statsgirl

I don't get BBC America, it's in a more expensive package. Sometimes they play it on Showcase. (That isn't Jamie Bamber's real accent??)

Yes, when they said they didn't have time for Felicity's backstory in s2, I was worried that it was because she was becoming less important to the show. Now I'm tending to think that it's because they wanted to put their daddy issues into s3 with Thea/Merlyn, Oliver and Diggle. KC may think that Laurel is the heart of the show because she's trying to do (e.g. at CNRI) but she's become tangential to the main show. The EPs have hopefully got the message that Team Arrow is the core of the show because they've been saying that next season will be more "intimate" which I take to mean it will be more about Oliver/Diggle/Felicity rather than like the second part of this season in which Diggle and Felicity were mostly supporting players. Felicity is the heart of the show because 1) she is the only one who been against killing and wanting to give people another chance, seeing the good in them; 2) she's the one trying to get people to make up when they've been fighting (e.g. going to Diggle in s1 to get him and Oliver back together); and 3) she believes in doing what's right even though there is a cost to her (e.g. telling Oliver about Thea's paternity). She also calls people on their crap, especially Oliver. Laurel has pulled enough dirty tricks that she doesn't get to be the team's conscience either, no matter what KC may think. I could see Laurel as legal liaison for the Team but I don't see a place for her working in the new cave right now. Roy is the muscle, Diggle is the brains and the gravitas, Felicity is the IT and conscience, and Oliver is The Leader.. This is a good example of the problems with Laurel. First, Tommy wouldn't have died if she had listened to Oliver, Moira or Quentin and kept out of the Glades as they told her to. Second, she wasn't in a relationship with Tommy at the time because as soon as Tommy told her that Oliver still cared for her, her eyes lit up and she went to Oliver to ask him if it was true, and then she slept with him as Tommy watched from outside in the street. (Another reason why she's not the heart of the show because the heart should have some moral values.) I can feel sorry for her that she's finally realized it's Tommy she loved and how hard losing him was on her but she did do her share of bringing that on herself.

Colin Salmon is going to be in the last episode of Law & Order: UK. I wish there was a channel over here that I could see it on. It was strange to see him with an American accent on 24.

I'd forgotten how great the appearance of the Black Canary was. Without even saying a word. Now that EBR has said that Felicity is afraid of a lot, I'm really starting to see it. She was scared in the airplane, she was scared to do the parachute jump (I loved that Diggle told her they'll do it in 'three' and then jumps with her on 'one', and that he thanks her for not throwing up until they had landed). The fact that she's terrified but she still goes ahead and does what she thinks needs to be done makes me like her more. When the plane left, I wondered how they got back to Starling City but I guess Oliver had a boat that he took to the island and moored there. Poor Thea, people really do forget about her. Walter is gone, Moira's in jail and Oliver's on the island. At least she had Roy, and even more impressive that she determined to keep the club going with no experience. She could have just given up and run away too. I liked that Robert Queen's death had put Oliver on the road to killing and Tommy's death made him determined to stop. Then Thea got kidnapped and Felicity told him to find another way (bookmarked at the end of the season when she told him again to find another way to defeat Slade without killing him) and he does. Moira telling Oliver that he has family reminded me that she did make a good CEO. Quentin was sort of bonding with Felicity, setting up that connection this season.

I liked that they stuck to real time in the first two hiatuses (hiata?) but I want this one should start right away. Not only will we miss Diggle's reactions to Laurel, but we'll miss Oliver trying to find a place to live and Oliver, Felcity and Diggle all looking for new jobs.

The EW finale awards are in and Arrow won for Most Likely to Earn an Emmy for stunt co-ordination. Here's an interview with stunt coordinator J.J. Makaro and fight coordinator James Bamford, The logistics of the fights really make me appreciate the work that went into it. http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/05/28/arrow-stunts-finale/ Nothing else, although 'Oliver telling Felicity he loves her' lost Most Rewound Moment by 245 votes to Damon saying goodbye to Elena on Vampire Diaries, and Arrow came close in Best Fight (for sheer retributions, I'm glad May beating up Ward on S.H.I.E.L.D. won). http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20593459_20820828,00.html

Good thought, icandigit. I wish they would do webisodes of Diggle and Felicity hanging out between traumas.

