The Arrowverse. You had to be there. What a time to be alive, where it felt like a brand-new episode every week. Whether it was The Flash, Arrow, Batwoman, Black Lightning, or Legends of Tomorrow, there was a feeling like The CW had an unlimited budget.
Now that The CW’s Arrowverse has concluded, you can look back on these projects with a fresh perspective. No matter what shows The CW produced, nothing even comes close to their powerhouses, which were Arrow and The Flash, rightfully so.
One of the things The CW struggled with was that once the show ran for a number of seasons, it became stale. They became predictable with little substance. More often than not, the more a show ran, the worse it got. The Flash is a prime example of this.
Every week, he needed a pep talk, side characters became useless, and The Flash never felt powerful anymore as he was beaten so often. The frustrating thing was that the show kept making the same mistakes season after season. Arrow, on the other hand, did actually manage to pull itself back on a handful of occasions.
There’s no doubting the first 2 seasons were peak. I believed the third season was incredible and featured a very interesting dynamic to Ra’s al Ghul. Season 4 fell apart, season 5 brought it back in a major way, and then after that, it became a very up-and-down series.
I feel like one of Arrow’s biggest issues was that it eventually drifted away from some of the core elements that made Green Arrow such a popular character in the comics. One of the major Green Arrow elements is his relationship with Dinah (Laurel).
Weirdly, they got this aspect spot on when it came to The Flash. They built up Barry and Iris from the first episode and saw it all the way through. Understandably, we choose to pretend the “we are the Flash” moments never happened. I believe if Arrow followed this path, the series would’ve gotten a whole lot better.
Even season 4’s biggest moment, when Laurel was killed by Damien Darhk, would’ve carried far more emotional weight had they continued building that relationship. Arrow always performed a lot better when the stakes were high.
As they chose to go down the path they did, season 4 suffered badly. The magic element alone was enough for people to switch off. However, what they managed to do with season 5 was nothing short of fantastic.
Adrian Chase (Prometheus) is arguably one of the best villains The CW created. This wasn’t a villain that simply wanted to kill our hero or destroy a city, you know, the typical villain tendencies. Nope. This man wanted to rip Oliver Queen apart. I don’t just mean physically either; he literally wanted to break the man mentally before killing everyone he cares about, then allowing him to die. That’s how sinister Adrian Chase is.
More importantly, he felt different. After years of villains wanting power, revenge, or world domination, Prometheus wanted Oliver Queen to suffer.
It ensured season 5 was a resounding success. This was a good ability from Arrow as it allowed the show to bounce back. The Flash, on the other hand, just steadily got worse season by season.
We have just decided to re-watch The Flash and Arrow. We started with The Flash as I feel like I haven’t watched it from the beginning in years. I am enjoying the first season so much, it’s some of the best television there is, but I know it’ll only get worse from season 3 onwards. This is why we’ve made the decision to call it a day at season 3, then watch Arrow all the way through. Doing it this way means we still get to enjoy all of the crossovers and enjoy the Arrowverse in its more peak years.
Maybe that’s the biggest compliment I can give Arrow. It wasn’t always great, and at times it was downright frustrating. However, unlike The Flash, it always found a way to pull me back in.
