Let’s just get the remaining Arrow seasons out of the way all at once:
- Season 4 – Fantasy elements take center stage this season. Both the present and past main villains are sorcerers, there’s a couple Constantine cameos, a bit more Lazarus Pool fuckery, and a crossover special heavy with Egyptian mythology. It’s not very good… and whomever thought that airing halves of a plot-driven crossover event in different series was a good idea should’ve been fired. Also: Netspeak should never, ever be spoken aloud.
Season 5 – This season introduces a (mostly) new team, trades the boardroom for the mayor’s office, and retreads some of the same ground the first season covered adversary-wise. The fantasy elements are gone, which is a positive, but the new team is worse than the old and once again we have orphaned cross-over episodes (two this time, one featuring a brief creepily perky Supergirl appearance).
Season 6 – Hey, remember that annoying secret identity drama from the first season? Guess what? That just so happens to be the central focus here. The series really should’ve just ended after the first season.
Season 7 – Events here don’t start off very Arrow-like at all. Lot of focus on the police, FBI, and prison side of things… not so much the vigilante side. If this is what you wanted to do, why not just go work on one of the quadrillion existing police procedurals floating around instead? While it does gets more Arrow-y toward the halfway point, it does so in the bad arbitrary way that’s been par for the course in recent seasons and doesn’t drop the police-side perspective until the last quarter or so.
Season 8 – This is more like a miniseries than a proper season. With less than half the length it mainly focuses on a single extremely comicbook plotline (alongside continued flash-forwards and an episode to wrap up the Guild of Assassins subplot). It’s amazing how they could so thoroughly squander the opportunity to finally tell a concise, focused story.
Well, that was an impressive waste of time. On the positive side of things, at least the crossover episodes cured me of any desire to check out Supergirl or Batwoman (never had any plans of watching Flash).