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After last season's traumatic finale it's not surprising there have been changes in Arrow. The main villain is dead along with Oliver's best friend. The Hood's old lair is gone along with a good chunk of Starling City.
It seems Oliver decided to run off for three or four months rather than help clean up the mess. Felicity and John have to go to great lengths to find him and get him to come back. In the meantime his off-and-on girlfriend Laurel has had a major attack of guilt for dumping Tommy, the late best friend, for Oliver toward the end of last season, and tells Oliver when she sees him they can't be together. On seeing her he probably is greatly relieved. Don't know what happened, but in the first episode this season, Laurel, who was so very attractive all last season, is downright homely. [ Was the actress (Partridge Family grandchild Katie Cassidy) ill when the episode was shot? Is her hairdo just all wrong for her face? Did her makeup person screw up royally? Did she gain or lose just the wrong among of weight? Hard to say, but she looked bad. At the beginning of a season of Bones a few years ago, David Boreanaz looked like he had a bad fitting set of dentures, and for at least half the season he looked ten years too old. I hope they get the problem with Laurel sorted out more quickly.] Oliver's little sis, Thea took it upon herself to take over running Oliver's dance club while he was gone, and looks like she did a good job of it. I guess she's beyond high school now, but even Oliver mentioned she's still supposed to be too young to drink. She replied she's not too young to run the place. Though in a practical sense she's right, I'm not sure the liquor license issuing authority in her area would agree. With her big brother back in town, probably nobody will look too carefully at the operation, anyway. The main family business has, however, gone to pot. Isabel Rochev played by Summer Glau has moved in and bought up 45% of the company, which I presume will make her the big villain at least for this season. Summer is a lot different than we remember her, too. She looks much more mature, in a good way, and costuming found her a pair of very high heels, because Isabel looks *tall*! Meanwhile John and Felicity have been setting up a new lair in the basement of the club, completely without Thea's knowledge, apparently. No wonder Queen industries was in bad shape with mom in jail, Oliver off pouting and Felicity undoubtedly embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars to trick out the new digs. As we would expect, Oliver found a reason to go back to being the vigilante. His new cause is to honor Tommy's memory. I wonder how long that will last. Maybe not long at all if Laurel can get her looks back! Oliver has decided he doesn't want people calling him, The Hood, anymore. About time, since all of us know he's the famous comic book character, The Cloaked Bloke... er... The Green Arrow.
In the end Oliver has decided to stop killing minions willy-nilly like he did last season. I guess it's to lessen some of the darkness of last season, though somehow I doubt the body count for the show as a whole will drop much.
Overall score for episode 2.1 - B-. Not quite up to speed, but not bad enough to complain.
Next on the Wednesday lineup for the CW last night was the premiere of the new series, The Tomorrow People. I have to say up front, I never saw any of the original British series this was based on. So I can't compare the two. I can compare Tomorrow People with typical CW product however, and honestly it's the same sort of thing. Way too attractive actors closer to 30 than 18 pretending to be high school age misfits. Teen angst galore. Irrational bad guys. Supernatural stuff. Fist fights. Half way through I was thinking this is Vampire Diaries without the fangs. Immediately after watching the show I read a professional review that said it was a cross between the first season of Nikita and Vampire Diaries. Well, I guess it did end up that way.
Actually I enjoyed most of the episode. If it was predictable it was well done. Nice introduction to the characters and their motivations. Nice plot development, a good climax and a big twist at the end. Nice... Except that wasn't the end. The rest of the episode felt very much as if the producers of the show had thought they were going get a two hour premiere and the network told them the day before shooting started that they'd only have one hour. While most of the show was carefully crafted with one event naturally flowing from the one before, the last few minutes had a new episode's worth of story without the necessary explanation as to why such a thing would happen given what we'd seen in the first 45 minutes. Obviously it all had to be in there before the bulk of the season could start, but it was a hurried, overstuffed, sloppy mess of an anti-climax. In those minutes I went from thinking I might well stay tuned past Arrow and watch this teen-show often, to wondering if the rest of the season was going to be this awkward.
