And here the programme that launched the CW DCU comes to an end, a few years too late, low on quality and pretty wonky in terms of lore, but, somehow, Arrow gets a better ending than the last few seasons would have deserved. At the risk of sounding overly sarcastic, probably my favouirte element of the final season of Arrow is that it is only a handful of episodes long, rather than the standard twenty-something, so the narrative is condensed and there is very little filler. The previous season having ended with the Monitor taking Oliver Queen away to do his bidding and keep the multiverse safe from... I think it's meant to be the Anti-Monitor? As usual, the crossover is mostly in other programmes, so I only saw a little bit of it, but it looked like fun and I will probably check it out at some point.
What the device of having Oliver traveling the Multiverse really enables is a tour of characters and locations from the history of Arrow, a kind of farewell parade, if you will. This sounds good in theory, but there's a huge amount of season one and two continuity that I just didn't remember, what with it having been half a decade since I saw them. I'm sure there's a group of fans out there who go back to the previous seasons regularly, but I'm not one of them, so I was completely lost for entire stretches. Much of the rest of the episodes deal with the children of "Team Arrow", who I find pretty tiresome, but the bits where they get to team up with their parents in their prime are enjoyable enough.
Somehow, the last episode is actually really good, with very little action and a focus on each remaining character getting their moment to say goodbye. Although trite, this farewell is pretty well executed, feeling genuine and heartfelt when it needs to be. The part everyone talks about is John Diggle finding a Green Lantern ring, but I personally enjoy Mad Dog's journey from murderous vigilante to mayor of the city through a humanist platform. I cannot honestly say that Arrow is worth the time it will take to watch all of it, but I don't regret having done it now that it's finished. What came after Arrow, like The Flash and Supergirl is typically much better, but without CW and DC taking a risk on a character and franchise that most people didn't know, they never would have existed. Well done, Oliver Queen, you did not fail this franchise, even if huge chunks of it were quite bad.
