Superhero Media: Arrow - Season 5

Man, but it feels like a long time between watching seasons of Arrow for me. The programme is now essentially unrecognisable from where it started, with Oliver Queen, Felicity Smoke and John Diggle being the only characters from the first season to appear in most episodes. Yes, Quentin Lance and Speedy are still around, but they take a back seat most of the time to the new vigilantes, Artemis, Mad Dog, Mister Terrific and Black Canary. After disbanding the team at the end of season 4, Oliver is forced to build a new one pretty much straight away, in what feels like a 'soft reboot' of the series. The new villain, Prometheus, is a bit of a let-down after Damien Dark, not only because the stakes feel smaller, but also because the idea of the character is kind of wasted. Rather than Prometheus being a highly-trained would-be superhero killer, he is a figure from Oliver's past that wants revenge, so frames Green Arrow for murder. 

That's all about par for the course in the series, but wouldn't have the more traditional Prometheus have been more interesting? Say if the character wanted to kill Supergirl and The Flash, but needed to work his way up through less super-powered foes, like Green Arrow and Spartan, but turns out the new team makes this much tougher than expected. Instead, much of the action focuses on the new team dynamic and explaining how everyone came to be a vigilante. DC's Vigilante (not the Cowboy one, sadly) is a secondary antagonist, but I really don't even remember if that gets resolved at all, though the costume looks cool. Artemis turns out to be a random turncoat, completely missing what made her so good in Young Justice. The finale is pretty good, when Prometheus kidnaps most of the team, Oliver has to break some of his former enemies out of prison, including Deathstroke and Captain Boomerang, in order to save his friends. 

Probably the most memorable episode of the series has Mister Terrific and Mad Dog arguing about gun control. This would be kind of cool, but because the programme is American, there "has" to be a section promoting a pro-gun point of view. Mad Dog relates a story about how his wife would not have died if he had had access to his gun, because he could have confronted an intruder if he were armed. What the fuck? I'm lucky enough to live in a country with decent firearms regulation, so any time I see someone promoting gun ownership for 'home defense', I have questions around why. In a place like Australia, I don't need a gun to defend my home, because it is highly unlikely that any potential intruders will have a gun. The 'bad guys' don't have guns, do I don't need them. Even our police don't draw guns all that often, really, so Mad Dog's argument just fell flat and kind of spoiled the tone of the episode. Although I enjoyed Season 5, I'm hoping that Arrow doesn't stagger on too much longer.