[Mild Spoilers] Some thoughts on what went wrong

I've tried to put some thought into why such a promising show has taken such a sharp turn for the worse, and here they are. I've already touched on some of them here but this is more comprehensive:

The Setup

We all have our own opinions, but we can probably roughly agree that the biggest issues this season have been:

1. Plot holes

2. How Felicity's character and the Ollie/Felicity relationship have been handled

3. Lacklustre fight choreography

4. How Laurel (and to a lesser extent Thea) have been treated by the writers

5. Over-reliance on relationship subplots separate to Ollie's story (aka 'Felicity and friends')

6. The nukes!

7. Poor flashbacks

8. Revealing the villain too early and then painfully slowly dripfeeding details of his plans and motivations. We know Damien's the bad guy from the first episode, most episodes have HIVE as the main antagonist, and yet it's not til very near the end of the series that the plot really gathers any sort of momentum

9. Over-reliance on Merlyn as a plot device rather than a character

10. Lack of planning around the reveal of who was in the grave

11. A huge slump in quality around the midseason

12. Too many plots solved by hacking rather than Ollie doing anything

13. The way the team dynamics were handled at the end of the finale

Well here are my thoughts on that...

The Theory

u/i_miss_arrow has made two posts, here and here that detail the kind of plot and character arcs that seemed to be being teased for seasons 3-5 based on the first two seasons. A lot of it is speculative, but it's a helpful way of laying out how the show started abandoning many of its structural and thematic motifs during season three, seemingly throwing them entirely by the wayside in season four.

So why on earth did they do that? We've been blaming Guggenheim and Mericle, but as documented here, Guggie actually only has an exec producer credit on two episodes this season. Much of the day-to-day running of Arrow appears to be on Mericle (who had arguably got less showrunning experience prior to this season than Neil Patrick Harris did after producing four episodes of How I Met Your Mother, and on Desperate Housewives of all things) under the supervision of Berlanti and Kriesberg. I'm not dismissing complaints about Guggie's attitude, but this mess is by no means entirely on him.

So, Berlanti and Kriesberg are apparently calling the shots, and the show's original creators (including Guggenheim) all still seem to have creative input. So why the sudden change in direction? I have a theory.

You see, the moment I first began to fear for Arrow's future quality was actually right after an episode that I found thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining, season three's 'Draw Back Your Bow' (the one introducing Cupid). In an interview after the episode aired, Guggenheim played coy on the effect the Ray/Felicity kiss would have on Olicity, and on whether or not Olicity was actually the endgame for the show. I can't remember his exact words, but he said something along the lines of that they were looking for the show to run for ten seasons, so the status quo in season three - or even season seven - isn't going to be the endgame of the show.

That actually seems pretty reasonable, so why was I worried? Simple: the plot of Arrow lends itself to a self-contained five-season arc. The final scene of the season five flashbacks is the first scene of the season one present-day plot. Arrow is, as its creators have said in the past, not the story of the superhero known as the Green Arrow, but the story of how Oliver Queen became a superhero (even giving him the name Green Arrow in season four doesn't negate that if he still has character development to go through before he's truly a superhero), and that he would be that hero by the end of season five.

While I liked the idea of Arrow going beyond season five if it gave me more of the characters I loved in great stories, from a practical perspective I thought the five-season arc that was clearly envisioned for the show should be let run its course, and then start up some kind of Outsiders/JSA team show featuring members of Team Arrow (say, a Lance sister, ATOM and Ollie, with Felicity as the Oracle/Watchtower equivalent) plus other characters like Flash and the Hawks, have a Star City show with, say, Roy and Thea and one of the Lance sisters, and let Ollie and other established characters bounce between the various Arrowverse shows as needed. Kind of the way the JL is treated in Young Justice: they're already fully-developed heroes, you don't need to follow their adventures on a weekly basis, instead show us new heroes coming up through the ranks, learning from and working with the old hands.

Now, there are multiple reasons why the producers might jump from five seasons to ten seasons, and the truth is probably a combination of factors. The CW are looking at Arrow as the cornerstone of a new fictional universe that's getting them a fair amount of critical and commercial success. WB/DC ditto, when many of their films have struggled. The production team are probably proud of the show they've created, and if the network offered them a chance to keep making it, they can be excused for agreeing. Look at other shows where that has happened, like How I Met Your Mother's weak final season. Berlanti's other show, The Tomorrow People, got cancelled by the same network, and when it came to Arrow there may have been an element of carrot-and-stick. For example, Fox convinced Joss Whedon to write a new final season for Buffy after he'd tied up the plot to his own satisfaction in exchange for giving him a free pass for one season of a new show (which became Firefly). Maybe extending Arrow was made integral to getting future spin-offs?

So the production team are looking at ten seasons, with enough plot for five. Sure, they can come up with new plots, that's not the end of the world, but the problem is that if they follow their original arc as planned, the show about Oliver Queen learning to be a hero will loose all narrative momentum halfway through its run, when he becomes that hero and no longer needs any serious character development. They're also probably operating under immense pressure. There's fan expectations. The fact that the CW's house style tends towards the soapy. The need to work on multiple shows at once. Pressure from DC/WB to do/not do certain things in certain ways. And, of course, WB's strict limits on access to certain characters, concepts and plots. We've seen fantastic characters written out at WB's behest, we've seen Guggenheim claiming that WB warned them off reusing Slade... hell, when the news surfaced that Margot Robbie had successfully pitched WB a Harley Quinn solo movie featuring a bunch of female supers, my immediate reaction was "Oh, so that's why Laurel was killed!"

