Arrow's fourth season was marked by plenty of highs and lows.
Update (8/30/16): With Arrow: Season 4 now on Blu-ray and DVD, we're re-featuring our review of the show's fourth season.
Special features include additional deleted scenes, a gag reel, Arrow's 2015 San Diego Comic-Con panel and the featurettes "Star Crossed Hawks: The Hunt for Vandal Savage" and "Smooth Criminal: The Damien Darhk Story."
Warning: full spoilers for Arrow's fourth season below.
It's beginning to look as though Arrow's best days are behind it. The show reached its current peak during Season 2 thanks to the compelling rivalry between Oliver Queen and Slade Wilson, but the third season failed to continue that momentum, despite the addition of Ra's al Ghul to the mix and a generally wider DC Universe canvas on which to paint. The fourth season made some significant strides, but ultimately failed to address the show's fundamental problem and, in some ways, Season 4 was the weakest yet.
That's not to say this season didn't start off well. In the aftermath of a muddled, underwhelming Season 3 finale, "Green Arrow" kicked off the season by building a solid new status quo for Ollie (Stephen Amell), Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards), and the estranged members of Team Arrow. The premiere introduced a very different Ollie, one who was happy to trade in vigilante shenanigans for a life of domestic bliss and quiet anonymity. For Amell, an actor who has always been skilled at playing his character at distinct stages of his life, this was a chance to showcase a newer, more personable take on Oliver Queen. And as Ollie and Felicity reluctantly returned to Star City and reconnected with Diggle (David Ramsey), Laurel (Katie Cassidy) and Thea (Willa Holland), Ollie was forced to confront the mess he left behind in Star City.
"Green Arrow" was very effective in building a new status quo for Ollie and his friends. It was both an optimistic start to the season, with Ollie adopting a new superhero name and voicing his desire to be the kind of figure who could inspire hope rather than fear, and a pessimistic one, with the knowledge that Ollie might very well have been ensnared by the same darkness he so narrowly escaped at the end of Season 3. That nagging sense of worry was furthered with the final flash-forward scene, which featured a despondent Ollie and Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) mourning over the grave of a fallen ally.
"Green Arrow" was also notable for introducing what was easily the best addition to the show in Season 4, Damien Darhk (Neal McDonough). Darhk and his fanatically loyal HIVE agents replaced Ra's al Ghul and the League of Assassins. Right away, McDonough's intensity and charisma forged him into a compelling villain. Even in the season's weaker moments, Darhk himself was always a highlight. Not to mention that Darhk's supernatural powers further opened the door for the wider DC Universe. With guest appearances for everyone from John Constantine (Matt Ryan) to Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) this season, it was impossible not to marvel at how far the series has come from the early days where rival archers were the worst thing Ollie had to contend with.
From that opening episode, Season 4 settled into a fairly comfortable groove in its early months. The combination of the threat of HIVE, the lingering unease between Ollie and Diggle, and Ollie's mayoral campaign and general efforts to become a hero of the people (more in line with the traditional Green Arrow of the comics) offered a solid blend of costumed and personal crises - though, as with The Flash, there were weeks where it felt as if Arrow was spending more time setting the stage for the spinoff series DC's Legends of Tomorrow than furthering its own storylines. That was definitely the case with "Lost Souls," which exerted a great deal of effort to bring both Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) and Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh) back into the fold before abruptly shuffling them off into the sunset.
On the other hand, that process culminated in an enjoyable crossover with The Flash and the closest thing to a legitimate Justice League team-up we've seen from the Flash/Arrow universe. Seeing the Green Arrow, Black Canary and Flash standing side-by-side with Hawkman and Hawkgirl was a huge thrill. That episode also made great use of Flash's time travel abilities to offer a sobering look at what could go wrong when Ollie and his friends weren't 100% focused and committed to their missions. If anything "Legends of Yesterday" seemed to mark the point of no return for Ollie, as his bad decisions and refusal to be completely honest with those closest to him cast a pallor over his romance with Felicity.
The Ollie/Felicity romance continued to be one of the show's more divisive elements this year. For every person who obsesses over the pairing, there's another who actively despises Felicity and everything she represents. For the most part, I thought that romance worked well this year. Felicity represented everything Ollie stood to lose by returning to Star City. But when he did lose her, it wasn't the city at fault, but rather his own poor choices coming back to haunt him. But that's not to say Felicity was important only in terms of her relationship to Ollie this season. She dealt with her own struggles as she fought to maintain control of the ailing Palmer Tech, recovered from paralysis after a HIVE attack and reunited with her estranged father, Noah (Tom Amandes). This season offered Emily Bett Rickards a wider range of both drama and comedy, and she rose to the challenge. It also provided her with an entertaining new sidekick in the form of scatterbrained tech genius Curtis Holt (Echo Kellum), a character who came into his own over the course of the season and now seems poised to take on a more active role as a member of Team Arrow.
It's also worth noting that, for all the talk of Season 4 opening the floodgates and allowing even more super-powered and even magical characters into the fold, the show wasn't afraid to showcase some good, old-fashioned vigilante action. This season boasted some of the best fight scenes in the show's history. Directors like Lexi Alexander and James Bamford elevated the martial arts and bow-and-arrow action to a new level. Bamford especially showed a knack for making the most of the talented stuntmen and women, with brutal combat and shots that lingered on the action rather than devolving into a mess of quick cuts and choppy editing.
