Arrow

All season, Arrow has struggled to find balance – a fitting metaphor for its main character, who is now learning that when there are too many balls in the air, there is no such thing as balance. Hell, half of the season has been hijacked by the Tony Star- Ray Palmer story, which is basically Oliver’s story without all of the physical and emotional trauma that comes along with it, which has often left Oliver a reactionary character on his own freakin’ television show. Throw on top the show’s regression with characters like Quentin (who is back to season one levels of obsessed dickhead cop in recent weeks, as he hunts the Arrow), Diggle, and Nyssa, and it’s become clear that Arrow is way too crowded, both in terms of the pretty white faces we see every week, and the story lines accompanying them.

Captain Lance goes on the offensive against Team Arrow as Ra’s Al Ghul forces Oliver to make some difficult choices in an episode that brings one of the season’s key themes to the forefront.

While Marvel comics have enjoyed success on the big screen over the years, their counterpart DC Comics has similarly found success on the small screen. The company’s most notable two shows have been Arrow and The Flash, both of which have enjoyed critical and commercial success on The CW. The world that the two shows …

Hey everyone, the Suicide Squad is back… to tell us an heartwrenching story about love, PTSD, and sacrifice? “Suicidal Tendencies” is an odd episode of Arrow, though one that benefits from one very important thing: the resurrection of John Diggle, whose been reserved to background fodder for most of the season while Ra’s wreaked mayhem and something happened in Hong Kong with some virus not named Mirakura (Alpha/Omega; but you get my point). And in an episode that mostly involves Laurel and Quentin bickering (yawn) and the increasingly grating arrowhead tip-shaped love triangle of Ray, Felicity, and Oliver went for another spin.

Thematically, “The Offer” is the most consistent episode of Arrow we’ve had in awhile. With a lot of truth out in the open, and motivations coming to light, there’s some room for Arrow to wiggle out of the crawl spaces it wrote itself in during the first half of the season, and begin to work out what this clusterfuck of a season actually means. Does that lead to any interesting moments of discovery? It certainly does, as Oliver considers the offer from the Head of the Demon to take his place, and other characters like Laurel and Malcolm try to make things right with their family: but again, Arrow’s tendencies to throw an extraneous layer of superficial dramatics on top of everything clouds the strong material.

Stepping back and viewing “Nanda Parbat” as a whole is kind of a bad idea. On a broad scale, Arrow is a bit of a hot mess right now, juggling multiple story lines and integrating wildly different character arcs with each other, all to varying degrees of success – and in some cases, coherency. A lot of what’s going on this season still isn’t clear; and the decisions made in the last fifteen minutes of this episode by the writers only complicate these matters further, in not-so-fun ways. Despite that, there’s one thing “Nanda Parbat” has going for it that too many episodes this season have lacked: truth, something many characters have avoided speaking up until this point.

If you, like most TV junkies, can’t get enough superhero shows, then you’re in luck. The CW has recently unveiled one of their most ambitious projects yet: a spin-off show of both Arrow and The Flash by creators Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg and Marc Guggenheim.

Remember season one of Arrow? The early episodes, the ones that featured a lot of Thea and Quentin being endlessly cranking and inebriated? Where Tommy Merlyn’s whiny attitude infected every corner of the show? Well, “The Returned” is here to remind those who forgot, an hour that wallows in the pitiful world of early Arrow episodes, only coming to life in the time it spends in the present – and even there, the return of Deathstroke isn’t quite as entertaining or resonant as one would hope it to be.

It’s impressive how “Canaries” ends in a completely different reality than it began, unburdened by the show’s two biggest still-existing “secrets” and teasing the audience with a closing tag that sets up next week’s episode as the inverse of Arrow’s normal world, with Oliver and Thea on the island (in the present), and Oliver returning to Starling City in his flashback adventures with A.R.G.U.S. It puts a fun tag on an episode that smartly pushes quickly past two major in-world reveals in order to move on to bigger, more important stories to follow. If anything, “Canaries” is a clear marking point for Arrow’s third season, hitting the reset button with this week’s episode, and positing next week’s episode as the dramatic catapult to kick the third act of this season into high gear -and hot damn, it’s about time.

Starling City’s time without the Arrow was largely a mixed bag; but it mostly comes together in “Uprising”, the conclusion to the “Oliver’s Gone!” trilogy that brought Arrow into 2015 with a bit of a whimper. As with the previous episodes lacking Oliver Queen, “Uprising” is mostly a showcase for Felicity, who is able to express all the frustrating contradictions that come with trying to be a “hero” – or at least, a man who makes reckless, short-sighted decisions that end up working in his favor. It’s all about perspective in “Uprising”, an idea that kicks some big season three stories into gear.

This week on The Flash, Britne Oldford stars as Shauna Baez (Peek-a-Boo) a metahuman who’s mastered the power of teleportation via quantum entanglement. After breaking her boyfriend Clay Parker, out of Iron Heights prison, Barry Allen is tasked with solving the case by taking the residual DNA particulates found at the crime scene to S.T.A.R. Labs for analyzing. Aiding Barry in his investigation is his incarcerated dad Henry who discovers that Clay owes money to a local crime boss, who just happens to be planning a major heist.

