TV Retrospective - Arrow Season 1 Episodes 1-3

With season 3 of this fine show coming soon, now seems like a good time to look back at the series past and evaluate the show's progress 

These mini-reviews are going to contain spoilers

Pilot

Well, it accomplishes exactly what it set out to do. It gives us an introduction to Oliver Queen as both a vigilante and as a person. And introduces all the supporting cast members, introduces the overall arc of the series (if sort of briefly) and gives us enough action to support the story’s superhero side.

Oh and we’re introduced to the maid who… Erm… Do we ever see her again?

And I don’t mean that in any negative light, this story is a bit paint by numbers, but being an episode that’s a pilot to  series as well as an introduction to the series in general, it’s probably the best way to do it.

If I have negatives, the henchmen are the worst shots ever!

Not much to say about the villains here, they’re all fairly generic, again, given the premise of the series, you should expect a fair few of these.

The drama is there, and there’s plenty of it, all to be addressed in the next few episodes.

Rating 7.5/10

Honour they Father

Ollie really needs a voice-changer for his persona, I know he gets one later on, but he didn’t even consider that people might recognise the voice of the guy.

Time to introduce to the show the Chinese triad; and enforcer China White (played by Kelly Hu – who also voiced Cheshire in Young Justice and Lady Shiva in Batman: Arkham Origins), and an introduction to Queen Industries, and the applied sciences division.

Ollie’s reluctance to lead Queen Consolidated seems like a reverse of the situation in episode 1.

We also get the flashbacks to Lian Yu (I think that’s spelt correctly) albeit relatively brief ones

We get to see the relationship with Detective Lance and his daughter Laurel. He gives her police protection to try and save her, despite her stubbornness (yeah, she’s much more annoying in season 2) and then trying to make her give it up, which she refuses.

Diggle gets to show himself as a semi-decent shot, which is, once again, more than I can say for the China White’s henchmen, or really any villain. Although it’s fairly clear Diggle won’t be staying as just his body guard much longer.

Rating 8/10

Lone Gunman

We’re introduced to the first super-villain of the series, and like most of them, he’s a Batman villain. His name’s Floyd Lawton, AKA Deadshot, and he’s a super-assassin, so they characterised him pretty well. The poison thing’s new and so the whole tattooing his victims thing (do they really want to make him like Victor Zsasz, because Victor Zsasz is creepy as hell)

Ollie is coming up with ever more creative ways of ditching his body guard, and it’s thankfully sooner rather than later that this comes to a head, as Diggle finds out the truth.

And we see the Russian mafia, who Ollie has an interesting relationship with. We don’t find our exactly how, with season. The tattoo is a bit odd; no-one noticed it and made the connection?

Thea’s a bad girl, who can’t listen to anyone, and is gonna need some much needed humility in order to grow… Just an observation

Meanwhile in Lian Yu, Oliver is captured, and freed again, that’s about it really

Oh, we get introduced to series regular Felicity Smoak, and Oliver spins her a tale about as convincing as saying a late was spilt on a bullet-loaded laptop, and that’s the reason why it doesn’t work, oh wait, that’s exactly what it was. And she’s also completely fine finding out the laptop was stolen, and Ollie didn’t even know who it belonged to.

Again, for a master assassin, Deadshot missed Ollie at close range with a lot of bullets (this is a guy who never misses)

Tommy and Laurel have a few moments together, as the truth about their relationship comes out (wow, we’re 3 episodes in out of 23 and a lot’s coming to a head now)

Rating 8.5/10

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Images used in this review are from Arrow and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.