Season 4 of 'Arrow': How a Good Show Really Screwed the Pooch

Oh, Arrow, I really tried to give you every benefit of the doubt with this Laurel Lance business.  I was certain that a show this good could never be so bad.  I told myself it was all part of a master plan and it would all work out within a few episodes.  Laurel's death was handled so poorly I could only assume there was a good reason behind every bad decision; you weren't making mistakes, you were just making choices that would be justified and forgiven before long.  Alas, the season has ended and Laurel's death remains a squishy brown stain on Arrow's leather undies.  Whatever comes in future seasons to rectify this will be too little too late.  The stain has set.

Let me be clear: this is not nerdrage, this is a criticism as objective as it can be.  I am not upset that my favorite character was killed.  I'm just disappointed in the way a character I barely care about was killed.  This isn't about "women in refrigerators."  For one thing, that's not my battle to fight and for another, I wouldn't know when that battle is worth fighting since the bugle is sounded every. single. time. a female character is killed.  This is just about the time when a great show was very, very bad.

I also want you to know that I understand why someone had to die and why you chose Laurel, although I don't think it was the best choice.  Last season introduced the infamous Lazarus Pit which can bring people back from the dead, opening a revolving door to and from the afterlife.  First there was Oliver, who didn't need the pit because he was only mostly dead which is slightly alive.  Then Thea was healed by the pit, followed by Laurel's sister Sara who was dug from her grave to be revived resulting in the destruction of the pit.  But that wasn't good enough and you had to send a message that the revolving door was out and replaced with a door that only goes one way.  And so a Lance sister was killed for what I want to say is the twenty-third time.  Is that right?

Your first mistake was calling your shot.  Every so often since the season premiere you showed that stupid grave and begged us to care about who was in it then you totally botched the execution, in more ways than one.  You pointed at the bleachers then hit a foul ball at the mascot's comically large head.

To go even farther back, the root of your problem is that you haven't really known what to do with Laurel since Tommy died, ending the Laurel/Tommy/Oliver triangle.  You couldn't even give her an interesting plot line in her swan song.  Most of the time when a character dies their show tries to send them out on a high note to elevate the emotional impact.  In this case you gave Laurel a job offer that would force her to give up her life as a crime fighter.  You tried to pull the old "one day left until retirement" move on a fairly recent initiate to the team.  It seems like just yesterday Laurel was in training and Oliver was yelling "you're not ready" at her over and over.  Even worse, you tried to convince the audience that she was encumbered with unrequited love for Oliver when there's hardly been a second of romantic tension between the two in years.

Which brings me to the death itself.  Laurel was stabbed by the big bad of the season Damien Darhk while trying to prevent his jailbreak and the team rushed her to the hospital, all still in costume because apparently there's no room in the van for a few sets of civvies or the prison is really close to the hospital.  Next Laurel came out of surgery and the doctor declared that she was going to be perfectly fine.  That doctor was presumably fired and barred from medicine for her incompetence.  Then Laurel poured her heart out to Oliver followed by a covert conversation that we are still not privy to but at the time very much seemed to be a plan involving a faked death.  Then she flatlined for no apparent reason.  Do you see the problem?  If your intent was to permanently close the revolving door you didn't have the option of leaving any wiggle room but this whole situation stinks of wiggle.

I said before that I don't care about Laurel but it's not from lack of trying.  I like the actress Katie Cassidy and I want to like her character.  As a matter of fact, I did like her when she was on your sister show The Flash for a couple of scenes about a year ago.  The Flash, especially in its first season, is a really fun show where people smile a lot, giving Laurel a chance to bust out those pearly whites.

