Arrow: Fatal Legacies (2018) Review

Hey everyone! How’s it going? Today I’m here to talk about Arrow: Fatal Legacies, a novel that came out in early 2018 and takes place between seasons 5 and 6 of the TV series, basically bridging the gap between seasons. Let’s get into it.

Good or bad, Arrow is one of my favourite TV shows of all time. It’s also one of the most important shows of the last thirty years as it launched the current slew of comic book and superhero Prime Time live action shows back in 2012. At the time The Dark Knight Trilogy had ended in theatres with The Dark Knight Rises and the Marvel Cinematic Universe exploded into the mainstream with The Avengers. However, on the TV front things were almost non-existent in terms of content based on comic books. Particularly in the Prime-Time department. Smallville had ended in 2011, and while it had been popular, Warner Media had been unsuccessful in launching any new shows in the decade since Birds of Prey had gone off the air. And I watched it from the pilot.

Fatal Legacies, written by James R. Tuck, who I am unfamiliar with, and Arrow’s then executive producer/co-showrunner, Marc Guggenheim, is an interesting look at the aftermath of Adrian Chase’s bid to take revenge on Oliver Queen/the Green Arrow due to Oliver’s take down of Chase’s father, Justin Claybourne, who was on the list of names Oliver used during his time as the Hood in season 1.

The novel picks up where season 5 ended, with the island of Lian Yu exploding because of Adrian’s death in the season finale and ends with the Green Arrow taking down Alexander Faust in the opening scene of the season 6 premiere. It deals with how all the characters dealt with what they’d gone through in the finale, as well as Oliver attempting to reach his son, William, who he gained custody of following William’s mother’s death, and sadly it was written better than most of the episodes in season 6 of the show.

Green Arrow has become one of my favourite comic book characters since I started watching the show in 2012, and I’ve always enjoyed Stephen Amell’s portrayal of the character on the show, though it’s different than the comic book character I’ve come to enjoy. So, to have a novel with that version of the character is cool.

Every time I read the book; I can hear the voices of the actors who played the characters on the show. In fact, there are several scenes between Oliver and Felicity in this novel where not only do I hear Stephen Amell and Emily Bett Rickards’s voices, but I can feel the sexual tension between the characters as they talk in the Bunker (the Arrowcave). Mostly because this was the period where they’d been split up following the revelation that Oliver had had a son with a woman named Samantha, back before he’d been stranded on Lian Yu, but there was the possibility they were probably going to be getting back together at some point during season 6. Spoilers: they do and end up getting married at the end of the season’s Arrowverse crossover, “Crisis on Earth-X”.

We also see the beginning of the nerve damage that plagued OG Team Arrow member, John Diggle, throughout the first half of season 6. This was a significant plotline in the season as it not only created problems between Oliver and Diggle throughout the season, but it led into the Ricardo Diaz storyline that dominated the entire back half of the season as well. While I didn’t particularly care for the storyline in the show, I did like that it established a friendship between Diggle and the new Black Canary, Dinah Drake.

Speaking of Dinah, she doesn’t play a huge role in this novel, but her plotline is substantial since it involves her getting the Black Canary costume, she wore for the last three seasons of the show. