Arrow; A farewell

Wow has it really been eight years since Arrow started? Eight seasons of Oliver Queen fighting crime in Star(ling) City?

In many ways you could call Green Arrow the Iron Man of DCTV.  Like the MCU all of the top tier characters were tied up elsewhere and one of the lower teir characters got the tap to build a universe, in the case of DC it was the movie people who had all the cool toys.

To many people Green Arrow was a wanna be Batman with a Robin Hood twist.  And many people wrote Arrow off for just that - the early seasons were heavily influenced by the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy but dammit I loved it.

I was a huge fan of the Mike Grell run of Green Arrow comics in the 80s which were grim gritty street level crime comics and Arrow delivered that in spades. The twist was that it was the start of Green Arrow's career instead of a man in his forties (which lead to his death after Grell's run)

The early seasons had flash backs to five years earlier showing how Oliver gained the skills and knowledge he used in his fight against crime in the present day.

The show wasn't perfect but what show is?  I would have swapped season 4 and 5's flashbacks around as four took him back to the island he was stranded on in seasons 1 & 2 and then five sent him to Russia to race back to the island to be rescued at the end of the season to take us to the start of season 1's present day story.

The flashforwards to 2040 in later seasons did nothing for me.  I was hoping though that they might tie into the season 1 Legends of Tomorrow episode "Star City 2046")

I wasn't wild on all the costumes that were given to characters over the show.  Wildcat and later Black Canary costumes were some of my least favourite - I liked Sara Lance's original Black Canary costume. Other costumes like Ragman and Wild Dog were spot on.

Some characters got the short shift in the show either through actors not coming back or taken away by the movie people (Huntress, Suicide Squad, and Deathstroke).

The wasn't beholden to the comics, creating new characters (John Diggle, Sara Lance), recreating exisiting names (Felicity Smoak) and letting the story take them where it would - in at least on occasion the show used our knowledge of comics against us with the relevation of the true identity of Prometheus.  It was a surprise and while it could have rubbed some fans up the wrong way it made me incredibly happy - it solved a mystery with a twist that I wasn't expecting and handed me a new mystery that I thought I already knew the answer to.

Like Iron Man, the show grew and The Flash spun off from it, and then we added Legends of Tomorrow and Batwoman, with Supergirl and Constantine joining from other networks which all culminated in Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Crisis was probably the ultimate way to end Green Arrow's story in a tale so massive that it ranged outside the scope of the current Arrow-verse and affected other DC live action shows.  I won't spoil how it ended but the final episode was a great ending  for Oliver Queen.

Arrow was a show the defied expectations and changed TV superhero shows building a universe that challenges the MCU for a fraction of the budget.