Dethroning Moment / Arrowverse

• X Spectre Grey X: I am enjoying Arrow to a decent degree, even with its lack of overall focus and needless training montages. There are bad episodes, "Vertigo" being especially bad for how hammy the Count is, but "The Odyssey" is easily the worst. First of all, Ollie takes a huge step back in his character development. The previous episode had him coming to terms with how his mother could be guilty of collaborating with criminals. It's a big step for the character because she's really all he has left; his sister is a Spoiled Brat who is constantly acting out to spite her family, his ex-girlfriend is dating his best friend, who is too busy trying to become a better man (and succeeding, mind you) to really pay Ollie much attention, and his bodyguard is the one accusing his mother. At the end of the episode, he resolves to question her with an arrow trained on her head. In "The Odyssey", she begs him to let her live for her children, then proceeds to shoot at him. You'd think this would kind of clue him in a little, but instead he resolves that, because she begged, she can't be guilty! Then there's the pointless bit with Slade Wilson not being the Deathstroke (I'm assuming that he and his partner both use the alias) that tortured Ollie, instead making him a Sink or Swim Mentor. Other than enticing people to watch this episode, what is the point of this? It goes against his comics characterization to a ridiculous degree, and feels like it's only there to say "hey, remember this is based off of DC characters!" There's also Ollie using the phone from a guard tower to call his girlfriend. Seriously, with how whiny and annoying Ollie is in the flashback segments, it doesn't feel like he's changed at all from when he arrived on the island! What did the time with Yao Fei teach you? All the episode really does is induct Felicity, a character who comes off as a Creator's Pet and whose actress cannot pull off Adorkable to save her life, into the team, and even then, her reasoning is so contrived that it's beyond unbelievable. Really, you're gonna associate yourself with someone you know has killed people for the boss who was somewhat nice to you? I know Star City is bad, but really? Overall, a crappy episode that is the first real sign of the show's decline (around when it was renewed for a second season as well).
  • Cranky Storming: I tried to watch that series, but the episode "Damaged" has made me question continuing. The police basically decide to let Oliver go only because the investigating officer had a personal grudge against him. Even though they had video evidence of him knowing where to find his vigilante gear, and earlier footage would show him placing it there. Any explanation other than "he's the archer" requires such a leap of logic that any doubt stops being reasonable. This means that the only reason Arrow isn't just a five-part miniseries is because the police are utterly incompetent.
  • whiteowl82: Thea going away with Malcom Merlyn in the Season 2 finale. Thea always behaved like a spoiled brat, but this takes the cake. When she finds out that Merlyn is her father she is understandably upset, but then she starts being really mean to everyone around her. She insults Moira, goes all “Oh my God you betrayed me” on Oliver (even though he just recently found out himself), says that she’s no longer a Queen (even though she had a great father who loved her) and leaves an “Oh my God I’m so miserable” letter to Roy before she leaves with the guy that, according to her, is the cause of all her problems. Seriously, if he takes her back, I’ll lose all the respect I have for him.
  • RAZ: Sara's death. All that build up for the character in the previous season and all that story potential left gets completely wasted for a poorly done, cheap shock death at the end of the season premiere. Even worse is that this is the same person who had equal footing with Oliver, yet is dispatched in such a weak, anti-climactic way. It's not enough to completely ruin the show for me, yet anyway, but it's definitely a big red mark for the third season.
    • Terror Toad: For me, it's Oliver's continuous refusal to do any harm to Malcolm. It was blatantly obvious that he was the one responsible for Sara's death no matter what BS he spewed. Ollie, being an idiot this season, let Malcolm walk away and refused to listen to any logic. Flash Forward to The Climb. Surprise, Surprise, Malcolm did do it! By drugging Ollie's little sister no less! So, when confronted with Malcolm again, what does Ollie do? Let's Malcolm walk away scott free. AGAIN! Ollie defends him no matter what, doesn't give a lick about Sara's death, refuses to rightfully hand him over to the League, and even listens to Malcom's BS logic that the League would go after Thea, when it was MALCOLM's FAULT! There's Took a Level in Dumbass and then there's Oliver Queen.