There are a lot of positive things to say to say about the first half of Season 4. It started strong and ended even stronger in the mid-season finale, "Dark Waters." By that point there was legitimate reason to hope that the old magic was seeping back into the show. Sadly, it wasn't to be. Cracks started appearing as soon as the show returned in January with "Blood Debts." That was the episode that introduced Lonnie Machin/Anarky (Alexander Calvert) as the X-factor in the ongoing war between Team Arrow and HIVE. Lonnie was always useful as a catalyst for a memorable fight scene or two, but despite returning several times over the course of the season, it was never entirely clear what purpose he really served as a villain. When used properly, Anarky is a character who could just as easily be the overarching villain of his own season.
Lonnie's first appearance came across as a way of forestalling the final showdown between Team Arrow and Damien Darhk, and that spoke a larger problem the second half of the season suffered from. It lost its sense of direction and tight pacing. Various character conflicts, such as Thea's struggle with her bloodlust and Diggle trying to redeem his brother, Andy (Eugene Byrd) meandered about without ever reaching a truly satisfying conclusion. Then there was the battle between Ollie and Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman) in "Sins of the Father," which somehow managed to be even more anticlimactic and unsatisfying than the showdown between Ollie and the previous Ra's al Ghul at the end of Season 3. Even Ollie's mayoral campaign reached an abrupt, unsatisfying conclusion halfway through the season.
The general quality of the show took a distinct nosedive during this period, with more mediocre to decent episodes than truly memorable adventures. Episodes focused on forgettable villains like Cupid (Amy Gumenick) and Bug-Eyed Bandit (Emily Kinney) only added to the sense that the writers were merely spinning their wheels before ushering in the final battle against HIVE.
Nowhere were the mistakes of the season more readily and consistently apparent than with the recurring flashback storyline. This year, the flashbacks brought Ollie back to the island as Amanda Waller (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) tasked him with infiltrating the operation of Baron Reiter (Jimmy Akingbola). That conflict started out well enough in the first few weeks of the season but rapidly devolved into a series of short, choppy sequences with little sense of plot progression. Too often, it felt as if the flashbacks were structured in a way so as to parallel to the present-day conflict as closely as possible rather than to tell the best story possible. The personal struggles that drove Ollie's story during his time with Slade in Seasons 1 and 2 or even the Yamashiro family in Season 3 were absent here. In the end, the flashbacks seemed to exist only so we could see Ollie battle two totem-wielding villains at the same time in the finale.
It's clear that the writers need to seriously reevaluate the flashbacks as they hash out Season 5. Is it even worth keeping that element in play anymore? The Season 4 flashback storyline might have worked as a single, standalone episode, but as a recurring conflict it felt barren and stretched beyond the breaking point. At this point, wouldn't it be better to just let Ollie spend his final year on the island moping rather than trying to shoehorn another conflict involving a random DC villain attempting to exploit Lian Yu's resources?
Season 4 did receive a boost late in the game thanks to the dramatic "Eleven-Fifty-Nine," an episode that culminated with Andy betraying his brother and Darhk murdering Laurel. Those twists served to reinvigorate the show and finally escalate the war between Team Arrow and HIVE once more. However, that proved to be the final great installment of the season. The remaining five episodes definitely had their moments, particularly with Diggle executing his brother in order to protect his family and Felicity being forced to drop a nuclear warhead on a small town in order to prevent it from landing in the heart of Star City. But neither plot point was resolved in a truly satisfactory manner. Felicity in particular seemed to shake off her guilt almost immediately. Like many running storylines this year, the payoff didn't do justice to the setup.
Which brings us to the season finale. "Schism" wasn't simply a poor wrap-up to Season 4, it might just be the worst episode of the series. Very little in that episode worked, whether it was the underwhelming final battle between Ollie and Darhk, Ollie's tepid moral victory or the splintering of team Arrow in the final moments. None of it connected on an emotional level. Even the idea that the world was facing total nuclear annihilation (thereby raising the stakes higher than they've ever been on the show) failed to inject "Schism" with the drama and tension it needed. Season 4 ended with a dull thud exactly when it needed to shine the most.
As such, Season 4 wound up being an even more extreme example of Season 3's failure in terms of the whole being less than the sum of its parts. There was a lot to like about the direction of this season. Problems were addressed and characters were given new challenges to overcome. But the quality generally declined over the course of the year, culminating in a very disappointing finale that that only served to make the preceding 22 episodes seem worse in hindsight. Nor did "Schism" do much to build excitement for what's to come in Season 5. If anything, the show is on even shakier ground now than it was a year ago.
The Verdict
It's funny how much a show's prospects can shift over the course of a few months. Early on, it seemed as if Arrow's fourth season was on track to redeem the series as a whole and recapture some of the glory of Season 2. Instead, that momentum faded as the season wore on, culminating with a truly disappointing finale that failed to wrap up the yearlong conflict between HIVE and Team Arrow in the way it deserved. At this point, Arrow's best days seem to be behind it.
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