The green hooded vigilante of Star City has gone through several ups and downs through the many years of gracing the geek culture with his presence. The story of Oliver Queen and his struggles to create a city free of crime has gone from inspiring to overloaded, and frankly, outright boring. But Arrow introduced a game-changing twist in its Season 6 finale by sending Oliver Queen to prison and opening up the story to new and unexpected possibilities.
Through the failure of Season 4 and in a series of bland, yet inevitable plot developments of Seasons 5 and 6, "Arrow" had turned into a mediocre show that couldn't even rely on surprise and mystery to keep its audience seated on their couch. That all changed with the premiere of Season 7, which reinvented the series and injected new blood into its veins.
The key strategic element of this sudden overhaul is a significant step out of the show’s comfort zone. (Which would usually have the Green Arrow and his friends fighting small criminals every week and slowly building up to a big baddie which would be conveniently defeated by the season finale.) To breathe fresh air into the lungs of this huge media franchise, CW had to change the rules of the game. In order to do that, they decided on a narration that would make the show unpredictable again, and a character development that would give the cast a fresh chance to start again and grow in their own independent way.
Some would argue that the life of a vigilante is one of sacrifice, but the seventh season of Arrow goes in the opposite direction by showing Oliver Queen finally pay the price for all his mischievous adventures as the hero of Star City.
The most significant challenge of making Arrow is the number of episodes and the time that is dedicated to producing them each year. In this sense, and regardless of the tight schedule and the questionable budget, the narrative pace is always undermined by filler episodes and twists that don’t make any sense, but help move the show forward in the direction that the writers have planned.
With Oliver going to prison, the show has found the perfect way to balance the pace of narrative and keep the excitement of its audience in two phases of storytelling: the struggles of Oliver in prison, and his ultimate and inevitable decision of finding a way out, to uniting the team of vigilantes again to fight Diaz one last time.
Challenging your main character after more than six years of storytelling is no easy task, and the previous argument is not to say that the seventh season will not feature any filler episodes, but with this new dynamic, the writers have been given a chance to truly flesh out a deep and emotional narrative for the Green Arrow, and a genuine challenge for the character that has faced so many powerful adversaries in his years of activity as a vigilante.
Now you may say that that the nature of this twist is cliché and a common trope of superhero stories, but is that in itself an indication of how one experiences the story? Since, if you were to fall down that rabbit hole, you could also claim that every superhero story ends with the protagonist overcoming the challenge of his foe or his inner dilemmas and coming out of the battle victorious. Better yet, that might be the pinnacle of every story ever told. In truth, the real quality of a narrative has more to do with how the scenes of a story unfold, and how the characters react to the troubles that they are faced with.
Arrow does not require narrative complexity, nor is it indebted to aestheticism for its estimable success across the years. What it must do, though, is finding and developing the emotions of its characters at their rawest form. That sense of emotional depth and diversity was lost in the shallowness of the previous seasons’ attempts at creating believable drama with no real stakes.
With the seventh season, the viewer will find that the stakes are more relatable, and that the main characters face more believable conflicts. This level of engagement will feed the show for weeks to come, and when compared to the structure of the first two seasons, it is indeed a return to form for the show that kickstarted the Arrowverse.
As for how the production team carries and protects this new bolt of lightning until, at the very least, the season finale, we will only have to wait and see for ourselves. Oliver Queen is back in the game again, and has not yet failed this fandom.