Inadvertant funniest line of the pilot: Tommy at the welcome home party, pointing out three women: Oliver, it's been 1,839 days since you've been laid. Oh, if only he knew! Also, I was struck by Robert Queen's response to Oliver for Sara being on board "This isn't going to end well for either of then". Seriously? How about "You're dating her sister. This is beyond acceptable, get her off this boat right now." Did neither Moira nor Robert know how to parent?. Yes, I thought she would be very Evil Queen so it's a pleasant surprise that she was layered more grey. and shown to be terrified of what Malcolm Merlyn would do to what remained of her family. Her scene when The Dark Archer shot the Asian man in front and she's was trying to wipe the blood off her hands was chilling. I agree, but I think it got worse later on the island. But starting from that, Oliver was traumatized and we could clearly see why pre-shipwreck Oliver was such a contrast to present day Oliver. Laurel had her good moments in the pilot but the characterization was a problem from the beginning. She told Oliver that he could talk to her if he ever needed anyone to talk to, and then never listened to him. She was always quick to take offence in the early episodes. Danny Franks, it was Adam Hunt who was on the list, played by Brian Markinson who like Roger Cross (Quentin's buddy) seems to have a contract to be in every show filmed in Vancouver. Adam Donner was the ADA who Laurel worked for in season 2 before the actor went back to Orphan Black.

Diggle has a wonderful sense of which women are good for Oliver: Thea, Sara, Felicity yes; Moira, Helena, Laurel no. Please don't ever change. Could be worse.... they could have Diggle be the one to train her.

BkWurm, thank you for going through the Laurel/Oliver videos. I salute you. I'm struck by how little chemistry SA/KC have compared to SA/EBR. All you have to do is turn off the sound and it's glaring. I was watching clips from the upfronts, and of course SA and EBR get asked first about that scene. In an IGN clip, SA talked about how what they shot was different than what came out in the edit, and how it made the scene much tighter and better. In a separate interview, EBR talked about how it was the last scene they shot at the studio and things were being cleaned out which made the sound much more cavernous and impressive. I've never heard KC talk about what makes up her scenes that way. If SA and EBR see making the show in much the same way, it's something that gets created and you do the best job you can, I can understand why they would be more comfortable with each other. I wonder if working on soap operas for a few years would help Katie Cassidy. I love Diggle, he's so open with his feelings about Oliver's women and the only ones he approves of are Felicity and Sara. Maybe McKenna but he never really got to know her. With Felicity, no sooner does she join the Team, with Diggle's full approval as they worked trying to save Oliver together, than she quits because she doesn't like the killing (Dodger). As Oliver tries to intimidate her with his size, Diggle is in the background grinning because he likes to see Oliver being stood up to.

I think the person with most shade to throw at Oliver was Quentin Lance because Oliver got his daughter dead. (Fortunately he was allowed to for the whole s1.) With Laurel, it never seemed to be about hurting Sara, it swung between "You cheated on me with my sister!" to "Let me help you", it was all or nothing and you never knew on which side she'd be on. The problem for me is that the only way I can make Laurel's behaviour consistent.is to make it all about her. The ship going down was her pain, not Sara's; her parents splitting up and her father losing himself in a bottle was them being mean to her, Even her work at CNRI, except in certain cases like an Innocent Man when she did it for the Hood, seemed to me to be more about how she saw herself as saving the world rather than actually caring about the individuals. When Quentin very reasonably wanted to put police protection on her in Home Invasion, she acted like 14 year old getting grounded. She also got him killed trying to save her because she wouldn't listen to Moira, Quentin or Oliver about not going to the Glades that night. The EPs said we would sympathize with her when we got to see the cut scene of her trying to gather the documents so the bad guys could still be prosecuted but I think that's another example of where they failed to understand how Laurel came across. I had forgotten about that. How self-involved do you have to be to go there, especially after she'd already slept with him earlier? Does she think she's that good?

