Things you miss from season one.....

[evaba]

Ksite poster @Sanddragon submitted this terrific post on another forum, and since I believe that it is very interesting and timely I'll repost it here. I hope that's OK with the O.P.!

1. Oliver having a normal-ish family life, with his mom, Thea and a stepfather in Walter (with whom they thankfully avoided the cliche 'evil stepfather' trope). I loved the scenes at Queen Mansion.
2. Oliver being a nightclub owner. It was an interesting deviation from the tried and tested 'superhero alter ego' professions (including CEO and industrialist which Oliver tried his hand at in Season 2). There was a very subtle aspect of wish fulfillment - Oliver's a billionaire playboy turned club-owner who also spends his nights taking out the scum of his city with extreme prejudice! A cooler vigilante life cannot be imagined...
3. Oliver's relationships with Laurel and Tommy. Yes, there was a 'love triangle' of sorts, but it was deeper than the shallow love triangles we normally see on TV. Oliver and Tommy's friendship was great, especially when it came to dealing with the sticky situation vis a vi Tommy dating Oliver's ex, which they handled with a fair bit of maturity. Laurel and Tommy trying to make their relationship work in a way that actually made you root for them (even if Oliver and Laurel were the 'endgame couple' at that point) and added an extra element of tragedy to Tommy's death. And of course, Oliver and Laurel trying to work through their issues, knowing that no matter what they can't completely ignore the pivotal role, for better or worse, each of them has played in the other's life.
4. Oliver taking down 'ordinary' villains like corrupt businessmen, drug-dealers, crime-lords and mercenaries. When he takes down a super-villain or terrorist these days, sure he's "saving the city", but I think the idea of Oliver actually actively making the city safer for innocent citizens had the greatest resonance in the first season.
5. The Hood being a one-man army and killing machine! Oliver may be skilled enough in later seasons to take down Ra's al Ghul and Malcolm Merlyn without breaking a sweat...but its his fights in Season 1 that remain the pinnacle of Arrow's achievements in the area. His taking down a small army of Merlyn's goons to rescue Walter in 1x21 remains a highlight of the entire series! When Oliver allowed Diggle to accompany him in the field, you KNEW things were REALLY f#cked up because he actually needed HELP in the field!

Here are my own thoughts about ONE of the many aspects that IMHO made season one such a great season in comparison with the later seasons (especially seasons three and four):

Season five has surely been an improvement in comparison with the pretty dismal seasons three and four, but so many of the things mentioned in this post are still sadly missing. I would especially like to see Oliver do some information gathering/sleuth legwork himself, like when he figured out about Deadshot in season one.....rather than having Felicity magically dig out info with a few computer keystrokes, or having her talk into his ears every time he's on a mission. It's not a bad thing to have a team, but why does Oliver have to drag everyone along whenever he goes after the bad guys? Sometimes I regret the change that turned Oliver/the Hood/Arrow from a private detective/lone vigilante into a team leader, who can't go after the baddies without his posse and without having Overwatch guide him every step of the way! The Marvel superhero shows manage to create fascinating and suspenseful story arcs without using unrealistic super-hacker information retrieval to move their plots from A to B. I personally cannot understand why the same "back-to-basics" approach can't be applied on "Arrow"...unless the writers are so desperate to make Felicity or Curtis seem relevant and important that they HAVE to concoct stories whose development depend on their computer savvy or magic balls (pun intended!).

[Dagenspear]

I miss good writing. Remember when almost every main character had a strong storyline? Have a very great day!

God bless you all!

[Freawaru]

I am currently re-watching season one and I agree with Sanddragon.
Also I enjoyed and still enjoy again those scenes where you get the feeling they really put some thought into, everything is perfect. These simple scenes, no magic or something, Oliver simply climbing up the wall of a house to get the bullet that had poisoned him. This was so beautiful, music and all just working in harmony. There were a few scenes like that in season three and four (the scene where Oliver shows Thea that he is the Arrow comes to mind) but way less, IMO.

[BkWurm1]

I think the changes (and I agree with most of the list) stem from a habit of rushing through storylines, the infatuation with masks, and the show runners' dislike of Oliver keeping his secret.

They've expressed how much they don't like writing that part of the story but part of the fun was the lengths that Oliver had to go to keep up appearances with those relationships that existed outside of the mission stuff. Now the only life he has outside the mission is Mayor stuff. And Chase and Snoozen were the only relationships he'd cultivated there.