There is much less smiling on Arrow, which is not something I ever want to change.  However, when a smile lights up the screen the way Laurel's does in that clip it proves an asset that you wasted for years.  It makes me think that the answer to making Laurel more interesting was to let her have some fun, but now she'll never have that chance.  Katie Cassidy might, though.  Fittingly, I imagine that Cassidy will make her return to Arrow by way of The Flash.  You've already laid the seeds for it.  You used that show's inter-dimensional hi-jinks to introduce Laurel's evil doppelganger who I assume will appear on Arrow next season.  You've made mistakes and that will never go away, but you still have a chance to do something right.  I only ask that when Darkest Timeline Laurel makes her debut on your show you let her have a good time being bad.

4 Things Captain America Would Want to Know About That Aren't on His List

Ever since the 1960's a pivotal aspect of Captain America has been his displacement in time.  His popularity had waned and he had disappeared from the comic book pages until Stan Lee had the idea to revive him and add his name to the roster of the Avengers.  That was just over two decades after his debut in 1941.  In the timeline of the movies Captain Steve Rogers was in a cryogenic slumber for almost seventy years.  Obviously there's a lot more for him to catch up on.  In Winter Soldier he is shown keeping a notebook of people's suggestions for him to look into.  They're things like the moon landing and Star Wars, major cultural and social touchstones that everyone should at least be aware of in order to exist in the modern world.  However, they're not necessarily things Steve would have a personal interest in.  Since Civil War has left Steve untied to the Avengers he's going to have more available Steve time that he could use to look into some things Steve would want to know instead of what he needs to know.

A Tribe Called Quest

One item on Cap's list is "Nirvana (band)" which I'm pretty sure is Tony Stark's idea of a joke.  I love Nirvana but it has to be a tough pill to swallow without a lot more context than Steve has got.  Grunge was a big deal because it was rougher around the edges than the previous era of manufactured pop and glamish hair metal.  That's why it's called "grunge."  When Steve fell in the ice it was still the swing age.  You can't go straight from "In a Sentimental Mood" to "Rape Me."  He would be much better off with a different kind of 90's music.   Enter A Tribe Called Quest who, along with De La Soul and the Jungle Brothers, formed the Native Tongues.  The Native Tongues were a collective of idealistically and stylistically compatible hip hop artists who pioneered the use of jazz samples in hip hop.  Think Kendrick Lamar but when Kendrick Lamar was an infant (much like I was).  On one hand, Native Tongues mostly drew from later jazz from fifteen to twenty years after Cap's nap started but on the other hand, it's still got to be more familiar than anything from In Utero.  If there's any chance of Steve wrapping his head around hip hop and modern music it should probably start with Midnight Marauders.

 High Noon

When Cap went under Westerns were on the rise but still a little way from their peak.  John Wayne's breakthrough film Stagecoach was only a few years old, marking the beginning of his historic collaborations with director John Ford.  There's no way Steve Rogers wouldn't be drawn to the cowboy pictures with their frequent themes of honor, duty, and individualism.  (Although, he would probably be wary of their often horribly offensive portrayals of Native Americans.)  Among the fantastic Westerns that Steve missed out on the one that would probably resonate the most is High Noon.  The 1952 Fred Zinnemann directed movie stars Gary Cooper as Will Kane, a marshal facing the looming threat of a showdown with a notorious outlaw he put in prison when his train arrives at noon.  He goes around town seeking help from anyone who can give it but the people are all too afraid of Frank Miller and his gang.  Kane succeeds in the end with a little help from an unlikely source but his faith in people is shaken.  It's a movie about doing the right thing even if you have to do it alone and no one wants you to do it in the first place, exactly the kind of thing that Steve Rogers does repeatedly throughout all three of his movies.

All in the Family

Generally, there are two ways people see Captain America.  He represents either the best or the worst of the United States.  Usually it's the best; he's kind and compassionate, but strong and quick to use that strength to fight tooth and nail for his ideals.  Then there's the version of Captain America who does a horrible job of adjusting to the modern world and says awful jingoistic things like "Surrender?  You think this letter on my head stands for 'France?'"  (It stands for "America" by the way.)  In All in the Family those two archetypes live side by side, in the same house, in the forms of Michael "Meathead" Stivic and Archie Bunker.  By watching All in the Family Steve could see the best and the worst of himself while learning about the social landscape of the 1970's, including many issues that are still shockingly relevant.  Not that Michael Stivic is perfect.  He's wrong sometimes and, less often, Archie is right.  I trust Steve Rogers to read between the lines and have a few laughs along the way.