Oliver did tell Moira that Thea needed more discipline and Moira tried. After that, her relationship with Thea got better and so did Thea. At the end of Vertigo, Thea thanked Oliver and Laurel for helping get her out of her trial. Also in Vertigo, when Laurel is trying to get Quentin to get the charges against Thea dropped, she mentions a time when he got charges against her dropped so she wouldn't have to go to court. When Oliver was recovering from vertigo, he said it was the worst hangover he'd ever had, and Diggle replied "That's saying something from someone who spent most of his twenties hung over." On this show, everyone behaved very badly and made mistakes in their youth. It took the cruelty of the island, Ivo and LoA to change Sara and Oliver, it took Malcolm cutting Tommy off at 28 to change him. In season 1 Thea was 17, now she's 19, still 4 years younger than Oliver, Laurel and Tommy were when the Queen's Gambit went down. When Thea tells her mother she's not going to school because she was out late last night (getting arrested) and Moira agrees to it, that's pretty bad parenting and that's on Moira. Presumably the bad parenting has gone on for a while since Oliver experienced it too before the island. Thea lost her father and brother at 12, she lost her stepfather at 18 because of her mother's actions, the Queens are pariahs in Starling City again because her mother was partially responsible for the earthquakes, and then with Walter gone, her older brother disappears for 5 months. She pulls herself together and takes over the club that he just left and does a good job for 8 months. But then her boyfriend dumps her and she gets kidnapped by Slade who tells her that her mother and brother have been lying to her for years about who her father is -- in reality he's the psychopath who killed 587 people last year. And then Moira and Oliver want her to sign some documents because they've screwed up QC and they're about to be broke. Not surprising she turns them down. "Time out" is a popular thing in parenting books and columns but I've found that often a 'time in' works better for the child. (Time outs are very effective for the parents though so they don't lose it.) I think what Thea needed at that point was for someone to sit down with her and give her their undivided attention so that she could talk, and process and understand everything that was going on. And then she might have been willing to sign what papers they wanted her to. Instead, they shoved some papers under her nose and told her to sign them or else. She found that everyone she had trusted had lied to her -- Moira, Robert, Oliver, Roy -- even though she kept begging them for the truth. She's angry and she's hurt. No surprise she wants to get away from Starling City any way she can; small wonder she's willing to go with the one person who has told her the truth and tells her that he will make her strong so she won't be hurt again. But this is what I see Laurel doing even in s2 when she's almost 30. You'd think that Sara and Oliver went off together just to hurt her, she's mad at her parents because their marriage fell apart when Sara died even though she was ready to move out of the house at the time; she's driving drunk, she's working stoned, she is intolerably cruel to her mother and throwing glasses at the door in fits when her sister returns from the dead, and she's blackmailing her bosses to get her job back after she was fired for cause. I give Thea a break because she's 19, not 29, and because she didn't have a happy, stable two-parent family until she was 24.

I'm hoping that Felicity is connected to someone either good or grey because that would be a better story as she has to reconcile any feelings of resentment she might have for him leaving. And because next season we already have Thea connected to a Big Bad. Also that he's still alive so the story can be carried through rather than as a one-shot shock value. I hadn't heard of him but that sounds like it could be good, Maybe they were thinking of him when they said Felicity's mother is a cocktail waitress is Las Vegas. Eddie Fyers is a character from the DC comics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Fyers