    • Caellach Tiger Eye: Much as I want to enjoy the show - and still do in a number of ways - the writers leaning over backwards to accommodate Merlyn's presence is stretching my SOD really far. Even disregarding his causing Sara's death, this is the man who murdered hundreds of people for a crime none of them had any part in - he meticulously plotted the Undertaking to destroy the Glades utterly and kill every inhabitant he could. Not only does he not regret this, but he doesn't accept any responsibility - he blames Danny Brickwell killing Rebecca for everything that's happened, ignoring moral responsibility completely. He orchestrates a murder which, leaving aside the ludicrousness of it succeeding, did nothing to help him save him and was an idiotic gambit to begin with - it takes Oliver's own bullheaded refusal to let him die (because reasons - like him being Thea's father, for one) which led to Ra's al Ghul forgiving the blood debt. The man is an astonishingly clever idiot... Worse, Oliver never seems to consider, you know, turning him in to the police; something which, if he'd just done it way back in Season 2 when Malcolm was revealed to be alive, would have averted the Idiot Plot that has dominated Season 3. If the writers aren't doing this on purpose, then they seriously need to up their game because they're clearly not thinking this through well enough to be convincing...
    • Guy01: The ending of Season 3 is just disgusting. Not only does Oliver spend the entirety of Season 3 kissing Malcolm's ass, but so does every other character in the show. We're expected to believe some Ass Pull of Malcolm magically making a cure to the virus out of nowhere and magically indoctrinating everybody so that the virus wouldn't kill them. But the ending is the worst part. Oliver, knowing full well everything Malcolm pulled, all of the people he killed, brainwashing Thea, gives him control of the League. Let me repeat that: Oliver gives a sociopathic terrorist who has killed people close to Oliver, control over an entire army AND the key to immortality. The writers even have Nyssa, Sara's Lover and a Badass Dark Action Girl, bow down to him. This is disgusting. The writers are so in love with Malcom that they've erased everything he's done in the past and made an entire season revolve around him. The so called heroes are reduced to helpless children who constantly need him and worship the ground he walks on. This is pathetic writing and I am done with this show. It's impossible for the show to recover from this season.
    • skteosk: The most ridiculous part of that whole arc to me was that, when Oliver finds out Malcolm is still alive, he rightly threatens to turn him over to the police. Malcolm retorts that since he's a member of the League of Assassins, no prison can hold him, not even Oliver's Supervillain Prison on Lian Yu. (A prison currently holding Deathstroke, who is at least as dangerous as Merlyn if not more so.) Oliver just accepts this without question and decides that, since he doesn't want to kill Malcolm, his best option is to let an unrepentant mass murderer wander around free and declare him under his protection. That's idiotic enough, but then over the course of the rest of the season, Malcolm is twice captured and imprisoned and is helpless to free himself, needing to be rescued by someone else. And Oliver has no problem taking Nyssa, another member of the League, prisoner and holding her until he decides to release her. So it's pretty clear that Malcolm's Badass Boast was simply hot air. Yet no-one ever thinks of imprisoning him again. It's obvious that the show's makers were determined to have Malcolm on the show, even though the only way to make it work was for everyone involved to grab the Idiot Ball hard.
  • baeraad555: I had been struggling with the show for a while, but "Legends of Yesterday" finally did me in. Oliver finds out that he has a son he didn't know about, and the mother demands that he doesn't tell anyone about it in return for getting to have any contact. Never mind that that's a contrived conflict to start with - it's one thing to ask Oliver not to announce it to the public, but demanding that he keeps it a secret even from his closest friends and loved ones is deranged. But either way, Oliver now has a choice between either a) lying to his girlfriend, who has proven that she can keep a secret, and who's bound to find out sooner or later anyway, or b) lying to (by pretending to have told no one, while having told Felicity and perhaps a few choice others) his estranged baby-mama. So of course he chooses a), because apparently we were running out of sources of cheap angst in this show and we need to get people to start hiding things from each other again.
