Team GATV Roundtable: Looking Back At Season 3

Did Season 3’s flashback work?

LAUREL: No. Not a bit. Easily the worst part of the season for me — surely there were better stories to tell about Oliver’s lost time?

MATT: Roughly, yes, but there was so much padding that they easily could’ve dropped it from a number of episodes and still hit the same story points. What’s disappointing about the flashback was that they had this whole new setting with all manner of possibilities, and we ended up with a fairly substandard chase plot. More important, they clumsily incorporated it as the backstory for the final big bad plot of the season. At the point where they had Oliver and Akio separated from the boy’s parents and then stumbling into Shado’s twin sister, I was just about done.

DEREK: It didn’t fail, but I don’t know that it “worked” fully. I did end up liking the Yamashrios a lot by the end, and I was genuinely affected by the death of Akio and when Tatsu killed Maseo. I wish we’d seen more of Tatsu in the present — I found her more interesting than the much more prevalent Maseo — and I’d be down with seeing her next season, back in Katana gear. So I guess it worked in that respect, but I can’t say I recall much from the actual plot of the flashbacks other than introducing the virus element. I also don’t feel that Oliver’s arc resonated at all — I get that it’s about past-Oliver losing his Oliver Queen identity while present-Oliver earns a new one, but its little more than the same old “Oliver commits violent acts for survival” stuff. It’s not bad, we’ve just seen way too much of it for it to be shocking anymore. Next season needs a very engaging flashback plot to keep it relevant, since Amell is already so close to playing season one Oliver at this point. I’ll also admit that the silly Starling flashback in “The Return” has grown on me over time, in that it’s kind of an affectionate homage to the soapiness and stiltedness of the show’s early days. Still say the fanserviceyness dragged it down, though.

CRAIG: I don’t think it did, for the reasons mentioned above. I just didn’t feel emotionally connected to it. Yeah, there was cool action, but maybe it’s just that nothing in flashback-land can live up to how much fun OSSS Show (Oliver, Slade, Sara & Shado) was. Except Hal Jordan, but it sounds pretty definite that they’re not going to go there.

STEPHANIE: Not so much, especially with the Hong Kong story. The amount of content and the content itself never really panned out into a compelling story. The screen time spent on the flashbacks appeared shorter than usual this year. If you were to cut out all of the shots of Oliver running through Hong Kong, there wasn’t a whole lot of substance left. They definitely made me want to know more about Oliver’s time in Hong Kong because it didn’t initially look like the flashbacks were building to something until the very end. I was interested in seeing more of a threat from Amanda Waller, but her absence (I’m assuming because of actress availability) made the flashbacks even less cohesive than they were already. Plus, the episode with Shado’s twin seemed like it was thrown in there so they could have a surprise in their promos.

Including flashbacks for characters who weren’t Oliver was an interesting risk. Unfortunately, Felicity, Malcolm, and Deadshot’s episodes were about what I expected – the most obvious versions of their respective tragic backgrounds.