Steroid Use in Professional Baseball

There's no version of Steve Rogers who doesn't love baseball.  He was a boy during the 20's and 30's when baseball was far and away America's favorite pastime.  What's more, he was in New York the whole time, during the heyday of the Yankees with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, et cetera.  At the end of First Avenger an old game is playing on the radio when he wakes up from his uber-nap to help him ease into life in the 21st century but he realizes immediately that something is wrong because he was at that game and remembers it well enough to recognize the color commentary.  So how would he feel about a massive ethics scandal in his beloved sport?  Bear in mind that Cap himself is basically the result of really good steroids.  Obviously, there's a difference between a scrawny weakling volunteering for experiments to better serve his country and athletes putting muscle on top of muscle to beef up their stats, but it would still seem a bit hypocritical for him to argue against performance enhancing drugs when he owes them for everything good in his life.  Either way, if the whole situation brings him down I'm sure he'd get a kick out of The Sandlot.

Please, for the Love of All Things Good and Holy, Watch 'Supergirl'

When Supergirl premiered on CBS in fall of 2015 it got fantastic ratings that quickly dropped off.  Over a few weeks the number of viewers dropped while the quality of the show shot up.  The seventh episode "Human for a Day" had less than three fifths as many viewers as the pilot despite being one of the best hours of SuperTV ever made, and I say that as someone who has seen every single episode of Lois and Clark, all ten record-breaking seasons of Smallville, and a few dozen 50's era Adventures of Superman.  (Speaking of which, Supergirl should at least get a chance to retell the "Panic in the Sky" episode, something of a right of passage for Superman adaptations.)  By the season finale Supergirl had less than half of the viewers of the first episode.  Numbers like that made a renewal seem unlikely but yesterday the second season was confirmed along with a move from CBS to the CW, home of sibling shows The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow.  The networks have given Supergirl another chance and now I'm asking that viewers do the same, not just because I might like a third season, but because I think you'll find that you will, too.

Like all recent adaptations of Superman, Supergirl faced the challenge of putting a fresh spin on a cultural icon nearly eighty years old.  The solution was to shift the focus from Earth's greatest champion to his younger cousin, the fantastic Melissa Benoist as Kara Danvers, a modern Mary Tyler Moore type trying to make her way in a Superman's world.  Kara was sent as a thirteen year-old by her parents to protect her infant cousin Kal-El, but she took a detour in space and time, winding up on Earth years after Kal-El had grown into Clark Kent and taken the mantle of Superman.  Making Kara the protagonist allows the show to meta-embrace the looming shadow of the Metropolis Marvel and explore all the same themes as a typical Superman story, like idealism, alienation, and hope, while putting more emphasis on the growing cultural conversation of feminism than Lois Lane alone can provide.

Speaking of gender, one of the early criticisms of Supergirl was its similarity to romantic comedies, specifically The Devil Wears Prada.  The comparison is fair, but only because Clark Kent has always been just one chromosome away from a clumsy, wide-eyed, adorkable rom-com protagonist.

Makeover!

The real problem is that so many people think The Devil Wears Prada is a romantic comedy.  It's much more accurate, even if slightly more sexist, to call it a "chick flick" since it treats its main character's personal relationships, platonic and romantic alike, as an afterthought, which is kind of the whole point of the movie.

