*This review contains some spoilers*
While improving on last season, this season of “Arrow” hasn’t recaptured the magic from its first two seasons. A lot of steps were taken to move things closer to the comic book version of the characters. Starling City is now Star City, The Arrow is now The Green Arrow. The Atom is now a superhero that can shrink. The show has embraced many supernatural and metahuman elements that it wouldn’t dealt with in the earlier seasons.
Damian Darhk is a strong addition as the season long villain. Neal McDonough seems to be having fun in every scene that he’s. The mystical elements of his abilities grow increasingly convoluted as the season gets closer to the finale, and his League of Assassins fighting skills seem to alternate between unless and almost unstoppable. The addition of Curtis Holt never pays off. Instead of getting Mr. Terrific, we just get a male version of Felicity. Felicity has some strong character beats this season, but the on and off relationship with Oliver and her mommy and daddy issues often drag the show down. Both Paul Blackthorne (Quentin Lance) and David Ramsey (John Diggle) have the most emotional performances of the season. Meanwhile, Malcom Merlyn continues to overstay his welcome, and Black Canary has an oddly written death to left much doubt on her fate with the viewers. Besides a nice cameo from John Constantine and a revamped version of the Batman villain Anarchy, there wasn’t much of interest as far as new characters.
The overall story took a long time to get to the point, and was all over the place, especially with the infamous “mystery” character death flash-forward. While there was some setting up for “Legends of Tomorrow,” it didn’t seem as obvious as what happened on “The Flash.”
This season probably had the weakest island flashback content. It was a very short storyline stretched out for entirely too long. It really did nothing to add to Oliver’s character in the past or present.
** out of *****