So what do you do? Well, you tread water in the hope that you can spin Ollie's hero's journey out for longer than five seasons and keep the show's momentum going a bit longer. From a long-term perspective, this means you place more obstacles in the way of Oliver reaching the place he's supposed to be in by the end of your planned five-season arc. It also means spinning out the flashbacks a bit so past!Ollie doesn't catch up to present!Ollie too quickly. You don't introduce too many new comic characters (especially in a season where a new sister show you're launching requires a whole bunch of them) and double down on the ones you have, so that you have some in reserve in case future WB embargoes severely restrict your access. This issue and the issue of slowing Ollie's development mean that instead of having multiple short arcs and villain-of-the-week episodes alongside your major season plot, you devote a lot more time to the stuff that won't use up future resources (that is, you spin out the main conflict across as many episodes as possible, and you spend more time on the relationships between the existing characters). You try to tread a line between the DC movies' grimdark style and the CW's soapy style that lets you evolve the tone of your show without losing viewers or annoying the higher-ups on either side.

As for fight choreography, well, they've kind of written themselves into a corner there too. If Ollie is going to be an archer and martial artist, his weapons are his bow and unarmed combat. Simple. This leaves us with two problems:

• If you're going to have Ollie stop killing, he needs to use his fists a lot more. The tone of Arrow is fundamentally realistic. Consider it along the lines of hard sci-fi or A Song of Ice and Fire; even when there's magic and ATOM suits and so on, the show is meant to feel gritty, feel like actions have consequences. It's not a kids' cartoon where the Green Arrow can fire off a bunch of trick arrows all the time and just discombobulate the villains: if Ollie hits an ordinary human with an arrow, that's going to wound or kill. So that means more hand-to-hand, using explosive arrows to distract enemies, etc.

• Eventually, escalating threats and escalating villains leave us in a place where Ollie is quite simply out of his league without help from others. If you want a villain who's going to nuke the city, or wipe out a whole tonne of people, or whatever, eventually you're going to need a hacker and/or a bunch of vigilantes working together and/or Barry to show up. Arrow has always worked best when its threats have been in some way personal (even when there are far-reaching consequences, like Slade wrecking the city). But if the season Big Bads don't escalate, at some point fans and critics are going to start complaining that the stakes remain the same each year and the show is becoming stagnant. Obvious comparisons will be drawn to Flash and LoT, and people will point out that the Arrowverse has embraced its comic-book roots, so why can't we have a serious supervillain who doesn't care about the Queen family? (Like Damien).

The Conclusion

A lot of this season has felt like the first 2/3 of season one of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., where the showrunners were treading water at the behest of Marvel Studios until The Winter Soldier came out. I've been speculating in this post, but I'm speculating based on established facts and maybe, maybe I have a point.

I think, however, that there is hope for the future. Amell has been talking about season five being a return to the show's roots, and for the first time in a while he sounds pumped. The casting call for next's season's villain sounds promisingly personal. There are still characters and concepts out there that WB is unlikely to use in a film any time soon (Bluebird, Artemis, Cheshire, Onomatopoeia, Intergang, Richard Dragon and Spoiler all spring to mind). Kevin Smith has made noises about writing for Arrow next season as well as Flash, and there's a man who respects and loves the Black Canary and the comics as a whole. Even this year, the production team have shown that they're trying to please fans who are interested in the show's roots and in the comics (salvaging Matt Ryan's John Constantine, giving us a very DCAU-esque Vixen miniseries, Flash of Two Earths, JWS in a Flash suit, Killer Frost, all the easter eggs and characters in LoT, the JSA...). They're floundering though, and they know it. Mericle has admitted the flashbacks were a misstep that will be fixed. And between the hints in the finale that they're wiping a lot of the slate clean (we may not like characters departing, but since many of them are departing to get over the problems that have been symptomatic of their weak stories this season (Thea's daddy issues, for one), there's some hope there) and of course Flashpoint, Berlanti may well be looking at doing a soft reboot next season to get things back on track. With Geoff Johns (who has had involvement in the Arrowverse from the start) amassing even more power at DC this spring (he's now basically DC's Kevin Feige and is also fixing the New 52 over in the comics arm), they may even be hoping to get some of the needless character embargoes lifted.

Are the issues we have with Arrow this season largely the fault of the creators? Yes, I'm not trying to handwave away their part in this. But this is my theory on the wider context of these issues. And we must remember that fans and critics have a part to play in this. Would we have been annoyed if Arrow ran for five seasons and ended, and then we discovered they'd had an option to double the length of its run? Probably. Would we have been annoyed if they didn't up the stakes of the seasonal Big Bads? Probably. Would we have been annoyed if Ollie just reverted to killing people all the time for no real reason? Almost certainly.

Any thoughts?