Piece of the Puzzle: Arrow S3 E1 - The Calm

In which I review the latest episode of Arrow.

Because of Oliver's tireless vigilantism, Starling City is a safer place than he returned to two years ago, enough so that the police have stopped their manhunt for him and Oliver feels comfortable asking Felicity to dinner.  But when a new crime boss calling himself Vertigo begins consolidating the city's criminals under his control, his first order of business is to take out the one man who can stop him: Arrow.

Despite having always been a DC-sanction Batman rip-off, Arrow perfectly embodies the reasons for its title character's enduring popularity.  Whereas Bruce Wayne is motivated by vengeance - a desire to keep the tragedy that befell his parents from happening to anybody else - Oliver Queen is motivated by redemption.  Although Starling City shares Gotham's corruption, it is the willful inaction of good, capable people that is its downfall, not their physical inability to act.  While Batman's mythos presents him as the equivalent of an abused dog that lashes back after being kicked one too many times, the Green Arrow represents every person's potential to redeem themselves through selfless acts.  In this sense, Oliver Queen is DC's moral equivalent to Tony Stark.

While the Green Arrow has always draped himself in Batman's semantic trappings - an incredibly wealthy, non-powered, masked vigilante employing the guise of a flippant playboy in order to protect his loved ones from the reprisals of his increasingly eccentric cast of street-level villains -  he's such a good embodiment of those features that his unoriginality can easily be forgiven.  It's easy enough to write off Vertigo, a villain whose primary method of attack is to inject his opponents with a weaponized hallucinogen that forces them to experience their greatest fears, as a Scarecrow rip-off.  But to do so would be to deny what a entertaining villain he makes when reimagined as a street-level drug dealer with larger criminal ambitions than he was previously able to exercise.  It's about doing something well, rather than doing it first.

Beyond its villain of the week, The Calm is an excellent addition to an already excellent series.  It manages to retain its distinct visual style - rapid editing, swift pacing, muted color scheme and low key lighting - without falling into the ocular monotony that defined its first season.  Inferior writing would have made Oliver's one episode attempt to balance his role as the Arrow with his romantic feelings for Felicity into a frustrating narrative back peddle: the same "one step forward, two steps back" character development that made me give up on Inuyasha back in the day.  Arrow, however, convincingly threads it into Oliver's quest for self-improvement.  How can he be in a relationship with her if doing so threatens her well-being?

Arrow  has come a long way from the melodramatic series that it began as.  It has an earnest , almost desperate morality that makes it unlike any other comic-based series on TV.  Its inerconnectivity with the Flash and its central position in a growing DC Television Universe has only added greater depth to the series and its characters: making their personal quests for redemption the moral compass of a rapidly expanding world in the exact manner that Man of Steel's Superman is the moral center of the growing DC Cinematic Universe.  Overall, I give the episode an 8 out of 10.

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