Let's go back to the "Human for a Day" episode.  Stories about superheroes losing their powers are a common occurrence.  It seems like Smallville had two for every Tom Welling ab muscle and Supergirl's sibling show The Flash has just ended one as it nears the end of its sophomore year.  Still, Supergirl handled it better than most, turning a tired trope into an opportunity for insight and poignancy.  One scene, likely inspired by an issue of the Superman comic book released several months earlier, sees Supergirl suit up and stop an armed robbery despite being every bit as bullet proof as you or I.  She does it not with her fists or her fiery eyes but with conversation and compassion.  The image of her hand shaking like a leaf, due in equal parts to fear and a broken arm, is more powerful than a thousand Kryptonian haymakers.

The back half of the season got a slight ratings bump from a crossover with CW's The Flash.  The writers had to know it was coming and they made the most of it, turning out another of their best episodes for slightly different reasons than "Human for a Day."  It isn't quite as subtle or heart-wrenching but it's possibly one of most delightful episodes of TV in years, rivaled only by Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.  When Barry "The Flash" Allen suddenly appears from another dimension he becomes fast friends with Kara.  They then spend the better part of "Worlds Finest" reveling in each other's adventures and oddities.  "You're an alien?  That's so cool!"  "You're from another dimension and you time travel sometimes?  That's so cool!"  Cue the vomit of cynics while everyone else massages their aching smile muscles.  The lovefest isn't entirely devoid of meaning, though.  Barry also moves the story along by giving Kara some advice that prompts her to go for it with her love interest, Jimmy Olsen, who is cool for some reason.  In the climactic battle (one of 2016's few instances of heroes fighting villains instead of each other) Kara manages to prove herself and win back the affection of the public she lost a few weeks earlier thanks to some brainwashing Red Kryptonite.  It couldn't be more heartwarming or uplifting if all the extras were replaced with puppies.

Look at that!  I got this far without talking trash about Zak Snyder!  That was nice while it lasted.  The reason I resent the director so much is that his depictions of Superman are severely lacking in hope and optimism, the tent poles of the character's appeal.  There's a line from the classic 1978 Superman movie that defines the Man of Tomorrow to me.  His biological father, who sent him to Earth to save him from Krypton's destruction, among other reasons, tells him from beyond the grave "[humans] can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be.  They only lack the light to show them the way."  If Zak Snyder insists on snuffing out that light, we are fortunate that Supergirl is up to the task.  The CW is willing to let her shine, but are you ready to come out of the darkness?

What is Stan Lee's cameo in 'Civil War?'

Since the very beginning of this age of superhero cinema legendary comic book writer Stan Lee has been making cameos in movies based on characters he created.  If you forget about Blade (as many often do) you can credit X-Men with kicking things off back in 2000 and Stan Lee was right there on the beach selling hot dogs.  Ever since, his gloriously mustachioed face has been in almost every Marvel movie and TV show, even animated ones.  He appeared in the after-credits scene of the "even more for children than usual" superhero movie Big Hero Six.  Thus far he hasn't shown up in person in Netflix's gritty "probably not for children at all" Daredevil and Jessica Jones series but his picture can be seen hanging on the wall of Hell's Kitchen's local police station.  The Stan Lee cameos are so revered a tradition for Marvel that the Russo Brothers made it one of the first scenes they shot for the newly in theaters Captain America: Civil War.  If you're anything like me, exposing the nature of the Stan Lee cameo is a spoiler of the highest order and should be punished to the full extent of the law.  However, that won't stop me from making a few semi-serious guesses.

A Janitor

The most common kind of Stan Lee cameo is the "guy just doing his job."  Take the beach hot dog vendor in X-Men for instance, or the oblivious librarian in The Amazing Spider-Man.  More often than not these men are dressed in a sharp uniform.  Lee played a security guard in Hulk and Captain America: Winter Soldier.  He was a mailman in Fantastic Four and an U.S. General in Captain America: The First Avenger.  Captain America is a soldier by his very nature, so it makes since for Stan to be in military garb but that's been done.  Civil War is a battle between heroes and it promises destruction.  Someone has to be picking up the debris left by these super battles, maybe Civil War is the perfect time to reveal the working class stiff who's been sweeping up after the Avengers for all these years.  Although, that's also been done but only in the cartoon Ultimate Spider-Man.  