I thought it was interesting in s1 that Thea rebelled and got into trouble because she thought her mother was unfaithful. It was really her father and Oliver thought Thea should know the truth but Moira was angry when he told her because she thought it would be better for Thea not to know, not to be disillusioned. You'd think they would have known better than to do the same thing to her in s2 and keep from her that Malcolm is her biological father. Realistic because real people don't learn that easily, but interesting in terms of the continuity from season 1 to 2 and what triggers Thea. She was willing to walk away alone without any money and later with Roy. Malcolm just swooped in at the right time to manipulate her emotionally. (Not signing the documents was stupid but then, so was Moira for not tying up her money better.) But is her behaviour really any different than Laurel's, who threw a "you're not the boss of me" tantrum in ep 20 (Home Invasion) because her father wanted to give her police protection after the bad guys had killed 2 people from the case she was working on and she brought their son into her apartment? Both were having immature hissy fits but Thea was 19 while Laurel was 28.

That's interesting because we're doing a bit of a re-watch here and I saw ep 2 Honor Thy Father last night (I think it was ep 2, the one at the club). Laurel is still cold to Oliver (justifiably to some extent at this point) while Tommy is torn and trying to reconcile everyone. Late in the episode Laurel figures out that Oliver wasn't surprised when Thea told him that she and Tommy had got together and that's because he knew already. Tommy said something about it being a good thing that Oliver is okay with it and she spits out that he has no right to sit in judgement over her. My reaction was "what a bitch" because it's not all about her, it's even more about Tommy who was Oliver's best friend and now feels guilty for loving the same woman he thinks Oliver loved and only lost because he was stuck on the island. It's partly the dialogue but it's also her line reading because she could have toned it down, or even complained about it because writers will change things when the actors have a better way. But it's consistent with the Laurel of season 2 that she saw things only from how they affected her. Once she had accepted a relationship with Tommy, I thought her best scenes were with him as well as with her father (except for the stupidity in refusing police protection when 2 people had just been killed on the case). But even when she's living with Tommy, Oliver asks for her help with Thea and she lights up and pushes Tommy aside, going to her father to drop the charges. It's always all about Oliver for her, whether she's hating him at the moment or thinking she's in love with him. The dinner with Oliver and Helena was cringe-worthy, but interesting in that her relationship with Tommy was starting to parallel the mistakes she had made with Oliver Before Island. She pushed Tommy too hard, he lied to her because he felt he couldn't tell her the truth, she made assumptions and then it all blew up in her face. The difference is that I think Tommy truly loved her and he lied to her because he felt he wasn't good enough for her whereas Oliver just took the easiest way out. I think what she did to her mother in Salvation (1x18) was horrible. So while Laurel had moments of warmth in season 1, as she does in season 2 with Sara when she's not throwing barware, it didn't make for a completely warm and attractive character. ETA: Catrox, that's exactly it for me. She could be kind if it didn't cost her anything but it was always about what was best for Laurel in any situation, and damn what anyone else wanted.

Maybe in exchange for information on her father's crime organization, they could let Helena out early. Wasn't she the one who got it all on the laptop anyway? I think she was. When Oliver came back from the island, he was very closed off emotionally and physically. Laurel shut him out, he opened up to Helena and that went bad, then he tired again with McKenna and she left. (Really, for her knowing Oliver put her in danger because Helena was the one who took out her knee.) Oliver cared very much about Sara, enough to put a tracker on her when she disappeared from Starling City. Their sexual relationship this season didn't last long for various reasons (plot contrivance being the biggest) but I think it was good for him to be with someone he could trust and who cared for him, someone with whom he could let his guard down completely, and who he knew could take care of herself in the field and fight by his side. She may not have been his great love story but it was as good a relationship as they both could make it given how screwed up they both were.

No, not Laurel. I've like to see Helena have a friendship with Sara because they've both been through the darkness but Sara is healthier. If anyone could help Helena put things in perspective, it would be Sara. I'd like to see a BoP with Sara, Nyssa and Helena, long as none of them have to be in a wheelchair. Viewers or characters on the show? I like Malcolm Merlyn and his craziness is fun to watch but I wouldn't want anyone I care about to be in a relationship with him. (Same with Laurel, but for other reasons.) It's no surprise Diggle and Felicity don't like Helena. Felicity having to deal with Helena and come to some sort of accommodation with her could be interesting -- unlike Isabel Rochev she's not out to get Oliver but unlike Sara she's not good for him either -- but I don't want to see Jealous Felicity again. It does her no favours nor the show either.

