guys who had been bidding for Unidec and were killed, there were three Black actors in the scene, and they were of equal stature to the two Caucasians. Tommy starting to hit on Carly and then veering off "whom I will never touch" when Diggle said "She's my sister-in-law" reminds me why I miss him so much. I hate Moira's cat story. As a human with rescued cats, I always feel sorry for the cat they got rid of. Why couldn't Thea keep it? There was certainly enough room on the estate for it. I saw the pilot episode, missed the second because I wasn't that into it, and was ready to give up on the show when Felicity turned up and brought some lightness. She brought me back for episode 4, although wanting to see Diggle's reaction didn't hurt. Even by the third episode, I thought Oliver/Diggle/Felicity was the best thing about the show. Laurel had a good moment beating up the goons at the club. "Cop father, remember?" But when Oliver tried to say something, Laurel cut him off "Oliver, Tommy and I don't need your blessing, and I don't need your forgiveness." Later to Tommy she says "Maybe because he knows he doesn't have any right to judge me." It's all about you, isn't it Laurel? I really don't understand why Oliver is supposed to be upset because after he was declared dead, his girlfriend had a relationship with someone else. He was dead, or everyone thought he was. Later when Tommy shows up at the courthouse to talk to her and says that he wants to show her that he's interested in just one girl, she warmed up and told him "Well, that's a guy I would be interested in meeting.

LOL. Or Falcon or Kestrel since Hawkman is already taken. If Sara had died, i could see Laurel taking on the name in tribute to her. But with Sara still alive, it makes no sense for her to appropriate her sister's identity.

I agree. It is essential that they don't sideline Diggle. Anything Olicity has to be a sidestory.

EBR did say that while Felicity likes Oliver, she knows he's not the only guy in the world so hopefully the show will let her have a new interest and not go all schmoopy.

My ADHD radar is pinging. I hope he handles it better than Corey Monteith did.

True, wanting to kill your beloved's mother to bring her back to you is insanity, rather like Helena's. Still Nyssa did it out of love rather than Slade and Helena who did it out of vengeance.

For me, moreso with Helena than with Sara. Sara was someone Oliver really cared about as a person, both before the Queen's Gambit went down and afterwards on the island. They had a lot in common, party animals before, broken after, but underneath there was the thread of truly seeing who the other person is and caring about her/him. With Helena, it was Oliver being surprised that he could connect to a person again after what he had gone through (it was after Helena that he considered dating McKenna), and later it was because he wanted to save her. As if it were a project that he could use as a step to regain his humanity again. He kept trying to save her and she kept rejecting his light. I can see broken souls saving each other but that was the only thing they really had in common, being broken souls, but he was trying to get better and she was all about revenge. But the biggest problem for me in terms of Oliver/Helena is that there are better, healthier, alternatives for him. Even healthy, I don't think Helena is the right person for him. Personally, I think she's always going to be too unstable to be a good relationship. Sara had the Amazo and the island to warp her; Helena seems like she was warped from the start. (Yes, her father killed her fiance but most people don't hate their father enough to go to the FBI on him or start killing everyone around him like that.) They really messed that ending up. It was as if they were thinking so hard about all the other aspects of the finale that they didn't stop to consider what they were doing to Sara. And it wouldn't have been that hard to fix, have Sara emphasize that this was the price for bringing in the LoA to help, have her somewhat worried but connecting with Nyssa who we know cares about her.

I was going to say that I thought that the Hong Kong flashbacks are the least problematic since they are flashbacks but nah, it would be better to have the flashbacks in real time too. The other points are even more problematic. They don't do well at the best of times, why give themselves such a large handicap? "And so it begins....." A Babylon 5 fan?

You know you're watching Arrow when you listen to Ariel Dorfman compare the Chilean and Egyptian revolutions and when he talks about the hopes of those who tried for a better country and their self-flagellation when they failed and you think of Oliver's manpain.

I agree, also because I think Sara/BC works more effectively in short, strong doses. I loved her in Heir to the Demon but by Birds of Prey, with Sara in the Arrow story, the Lance family drama story and also in the flashbacks, I was ready to cut her screen time down. My theory is that they are lining the comics up with what's going to happen on the TV show rather than the other way around. Right now the show is generating more buzz than the comics. They're already brought Diggle, a show-creation, into the comics.

Given how much Sara has struggled with good vs bad and was willing to commit suicide rather than return to the LoA, and how vulnerable she's been at times, at this point I don't think I would buy her as a villain even if the show tried to push her that way. For me, a person has to be heartless (the Count, Amanda Waller), batshitcrazy (Malcolm Merlyn) or mirakiru'ed up (Slade) for me to accept him or her as a villain, especially on this cartoon show.

There have been Ted Kord mentions on the show. I remember in one flashback with Moira commenting on how tiring the evening was, another Ted Kord fundraiser, just before Robert tells her Malcolm's big plan.

While the writing for Laurel wasn't great in the early episodes, I still think they could have been saved if KC had played the layers beneath the speech rather than the surface. For example, if she had told Quentin that putting a police tail on her didn't work when she first discovered boys and it wasn't going to work now with teasing and a shared remembrance of past parent/child battles rather than nastily, it would have said something about their relationship and their affection for each other. As it was, it came off like a brat. I think I'd like that better than being with Waller, although the way he said "Amanda" suggests more intimacy than he'd have with someone who is just pulling his strings. Either way, Waller or someone new that he cares about and loses, they both work to make him more emotionally walled in. I'm looking forward to see how they make Oliver increasingly PTSD in the flashbacks till we get the Oliver from the pilot, while in the present he becomes more healed.