Phil Sheldon

Speaking of working stiffs, the idea of a genuine every-man living in a world of superheroes was explored to perfection in the 1994 graphic novel Marvels by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross.  It follows the life of photographer Phil Sheldon from the late 30's to the mid 70's as he witnesses firsthand the major events of the Marvel Universe.  One memorable scene puts Phil in the middle of a battle between Namor the Submariner and The Human Torch (an android of no relation to The Fantastic Four).  Through Phil's eyes the reader witnesses a true battle of titans and an early example of heroes fighting each other.  Over time, as Phil loses his hair and grows a mustache, he begins to look not unlike Stan Lee.  The tribulations of Phil Sheldon as played by Stan Lee could make an excellent sub-sub-plot in Civil War.

J. Jonah Jameson

If Stan Lee is going to play a comic book character it might as well be one of the countless horde that he created, like he did in 2005 as Willie Lumpkin, the mailman to the Fantastic Four.  Better yet, he could play one that he based on himself and has specifically expressed a desire to portray.  That character is J. Jonah Jameson, publisher of the newspaper The Daily Bugle, frequent employer of Peter Parker and extremely outspoken critic of Parker's alter-ego Spider-Man.  As you probably know, the newest incarnation of the wall-crawler is debuting in Civil War.  Conveniently, Marvel has something of a J. Jonah Jameson casting dilemma.  Not only would any actor be playing a beloved character, but one that was already played exquisitely by J.K. Simmons in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy.  Simmons as Jameson didn't just steal every scene he was in, he acted as if he owned the whole movie all along and it's hard to disagree with him.  He remains one of the most fondly remembered parts of an incredibly beloved and acclaimed film series.  Rumor has it that JJJ didn't appear in the The Amazing Spider-Man because of the difficulty of replacing Simmons.  Perhaps Stan Lee is the only person who can pull it off, with his hammy charm and the novelty of it all.  He is generally much more cheerful than the irascible JJJ but he definitely has the 'stache for it.

An Actual Pimp

Another common type of Stan Lee cameo is the "man surrounded by young, attractive women," a way to capitalize on his slightly-creepy-but-equally-sweet-flirty-old-guy vibe.  In Guardians of the Galaxy he is seen hitting on a Xandarian woman, prompting Rocket Raccoon to call him "a class A pervert."  In Iron Man Tony Stark mistakes him for Hugh Hefner and in Iron Man 3 he plays a zealous beauty pageant judge.  The most extreme case is in Deadpool, where Lee plays a strip club DJ.  The next logical step is for him to play an actual pimp.  It seems a little out of place for a superhero movie, but Captain America is the most political Avenger and that means pushing the envelope.

Bernie Sanders

Or, slightly more likely, a Bernie Sanders look-a-like.  Iron Man and Iron Man 2 both see Tony Stark mistaking Lee for other white-haired old men, Hugh Hefner and Larry King respectively.  Iron Man 3 went in a different direction, I assume to avoid wearing out the joke and because there are only so many men who fit the profile.  Enough time has passed now that another mistaken identity cameo wouldn't feel so familiar.  Coincidentally, another silver fox has recently entered the zeitgeist, the sweetheart of the Presidential election, Bernie Sanders.  Unfortunately, Stan shot his cameo almost a year ago and Bernie didn't enter the race until about a month later.  However, that's just going by Wikipedia and several news sources.  I actually lived it and I'm fairly certain this election cycle has been going on for seven years and three months.  That's plenty of time for Bernie to have won the hearts and minds of not enough people to beat Hillary but enough to make an impact worthy of a brief reference in Civil War, which promises to be very political.  Although, there are a few other options in the "mistaken identity" category; Regis Philbin and Alex Trebek  come to mind.