Overall score for episode 1.1 - C+. I suspect it hit home with all the flighty teens in the audience. Wasn't bad overall. But that ending... yeesh!
It seems Oliver decided to run off for three or four months rather than help clean up the mess. Felicity and John have to go to great lengths to find him and get him to come back. In the meantime his off-and-on girlfriend Laurel has had a major attack of guilt for dumping Tommy, the late best friend, for Oliver toward the end of last season, and tells Oliver when she sees him they can't be together. On seeing her he probably is greatly relieved. Don't know what happened, but in the first episode this season, Laurel, who was so very attractive all last season, is downright homely. [ Was the actress (Partridge Family grandchild Katie Cassidy) ill when the episode was shot? Is her hairdo just all wrong for her face? Did her makeup person screw up royally? Did she gain or lose just the wrong among of weight? Hard to say, but she looked bad. At the beginning of a season of Bones a few years ago, David Boreanaz looked like he had a bad fitting set of dentures, and for at least half the season he looked ten years too old. I hope they get the problem with Laurel sorted out more quickly.] Oliver's little sis, Thea took it upon herself to take over running Oliver's dance club while he was gone, and looks like she did a good job of it. I guess she's beyond high school now, but even Oliver mentioned she's still supposed to be too young to drink. She replied she's not too young to run the place. Though in a practical sense she's right, I'm not sure the liquor license issuing authority in her area would agree. With her big brother back in town, probably nobody will look too carefully at the operation, anyway. The main family business has, however, gone to pot. Isabel Rochev played by Summer Glau has moved in and bought up 45% of the company, which I presume will make her the big villain at least for this season. Summer is a lot different than we remember her, too. She looks much more mature, in a good way, and costuming found her a pair of very high heels, because Isabel looks *tall*! Meanwhile John and Felicity have been setting up a new lair in the basement of the club, completely without Thea's knowledge, apparently. No wonder Queen industries was in bad shape with mom in jail, Oliver off pouting and Felicity undoubtedly embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars to trick out the new digs. As we would expect, Oliver found a reason to go back to being the vigilante. His new cause is to honor Tommy's memory. I wonder how long that will last. Maybe not long at all if Laurel can get her looks back! Oliver has decided he doesn't want people calling him, The Hood, anymore. About time, since all of us know he's the famous comic book character, The Cloaked Bloke... er... The Green Arrow.
In the end Oliver has decided to stop killing minions willy-nilly like he did last season. I guess it's to lessen some of the darkness of last season, though somehow I doubt the body count for the show as a whole will drop much.
Overall score for episode 2.1 - B-. Not quite up to speed, but not bad enough to complain.
Next on the Wednesday lineup for the CW last night was the premiere of the new series, The Tomorrow People. I have to say up front, I never saw any of the original British series this was based on. So I can't compare the two. I can compare Tomorrow People with typical CW product however, and honestly it's the same sort of thing. Way too attractive actors closer to 30 than 18 pretending to be high school age misfits. Teen angst galore. Irrational bad guys. Supernatural stuff. Fist fights. Half way through I was thinking this is Vampire Diaries without the fangs. Immediately after watching the show I read a professional review that said it was a cross between the first season of Nikita and Vampire Diaries. Well, I guess it did end up that way.
Actually I enjoyed most of the episode. If it was predictable it was well done. Nice introduction to the characters and their motivations. Nice plot development, a good climax and a big twist at the end. Nice... Except that wasn't the end. The rest of the episode felt very much as if the producers of the show had thought they were going get a two hour premiere and the network told them the day before shooting started that they'd only have one hour. While most of the show was carefully crafted with one event naturally flowing from the one before, the last few minutes had a new episode's worth of story without the necessary explanation as to why such a thing would happen given what we'd seen in the first 45 minutes. Obviously it all had to be in there before the bulk of the season could start, but it was a hurried, overstuffed, sloppy mess of an anti-climax. In those minutes I went from thinking I might well stay tuned past Arrow and watch this teen-show often, to wondering if the rest of the season was going to be this awkward.
Overall score for episode 1.1 - C+. I suspect it hit home with all the flighty teens in the audience. Wasn't bad overall. But that ending... yeesh!