Wonderwall, yes, I can see that he doesn't care for Felicity at all in that scene, he just wants her to be kidnapped so he can save Laurel. That comes out even more in the scene on the beach when she's talking about how unthinkable they would be as a couple. You can see it in the way he looks at her. How much later is the beach scene supposed to be? The wounds on both of them look pretty fresh. (I bet the cast was glad they finally got the change clothes though.)

This, for me, is one of the dividing lines between the characters that I like and those I don't. Oliver, Sara, Diggle and Felicity all take responsibility for their actions (unlike some of the other female characters). Sadly, Oliver doesn't seem to learn from his mistakes -- Thea got upset because secrets were kept from her in season 1 so in season 2 Oliver and Moira keeps the biggest secret of all from her. Two other reasons why I like Felicity is that even though she's scared, terrified sometimes, she forces herself to do what she thinks needs to be done, and she thinks of other people. An example is at the end of Sacrifice, the Arrow Cave is falling apart around her and she's scared and crying but she tells Oliver to go save Laurel because Laurel needs him.

Around the middle of s1 they started throwing a lot of women at Oliver -- Felicity, Helena, McKenna -- as if they were trying out other romantic partners for Oliver. They went back to Oliver/Laurel/Tommy for the end of the season probably to make Tommy's death more dramatic. But even if they had decided to quit Laurel as Oliver's endgame romance, they still could have been building Laurel as BC. Your scenario is a good one, laurendrew. The EPs said that they had planned on Sara being alive as far back as s1 but did they also plan to have her as the Canary? It seems to me that bringing Caity Lotz in as the Canary was a nail in the coffin of Laurel being a realistic BC unless they had planned to kill Sara at the end of s2.

It also makes no sense. In Damaged, Oliver hired Laurel to defend him on charges of being The Vigilante because she believed that he was just a rich playboy, he couldn't possibly be the guy saving everyone so she would fight to get him off, in Sacrifice he told her that she always saw the best in him, and in City of Blood, she's telling him that she knows him in her bones even though she missed entirely that he was The Hood. Which is it, show? I definitely do. When characters stagnate or worse regress, I wonder why I am wasting my time with them.

LOL I can just hear him saying that, in his very dry tone of voice. Thanks for posting the link, morrigan 2575.. That would be today. (Not much of a break at all.) I guess I'd better start doing something myself.

I know they kept going back to each other in the comics but on TV, that would be pure soap opera. Different medium, different requirements IMO.

Laurel already went through that in Damaged though, when she was struck dumb hearing that 20% of Oliver's body was scar tissue and he revealed that he had been tortured. And then he said he didn't want to talk about it. You'd think that Laurel, seeing Sara's scars, would assume it was the same for Sara. But she never so much as mentioned the scars, or asked Sara if she wanted to talk about what had happened to her. Laurel was only concerned about herself and her feelings about Oliver, not about Sara and only about Thea when Oliver asked her to help (hello, bitterness!). I think that Sara was thrown under the bus so that Laurel could have an addiction/growth arc in the hopes that the audience would finally realize what an awesome character she is. That's why we didn't get any good sister bonding scenes unless it was necessary for Laurel's storyline, which is was for to AA and in the finale.

I don't think it was a sexual chemistry though, it was just pleasant to watch them interacting with each other, which Oliver and Laurel wasn't. I've been re-watching s1 and having seen s2, I'd forgotten how much Laurel was in the first season episodes. If it wasn't with Oliver, it was about Tommy or Thea or working on a legal case. The temptation to fast forward her scenes is great. It's not that I hate Laurel, it's just that I want her to hurry up and get out of the way so I can get to what I'm interested in watching. dancingnancy, the idea that KC lost the weight for her fashion blog makes sense, especially since Laurel's addiction arc didn't start for a few episodes in. In at least one interview she seemed more committed to her blog than to Arrow.

I expect we'll get Felicity's back story in the daddy issues portion of the show. I'm torn about doing anything else with her alone because while it would be good to see her as a person with interests beyond Oliver and Team Arrow, it also means she's more tangential to the main story and we saw how well that worked for Laurel. From the Bitterness thread: Felicity didn't trust Moira, hadn't really since she first found the secret fund for Walter in s1, and then decoded Moira's book with invisible writing for him, and then Walter disappeared. She kept a tag on the account and when there was more activity in it, she followed the money as she had the first time around because Walter had asked her to. Then she went to Walter with the information but he didn't do anything about it, since he was probably the person who had paid off the doctor in the first place. Felicity's always been a 'Valiant For Truth' kind of character. I think she went to Moira to tell her that the secret's out, She probably expected Moira to say "Yes, I need to tell Thea the truth." But Moira is completely different from Felicity (as much as I love them both) and she threatened Felicity with what she knew would hurt her the most, having Oliver turn from her, in order to keep Felicity quiet. I see this as another time where Felicity was afraid Oliver would abandon her but overcame it to do what she thought was right. It wasn't her place to tell Thea but she did tell Oliver, not because she's emotionally dependent on him but because telling him what she had learned was The Right Thing To Do.