  • Bumblebee Magnus "Arrow" had a pretty rough 3rd Season and, to the surprise of me, this 4th Season has been pretty solid so far. Hell, this episode, "Taken," wasn't that bad overall. Live-Action Vixen, good action, and a solid blow to the bad guy... But Felicity... Oh, Felicity... I liked her as a character, unlike most people, but her reaction to William ended my enjoyment of her. I know Oliver likes to keep secrets but Ollie's reasoning this time is solid, if flawed. He wants to know his son and keep him safe so he follows the mother's instructions of keeping him a secret. If she had been upset before he told her about the mother, she would have been in the right, but she continues on long after that. When she finds out who else knew, she gets angry which, again, is perfectly reasonable... Except for the fact that the only other people who knew either took that information by force or time travel. Oliver didn't volunteer this information. But the cherry on top? After Oliver and the mother of his child decide that William would be safe in a completely secret home, Oliver creates a goodbye video message for William to see on his 18th birthday. Felicity rolls in to see Oliver doing this and comes in, yells at him for not involving her in this decision, which is not technically one for her to make, and breaks off their engagement. Then, not only does she get no reprimand for this, she gets a thematic reward in the form of her ability to walk being restored. All of this coagulated into one of the most disgusting moments of the show for me.
  • Daltimus Prime: Oh, man, it gets so much worse. To recap, in the events of episode 4x21 "Monument Point," Felicity is forced to redirect a rogue nuclear missile away from Monument Point into a less populated area 20 miles away, killing tens of thousands of people. While you could probably explain her only being able to move it 20 miles way, she couldn't have looked for a less populated area? But I digress, this isn't the DMOS. The real DMOS is the entire next episode, "Lost in the Flood." A nuclear missile just went off on US soil. Tens of thousands are dead. How does Felicity, who is at least partially responsible, respond? She says "I can't deal with this" and turns off the TV. What follows is an hour of Felicity's goofy family drama with an occasional guest appearance by the Green Arrow. Shouldn't the tone be just a bit more somber? And where is the army? Aren't there more important things to do than spend fifteen minutes at a time talking about Felicity's broken childhood home? To top this travesty off, we're treated to quite possibly the worst example of Hollywood Hacking I've ever seen. Not only are Felicity, her dad, and Curtis somehow able to all type on the same computer at a time, as though each monitor was it's own terminal (Why are there three keyboards plugged in anyway?), but they can somehow do it when the virus her hacker ex-boyfriend is currently projecting the eye of Sauron on all three screens. Hacker Boyfriend is also somehow able to hack into Felicity's apartment itself and make everything short out. I understand that you have to make hacking interesting for TV and movies, but this honestly felt insulting. The hacking on this show almost seems more magical than the actual magic. If it wasn't apparent before that Felicity had become an obnoxious Creator's Pet by the end of Season 3, it should be after this. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
  • Forenperser: Fuck, the end of Season 3 was bad already in regards to him, but they are seriously pulling this bullshit with Malcolm Merlyn AGAIN? Just because this scumbag tries to get his neck out of the rope in the very last second, Team Arrow just accepts him running to them without even a WORD of protest? The writers have lost all the respect I've ever had for them. Really don't get why they don't finally give that scumbag what he really deserves.
  • Rebu: "So it begins" is about Prometheus, yet another masked maniac murdering members of the public with throwing stars. There's a riot at a public market, which results in people defending themselves by pulling guns and plinking away randomly at nothing. It comes off as an anti-gun message in a show that has dangerous killers attack every week or so, set in a city that has been through catastrophe after catastrophe. The Orlando nightclub shooting reignited debate over gun control and the idea of a "good guy with a gun" stopping crime. Season 5 didn't start production until after the shooting, and CW skews left. I'm not sure if this was a reference to that, but gosh, it sure seems hypocritical to see a good guy with a bow (who leads a team including a good guy with two guns) tell people trying to protect themselves and others to stop. And it's about the most stereotypical portrayal of gun owners other than, say, inbred rednecks who use them to compensate for something.
