(Originally posted April 13th, 2018)
I've talked about this show in the past, but I've recently been re-watching it with my sister, so I figured I might as well post a review. This is for the 1st season of Arrow, the show that kick-started DC's shared TV universe known as the Arrowverse, and I'm going to delight in talking about this show again. Starring Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen, Katie Cassidy as Laurel Lance, Colin Donnell as Tommy Merlyn, David Ramsey as John Diggle, Willa Holland as Thea Queen, Susanna Thompson as Moira Queen and Paul Blackthorne as Quentin Lance.
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| Arrow: Season 1 (2012-13) |
5 years after billionaire playboy Oliver Queen is lost in a boating accident and presumed dead, he returns to his hometown, Starling City, with a secret agenda to right his family's wrongs and save his city. A simple enough premise and, really, it starts out just as simple, with each episode featuring a new target for Oliver to cross off his list. But it doesn't take long for the show to pick up the pace and start dealing with the real stuff. Whenever this first season deals with the season-long story arcs instead of telling one-off stories, it's a joy to watch, and the characters are what make it. There's not a single person in this starring line-up that isn't a compelling and complex character that you just love. The show even manages to win you over on characters that you hate in the beginning. Oliver's character is strong enough to carry the show on his own, which you'd want, but with such a strong ensemble, the show shines.
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| Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen |
The show also employs a small amount of flashback storytelling, with most episodes featuring brief cutaways to Oliver's surprisingly intense stay on the island of Lian Yu. These serve as a nice way to break things up a bit, but they also tell a story of their own, and the best parts are when the story of what happened on the island and the story of what's happening in Starling City are interconnected in some fashion. Especially about halfway through the season, the flashback scenes really pick up, and they're such a treat that you forget anything that's happening in Starling, particularly with such a strong supporting cast. I need to stop talking about the cast in general, but when you've got such strong recurring actors as Manu Bennett, Sebastian Dunn, Colin Salmon, Alex Kingston, Colton Haynes, Emily Bett Rickards and John Barrowman, they definitely deserve their own special mention.
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| Manu Bennett as Slade Wilson |
The fight scenes are especially well choreographed. These are some intense action set-pieces, and they all feel very unique despite mostly pitting an archer against some guy. Of course, there's typically a lot more to it than that, but I can't really discuss it further without encroaching on spoiler territory, which I try to avoid in these reviews, but trust me when I saw that these action sequences are among the best I've seen on television, and they're especially good with Blake Neely's score providing the assist. The OST for this show isn't my favourite of all time, but it does its job, with the music being mainly atmospheric or ambient rather than grandiose. Any scenes involving 'The Hood' in action, however, allow the score to become a little more bombastic, and I love that recurring motif that accompanies such sequences.
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| The Dark Archer |
In summary, though at times the show can be a little formulaic when it just deals with crossing a new name off the list each week, whenever it deals with the characters or the season-long arcs, the first season of Arrow is incredible TV, and I could talk about the season finale alone for pages and pages if I wasn't being spoiler-free. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd definitely recommend it, though be prepared to get sucked into an entire universe of shows which i will be reviewing in due time, as I'm so far down this rabbit-hole already that I never want to come out. 8.5/10
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