EW.com is doing their 5th annual Season Finale Awards, and Arrow is nominated in five categories: Most Unforgettable Line (“Slade took Laurel because he wants to kill the woman I love…. So he took the wrong woman…. I love you.” — Oliver convincingly professing feelings for Felicity to lure Slade, ); Dumbest Move by a Character Who Should be Smart (Slade didn't frisk Felicity); Best Fight (Team Arrow vs. Slade’s soldiers); Most Rewound Moment (Oliver saying he loves Felicity); and Most Likely to Earn Someone an Emmy Nomination (Outstanding Stunt Coordination is a category) http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/05/22/season-finale-awards-vote-now-2/ Voting through Memorial Day. ETA: I'd like it if Arrow won the Best Fight and Stunt Coordination categories because hopefully the Emmy committee will take a look at that.

I'm really going to miss Slade. He was a hoot as a truth speaker. So is that where Oliver learned to fly a plane? I wonder when he got his pilot's license.

With Dracula cancelled, I can just see the EPs planning how to write the Huntress back for an arc next season. I like their dynamic and I think it could be a strong arc/relationship. She's a lot like Sara damaged but survived it less well, more darkness, fewer morals. The show (mostly voiced by Diggle) has set up that she's crazy and that for me rules out a healthy long-term relationship with Oliver but it would be interesting to have Helena back again and see where they go with it, especially if they use her to set up a Birds of Prey spin-off.

While I think the show has wonderful production values and they certainly give it their all in the fight scenes, everyone does, what really worries me is the risk to the narrative that Laurel is. Sara should stay the Black Canary because even if they kill her off, KC/Laurel is never going to be as good, and I really don't want Laurel to end up as Oliver's love interest because their relationship was false and dysfunctional in the past, and they wouldn't fit together in the present or the future, and I live Oliver too much to stick him with Laurel. Also, the Laurel storylines have taken away too much time from the people I really care about this season. Hopefully the EPs got the message that Team Arrow is what is worth spending time on, not Lance family drama..

Maybe Roy can be the cannon fodder while Diggle takes the role of a general. I love Diggle, he was so anti-Helena and later anti-Laurel. Oliver should listen to him, guy knows what he's talking about.

Vendetta Diggle: You know, Oliver, I'm no expert at this but I don't think love is about changing or saving a person. I think it's about finding the person who's already the right fit. One day you will. Oliver: I think I burnt that bridge. Napalmed it, actually. Diggle: The thing is you saved Frank Bertinelli, He'll be doing time for a while, justice is served..... You opened up, took a risk with your heart. The Oliver I met a few months ago would not have been able to do that. And when you meet the right person, you'll be ready for her. [cut to Felicity going into Walter's office]

I just watched Year's End from season 1, and at the Christmas party, Oliver tells Laurel that he is happy for her and Tommy. As she walks away, the expression on his face... there is no longing or jealousy that she's with someone else now. Except for the sex at the end of the season when Tommy pushed him into it, I really believe that Oliver was over Laurel by then except as a memory or desire to turn back the clock. In the island scene, I thought that Felicity was really asking Oliver to confirm that it wasn't just an act, that he really does have feelings for her. So she said "You really sold it" and instead of telling her that he meant it, which is what she was hoping for, he replied "We both did" putting both of them into the category of faking it for Slade's camera. The stars in his eyes tell me he was lying (as do Guggenheim and Amell) but he wants her to believe that he was just acting because he thinks he can't be with her and he doesn't want to hurt her any more than he has to. That's just my opinion,

Season 3 is coming up. With Sara handing her the Jacket of The Canary, maybe this is the 'make or break' year for Laurel if she did get a 3 year contract.