The Week in Geek: 5/25/16 or My Breakup With Arrow

So, This Week in Superhero Television.....I think I'm done with Arrow. For those of you that don't follow me on Twitter, I do the weekly livetweet for Flash and Arrow under the Black Nerd Problems account. One of my editors, Omar Holmon, used to do it, but I think his neighbors found out he was stealing cable and he had to shut that shit down. Anyway, I'd usually be honored by the opportunity, but Arrow's redemption season has been a painful trudge to the middle of the road. I mean, the show has maintained a steady standard of "not as good as The Flash but better than Legends of Tomorrow" but let's be honest; that's not a high bar to clear in the first place.

When this season started, there seemed to be some light at the end of the tunnel, an attempt to right some of the creative wrongs committed in the previous season. But the writers seemed to make an almost deliberate attempt to solve those problems by either highlighting everything that's been wrong with the show or stepping over said problems altogether. Case in point, the Black Canary II. There has been no one more against Laurel Lance taking her sister's mantle than me. They choreographed her fight choreography terribly and she spent the past two seasons being unnecessarily unlikeable. So, you would think I would be happy they killed her off. But then, her Earth 2 doppelganger shows up on The Flash and she stole the whole episode. She was an amazingly fun villain as the Black Siren, it brought into realization that the writers just plain squandered her on Arrow as opposed to the thought that she'd fallen so hard, she couldn't be written back into glory again. It was just a waste, retrospectively.

The finale was like a window display of everything that's been wrong with this show. Much of this show has been about Oliver Queen's fight against his darker nature and the killer instincts that he picked up during his time on The Island From LOST. For a few episodes, they telegraphed to viewers that the way to combat Damian Dahrk's Sith Lord Magic was for him to expel the darkness in his own heart and embrace the light. But in the end....after Dahrk's magic was nullified by the people of Star City using The Third Act In Dark Knight Rises against him...Oliver ended up succumbing to the darkness by killing Dahrk after he was clearly beaten. Even Diggle, the Arrow's moral compass ended up giving into his dark side by murdering the older brother whose soul he'd been trying to save all season because Andy trolled him a little in defeat. I mean, really, Diggle had turned to the dark side when he tried to kidnap his enemy's wife and pistol whipped her in broad daylight, but hey....who's counting at this point? It's just strange that the show has spent all this time cloning Batman (more blatantly in the finale than ever before) and yet picked the strangest time to step out of Batman's shadow. One of the big problems with American shows like this is that they go on past their structural shelf life. In a perfect world, Arrow would have ended after Season Two when he defeated Slade Wilson and conquered the darkness within the second time (he's gone back and forth about killing no less than four times not including his useless flashbacks to The Island From LOST). But because the endgame is to monopolize CW with entire blocks of the Arrowverse (as is more evident by the inclusion of Supergirl), these shows have to go on being built far away from the foundations they were built on and the past season is the resulting category 4 shit storm. Rest In Peace, Arrow. We will never forget. But we will try.

My comic reviews for the week on Star Wars and The Mighty Thor are available on Black Nerd Problems. And don't forget my ongoing webcomic series with Katie Coats, Neverland: The Untold.

A Brief Opinion of Civil War

So, I finally got around to getting out to the theater to see Civil War yesterday (I waited a week so there'd be less humans and crying babies to trigger my Akira-like, rage powered telekinesis) and I'm going to go ahead and skip the obvious angle of comparing to the DC's latest dumpster fire, Batman v Superman because the comparison is almost insulting to Civil War which is, undoubtedly, the better movie on virtually every discernible level. I'm going to jump out there and say that this movie is the linchpin that makes the Captain America trilogy surpass the Dark Knight trilogy which, up to this point, was the Godfather of superhero sagas.

There are spoilers after the jump. Not a lot or even major spoilers, but there are spoilers there. So, yeah.

The New Game of Thrones Trolling Experience

So, Game of Thrones happened in the past couple of weeks. I was going to do a post about it after the season premiere but I wanted to wait until two episodes had passed because GoT has a habit dedicating one episode purely to set-up for what's to come. And that's basically what happened.

For those of you keeping score, that's that kid's uncle. He's also
that kid's father AND he fucked the boy's mom in that same spot.

I'm glad I waited until after the second episode to form an opinion because it's plainly obvious now that the format has changed. Obviously (except for the Iron Islands stuff), the showrunners have run out of book material to follow and honestly, it's the best goddamned thing to happen to this show in the past two seasons. See, there was a time when the showrunners made an attempt at a 1:1 representation of the source material as established by George R. R. Martin and before anything else, Martin is an extinction level troll. He loves that people lose their collective shit when someone who may or may not have deserved it gets killed off. That said, the source material can be long and torturous to its characters. So, "staying faithful" to it means we would have had to sit through half a season of Roose Bolton telling Ramsey to get his shit together after he does something unforgivably evil and macabre or no less than six episodes of Tyrion Lannister realizing that he is the smartest person in the room and STILL has to be the one to do the legwork nobody else wants to do in the service of saving the day. But now that the ship is set on "sail", the showrunners get to advance the plot at their leisure. So, now, Arya only has to go through a couple episodes of Daredevil training before we see some payoff. Just two episodes before Ramsey finally gets sick of his father's shit and does the thing we all knew he should have done a season ago (Jesus Christ, he had his JUST BORN baby brother fed to dogs on sight before even washing his father's blood off the dagger). As the writer of a comic whose first issue is primarily set-up, I appreciate the time it takes to create a universe and lay groundwork, but I feel like we're at a point where the training wheels can be taken off and viewers can all have an experience together without being divided by people who are on the edge of their seat and people who've read the books and are just waiting for one shoe or another to drop. We can all be trolled together and that's a good thing....unless they start with that rape shit again.

My comic review for the week on Invincible Iron Man is up and available on Black Nerd Problems for your viewing enjoyment. Feel free to like, share or comment at your own discretion