apinknightmare

So I guess ol' doctor what's-his-face managed to track this guy down and tell him about what happened to his father before Talia offed him in the parking garage, since that's the only way he could possibly know about what happened after the Gambit went down. Unless we find out there was someone floating on a life raft nearby with a really sensitive microphone and a great pair of binoculars, lmao. This show is so dumb. ETA: If this storyline actually comes to pass, I hope some a-hole from the prison just sent out some surveillance from Oliver's interrogation after he got released, since that's the only way it'd make sense.

The way Chico wrote the summary sucks - at first glance it seems like the "with" is announcing them as guest appearances, but they're actually listed as members of The Ghost Initiative.

They're part of the Ghost Initiative that Diggle restarts and Curtis gets upset about.

The guy Robert shot on the boat after the Gambit sunk, right before he killed himself.

I hope it's not that. It would be supremely flimsy and stupid, although this is Arrow so I guess that's par for the course.

They're part of The Ghost Initiative that Diggle "restarts," which I guess is the new name for the Suicide Squad.

Maybe they don't know about it yet.

Being dipshits and leaving Diaz alive (at least for Oliver). This has to come into play at some point, maybe this episode is it:

Just to keep this on topic since Emily mentioned this in the article: Just yesterday Carina was in the comments of that 3-page rant replying to someone who mentioned Emily's absence from A Very Jar Christmas by telling this completely random stranger why she wasn't there. I hope she does this with Emily's blessing - if not, yikes.

He was supposed to tell her that he had a kid in Central City that he wanted to get to know but whose mother didn't trust him and didn't want him to tell anyone in his life about because she didn't trust him. He was supposed to tell her that because they were going to get married he wanted to be honest with her, and that he hoped once he'd been a consistent, safe presence in William's life that Samantha would allow William to meet Felicity and become part of their lives. He was given the choice between lying to two people: one he trusted with his secret identity, who was his partner in life and in vigilante-ing, who would definitely find out about his lying at some point; and one who had kept him from his son for ten years, had lied to him about a miscarriage, and had lied to him about paternity straight to his face, who would never know that he told Felicity when she asked him not to. That he's treated as somehow not having a choice when he had a pretty easy one IMO is baffling to me. Especially since I mostly see him regarded as doing the right and honorable thing when keeping that secret from who he did for as long as he did ultimately resulted in William getting kidnapped. He kept that secret after Malcolm told him he knew and was going to make Oliver pay for disbanding the League, and he kept it after Thea told him there was a direct paper trail between Oliver and William that the wife of the guy who'd tried to kill them all multiple times that year was definitely going to find out about during opposition research while she was running for mayor. But he said nothing to Felicity or anyone on his team to actively try to protect his own kid, he just kept lying for...whatever reason and still came out of the whole situation with lots of people thinking he was the wronged party. All I could think about was how yes, Felicity should definitely break off that engagement and also reconsider having kids with the guy because he was such an awful and neglectful father. It does make me happy that when the plot no longer called for him to be a flaming moron about the whole thing that he actually turned out to be a relatively good father. And that despite thinking he was dumber than a box of hair and about as interesting, I really came to enjoy William and his relationship with Oliver (and Felicity) in Season 6.

If I were a remotely famous person and for whatever reason decided to be friends with Carina, I'd make her sign a contract that she couldn't name drop or post anything about me without written permission. Although that would probably be the end of the budding friendship, LOL.

I don't think that was the plan going in, but I'm wondering now if they'll use next year's crossover to undo/redo the future timeline just because the reaction to it now is so universally negative.

Yeah, this is my issue. What on earth do I have to root for when I already know how terribly it turns out? O/F are estranged from William, the city is a garbage fire, everything they're doing right now is for nothing. JH attempted to save it by saying that there's still a happy ending possible in the future, but who cares? We still know they don't get much happiness between now and whenever things go to shit, and they've also managed to take any kind of urgency out of the present with regards to whoever they show alive 20 years from now. They aren't even dropping breadcrumbs that we can follow to figure things out - they're just giving us dots with no way to connect them, probably because the main purpose of the FFs isn't to give us a plot to figure out, they're just constructed for "shock" value (whenever they get around to revealing how things ACTUALLY are).

I love that this person believes that surrogacy results in a kid having TWO moms, LOL.

This is wild: I wonder if this person forgot that Felicity was already shot in the abdomen and paralyzed or is just really super excited and hoping for the possibility of it happening - again! Given the rest of their post, probably the latter.

Yeah, at least the flashbacks were filling in gaps for a story we had kinda an outline for. The flash forwards are just throwing random "facts" at us that I'm not sure are telling an actual story or not or if a lot of what we're getting is meant to throw us off the scent of what really happened so we'll be surprised.

The flashbacks featured a character whose journey we were pretty invested in (even if there wasn't much suspense to them since we knew Oliver lived), and the flash forwards feature a character who's had a mixed reception of late (and that's being generous), a petulant adult William, Zoey - who we barely know in present time, and Roy who we don't know much about anymore. And it's all centered around a pretty nonsensical premise, and slow as shit to reveal any kind of crumbs to follow to make sense of them at all. At this point what would make them most interesting would be giving us a trail to follow, but they won't even do that because either a) they're just really bad at telling stories, b) they're holding everything close to the vest to shock with a big twist, or c) all of the above. I'm going with C.

Maybe, but she's also covering up titles that aren't even spoilery.

I would understand the point of this if the episode titles were unknown until the episode airs, but they're released a couple months in advance. Why even bother? LOL

Beth said the FFs are going to be a part of the show for the remainder of the series.

I love JH’s commitment to smoldering.

He's so good at chess he helped his fall guy build a bomb to destroy the city he was planning on taking over (with no way of escaping!). AN ABSOLUTE GENIUS.

He may have, but I don't think it would've made much of a difference. Too much of the crossover hinged on painting Oliver in that light, not to mention the fact that Todd Helbing said there's a little arc for Barry dealing with it further on in The Flash's season:

It was especially annoying because I can't really think of a time when Oliver cared enough about QC to even bother sleeping with someone to get some good press.

She could be appearing in the FFs, but looking through Sea's Instagram, that pic seems to be from a place where she's staying. Maybe the show is putting them all up in the same building?