  • immortalfrieza: Oh, it gets so much worse with one episode in season 5. "The Spectre of the Gun" is one hour long episode whining about gun control on a show that's never given a damn about guns before, likely never will again, and in which half the protagonists use them. Now, I don't mind that they did a Very Special Episode about gun control specifically, what I DO mind is how every other sentence coming out of their mouths was whining one way or another about guns while most of it not actually coming from the context of the scenes or the personalities of the characters. Very Special Episodes only work when:
    A. it's a work designed for children as adults and teenagers already know about this stuff and have formed their opinions on it long before. No Very Special Episode is going to make anyone change their opinion on anything unless they are too young to even have one.
    B. It grows organically out of who the characters are and what the situation is. This whole episode only could have worked if Team Arrow and Friends was filled with people who actually have good reason to be on both sides of the debate and if Star City didn't get some place shot up every week with many casualties that nobody ever screamed gun control on.
    C. The message is stated in passing instead of being preached. Simply stating the message with every word where the writers can even remotely justify it over and over is just going to annoy the viewer, not inform or convince them of anything.
    Honestly? If they had thrown out the whole gun control message and just had the plot be about some nutjob shooting up City Hall, Team Arrow tracking him down, and Rene revealing to the audience a piece of his past the whole episode would have been a LOT better.
    This is the only episode of Arrow I could say I didn't like at all, and I've liked every episode the show has had both before this and after to some degree.
• Deadpan 29: The Flash (2014): "Welcome to Earth-2" had Barry Allen spend the whole episode stumbling around, unable to wrap his head around the idea that these were not the people he knew. He also kidnaped an innocent man, then totally lost focus on saving Jessie and stopping Zoom in favor of living someone else's life. He went home with another man's wife under false pretenses, got alternate-Joe killed because he wasn't doing the mission he was there to do, and never has a "what am I doing" moment about any of it.
  • RAZ: I've been enjoying Season 2, but I hated how Patty's exit was handled. Even after Patty figures out that Barry is the Flash he still refuses to tell her the truth so that way she'll leave and won't be put in any danger by any of his enemies if they ever learned the truth about him. It doesn't fly at all though, because 1, even if that was the case one of his enemies would likely still target her if they ever learned his identity regardless of whether she knew his identity or not, and 2, it's a terrible case of Aesop Amnesia, since at the end of the previous season Iris told him that knowing the truth could actually help her protect herself.
  • Penny Dreadful: For me, the scenes of Patty's exit detracted from the subplot of Iris and Wally saying goodbye to their mother. They should have balanced the subplots with Patty and Iris/Wally better.
  • Dark Lord Jadow: I truly enjoy The Flash, but throughout Season 2 were painfully bad episodes with idiot plots designed to stretch out the Zoom Arc. The epitome of this for me came in the episode "Against Zoom." At one point in the episode Barry captures Zoom- the Big Bad of the entire arc. Barry has won- Zoom is completely incapacitated and all Barry has to do is knock him out and throw him in one of the group's cells to defeat Zoom once and for all... and Barry proceeds to stand around gloating and doing nothing until Zoom escapes- something that's completely out of character for Barry in the first place. I continue to enjoy the show, but this moment and the rest of the episode cemented for me that the cast is only as intelligent as the plot at hand requires them to be.
  • Doctor Cooper: The fight with Solovar explained what is wrong with the series: Team Flash barely works as an efficient team and bars its members from using their knowledge to justify its existence. That is not a healthy group. Do they really have to make everyone speak even when it is not for the better of the plot? It is not just the unjustly maligned Iris, who was not even in that scene, but everyone.
  • PPPSSC: I was really enjoying the Armageddon arc in Season 8 for the first four episodes and was hopeful for the arc finale, but couldn't get past how terrible the arguments were in favor of saving Thawne. Caitlin, Mia Queen, Barry and Iris, Despero, and even Thawne himself provide good reasoning for why to let him die: namely, he has committed several atrocities, is fully remorseless, and openly plans to continue doing them once saved. Meanwhile Alegra, Joe, Cecile, and Chester are mainly against it because heroes save people. And that's it. That apparently is a good enough argument to dissuade Iris, Barry, and Caitlin from their initial, much stronger positions. Add on Joe's weirdly strong emotions about it and uncharacteristically threatening tone, and it really feels like they just picked the solution they did because the writer said so.