Arrow 'Al Sah-Him' Review: UGH!

Arrow is a tough show to love, I want to love it, but it fails my heart (and City.) If my last few reviews are any indication, I’m absolutely furious with how the season is panning out. Plot threads and extended characters are unwieldy and hard to even keep my attention. Everything else about the show also pales in comparison to the excellence of last season of Arrow that really struck an emotional chord with it’s strong finale and year. Can Arrow possibly rebound in these last two...or even make me not actively disdain the show...there’s only one way to find out.

Spoilers be ahead of this here warning matey!

Pass the anti-depressants.

It’s been less than five minutes and I think I have had about enough here. Killing off Diggle is possibly the dumbest thing in all of Arrow to take seriously. In a season that’s broken literally every rule in countlessly bringing people back from the dead, why should we possibly believe that Diggle is still alive this season -- why should we buy into Oliver completely believing in the cherry picked crap of Ra’s Al Ghul?

Flashback to nothing, I’m going to sleep now.

Flashing back to the past is a little trite at this point -- especially as the different heroes of the show are so caught up with the tragedy. Worse still, the flashbacks in this episode are used on a ancillary scale that doesn’t contribute anything to the overall show. It's nap time folks, as soon as the flashbacks air open up a big of crisps and and put on a nighty.

My Shadowland memories are bubbling up to this surface.

So...somewhere between this episode and last episode off-screen, Oliver has all the sudden fallen into mind control. This all reminds me of the horrible Shadowland arc of Daredevil which tried so hard to tone up the shock value melodrama of the comic by making Daredevil big and evil. This is some of the darkest parts of superhero comics, like reading those stories where insane things happened more and more.

Nyssa...what?

Nyssa is training Laurel, which would be fun to watch, if we weren’t sitting with two of the least likable women on this entire show. The fact that she’s operating like a weird robot definitely puts up a sort of guard between me to actually value her as a character. 

Another problem.

Diggle has way too much to lose over the past season, and I have already spoken at length about how not taking the character out of the spy game is just straight up stupid. Worse still, Lyla plans a stand-off completely with firearms to counteract the battle. I think it’s just dumb period to be taking this show in all these flawed directions.

Run Thea, you deserve better than this show! Well folks, we're in the home stretch now. I'm gonna try to breathe and take this lightly -- there will be an extended season review past the finale.