ARROW Producers Know You Hate The Flashbacks, But They're Going Nowhere In Season 5
Arrow's flashbacks stopped being good during season three and have grown steadily worse. The show's producers are actually aware that they're not working, but that doesn't mean they'll be scrapped!
Arrow's flashbacks started going downhill during the time we spent in Hong Kong last year, but Oliver Queen's return to Lian Yu has led to some of the show's worst moments during season four. Be honest, can you even remember what the hell is happening in them week to week? At this stage, it feels like the team working on The CW series are stretching them out for the sake of it, so surely it's a plot device which can now be dropped? Well, TV Line reports that Arrow's producers are aware of the lack of interest in them, and Marc Guggenheim had this to say about why they're not working right now.
"Part of the appeal of the flashbacks – certainly in the first two years, but I think the first three years – is seeing what a big difference it is between Oliver Queen in the present day and Oliver Queen five years ago," he explained. "The problem is that we are telling a five-year story in the flashbacks of Oliver becoming the guy you met in the pilot. So the deeper you get into the flashbacks, the closer he becomes to being that guy, and, thus, you lose that element of the flashbacks that was so interesting, which is how different he was…. That’s something we have struggled with this year."
Unfortunately, it sounds like Arrow plans to stick with these for the foreseeable future as Wendy Mericle added that, "The way we write the story is still very much married to that backstory, and trying to change it up at this point would feel weird." Thankfully, it sounds like things will improve dramatically during season five as they've already established the end of Oliver's five year journey to become the Green Arrow, and it sounds like we'll be spending the year in Russia. "I don’t want to tip too much, but it’s a very good possibility that we’ll finally find out how Oliver got that Bratva tattoo and how he learned to speak Russian." Sounds...thrilling. They can't get much worse, right?