As Arrow often does, “Midnight City” finds its heart most consistently with Felicity Smoak. There are many attempts in this episode to forge emotional connections between characters – Laurel and her father, Maseo and Tatsu, Malcolm and Thea – but when “Midnight” is focused on Felictiy and the void left by Oliver Queen, it enriches her story and Ray’s, elevating it beyond a lot of the other, more telegraphed material in this week’s episode.

It speaks to how strong (most of) Arrow’s supporting cast has grown over the last three seasons that “Left Behind” doesn’t fall flat on its face. Sure, the script doesn’t quite go to the emotional lengths it does with Felicity as it does with other characters as they contemplate the mortality of their chosen profession, however using Felicity as the emotional anchor turns out to be the episode’s greatest strength. An hour that is able to convey reflective moments alongside some obvious plot building, “Left Behind” is a strong hour that establishes a number of interesting new directions, in the extended absence of Oliver Queen.

With the League of Assassins arriving in Starling City and demanding answers about Sara’s murder, it’s clear from the beginning that “The Climb” is ready to kick season three of Arrow into high gear – and it couldn’t happen soon enough: the lack of delay tactics in “The Climb” breaks the show wide open, allowing characters the freedom to both emote and take action, the latter of which has been sorely missing at points in recent weeks. Ending with a series-shaking moment, “The Climb” ends an up-and-down start to Arrow’s third season on an exciting high note.

The DC television domination continues as yet another property is headed to series with the recent announcement that Teen Titans would get a pilot. TNT confirmed on Monday that a pilot for DC’s Teen Titans characters in a show called Titans would film at some point in 2015. Titans will revolve around onetime Batman sidekick-turned superhero …

  It was rumored last week and now it has been confirmed by Variety that David Ayer’s Suicide Squad will start shooting in Toronto in early 2015 and  cast has been officially announced and it includes: Jared Leto – The Joker Will Smith – Deadshot Tom Hardy – Rick Flag Margot Robbie – Harley Quinn Jai …

We’ve already seen plenty of exchanges between The Flash and Arrow since Barry Allen first debuted in “The Scientist”, but this episode marked the first major crossover between the two shows. The writers focused a great deal on the sheer entertainment in seeing these two heroes square off, and the end result is a fun, lighthearted, action packed adventure that knows exactly what it wants to be and executes it well. As DC and Warner Bros. prep Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice to kick-start their interconnected big-screen universe, “The Flash vs. Arrow” proves their small screen worlds are miles ahead of the game.

Warner Bros. and producer, Jerry Bruckheimer (best known for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, and the U.S. version of The Amazing Race), are taking on the DC Entertainment property titled Global Frequency, a comic book series written by Warren Ellis. The high-profile television project which has landed a pilot production commitment at …

An episode that embarrasses on a number of levels, “Draw Back Your Bow” feels more like it belongs in season one of Arrow, when pointless flashbacks and romantic subplots ruled the day, and Arrow didn’t get to do a whole lot of hero-ing around Starling City. Bogged down by a horribly written antagonist and one of the dumbest Thea plots ever, “Draw Back Your Bow” recognizes its existence as a filler episode, and embraces it, delivering scene after scene of unimportant material before throwing two major teasers into the final moments. Intriguing as the directions this season of Arrow appear to be going with some stories (League of Assassins, Black Canary, etc.), “Draw Back Your Bow” is anything but, a slog through a bunch of trope-filled writing to reach conclusions that delay interesting things further.

The CW has been teasing the upcoming crossover episodes for The Flash and Arrow for a couple of weeks, and now they’ve finally released the first images from the episode online. Part one of the Flash vs. Arrow crossover event (which is technically an episode of The Flash) is directed by Glen Winter with a …

Not every episode can be a home run; after a relatively strong half-dozen episodes to start the season, “Guilty” is the first dud of Arrow’s third season, a story undone by its simplistic parallels and relying on the show’s two most inconsistent charcters (Roy and Laurel) to deliver them. Sure, it gives us some background on Wildcat, and appears to raise the stakes in the season’s tepid flashbacks… but it’s not enough to reconcile the shortcomings of the rest of the hour, even with the devilishly fun ending tacked on the end.

One would expect, given the title of the series, that Arrow would focus mainly on Oliver Queen as The Arrow (or Green Arrow or The Vigilante or whatever). And that’s true, for the most part.

It was only a matter of time before Oliver Queen’s morality was tested in the face of Sara’s death: no matter who may have committed the crime, Oliver will struggle with the decision to kill them and betray the vows he made in season two. Surprisingly, “The Magician” is that episode, though it replaces the actual killer with recently-returned Malcolm Merlyn, doubling down on the test of The Arrow’s humanity: even if he didn’t think Malcolm killed Sara (who we find out, was sent to Starling to hunt him down), Oliver had to decide whether to let a man who murdered over 500 people live. That particular tweak is really the saving grace of “The Magician”, elevating an otherwise obligatory set of scenes (Nyssa gets pissed off, Laurel gets pissed off, Malcolm teases Oliver and pisses him off… you catch my drift) into a fully-formed hour of dramatic television, highlighted by a three-way fight and underlined by the frustrations of Team Arrow and the dead ends they’ve faced.