We should have at the very least had some fun with him slipping away from his security detail, but the little extra details like that and like the process of getting answers on a case, step by step, is now something that they just jump past or gloss over as if it's not interesting or important when actually seeing them work a case and what each member of the team brought to the table was half the fun of the show. Just jumping to the fights IMO gets boring if they haven't had to work for it.

And the fact that Arrow is part of the comic world can really be a drawback when the showrunners seem to be more interested in adding masks for the sake of having another piece of the comic world come alive rather than stopping and addressing if another mask adds enough to the show to justify the time they will take away from some other part of the show. I think they've been blinded by the shiny and new and ignore that the dynamic of the show works better when Oliver is special and that means he can't just be one of a whole bunch of qualified vigilantes.

Season 4's everyone is equal was a terrible writing choice. This year it's a bit better since the newbs are treated as the B team, as they should be, but the show still hasn't made a great case for why three or four of them wouldn't be enough to replace Oliver and if he's not special, the show suffers.

[BkWurm1]

This doesn't exactly count as something missed from season one, but I thought it was kind of hilarious in the context of where the show very quickly went after season one. This list was posted over at Previously.tv but i thought you guys would find it...well, probably not as amusing as I do but interesting none the less.

Back in 2012, Arrow was promoted as a crime drama, a character drama, and a hero show. They downplayed superheroes. They also said no superpowers and no aliens (how things have changed!)...

GreenArrowTV (Jul. 19, 2012) - MG: "One of the things we’re doing is, we don’t really consider the show a superhero show. We consider it more like a hero show; more like a crime thriller, and as with any with crime thriller, you’re going to have a mystery. Except unlike CSI where it’s a body drop at the beginning of every episode, the mystery is Oliver. Oliver is the case of the week, basically. Each week we’re peeling back the layers of his character, both in the present and in the past. We’re going to be continuing the flashbacks into the series, so you’ll get to see what happened to him on the island, and it won’t always be the things that you expect. We’re trying to always surprise the audience, so the mysteries and the twists come out of character as opposed to out of plots.”

Nerdist (Oct. 9, 2012) - AK: "There’s no supervillains or superpowers on the show. No aliens." MG: "We’re always trying to take a 'world outside your window' approach. This is not a show about superheroes; this is a guy taking the law into his own hands like a vigilante. We’re always asking ourselves the question: is this something that could happen in the real world? How do we make this believable?"

Blastr (now SyFyWire) (Dec. 16, 2012) - According to The CW's head of development, Thom Sherman, Arrow's pilot is "not as comic book-y as Smallville or other [superhero projects] from other networks." Arrow will be more grounded in reality, but the tone will be less Dark Knight, more Jason Bourne.

[Haggard01]

This doesn't exactly count as something missed from season one, but I thought it was kind of hilarious in the context of where the show very quickly went after season one. This list was posted over at Previously.tv but i thought you guys would find it...well, probably not as amusing as I do but interesting none the less.

It is kind of amusing given that well everything on here just clearly got blown out of the water as the years went on for anything "We’re always trying to take a 'world outside your window' approach. This is not a show about superheroes; this is a guy taking the law into his own hands like a vigilante.We’re always asking ourselves the question: is this something that could happen in the real world? How do we make this believable?" has clearly gone out the window.

There are times when I do miss This show as it used to be.

[BkWurm1]

If you think about it, it's all Barry Allen's fault.

[President_Luthor]

^Yeah.

Once Barry's series pushed/kicked open the door to metas, time travel and magic, it was harder to keep Arrow out of the fantastical stuff. As the only series that began as "grounded" aka no powers, magic, time travel etc., Arrow experienced the steepest learning curve in having to adjust. We could say Arrow is still having to adjust to this new reality imposed on it.

I think Diggle vomiting after getting a speedster lift from Barry would be an apt metaphor for what embracing the fantastical has forced Arrow as a series to do at times. An expanded universe sounds great in theory, but the reality is they really only share during the crossovers, or anomalies like that musical episode.

Arrow might have benefited more from being on another earth, to keep some of those fantastical elements in check or even non-existent.

[BkWurm1]

Arrow might have benefited more from being on another earth, to keep some of those fantastical elements in check or even non-existent.

Or some reason why the metas in Central City had to STAY in Central City.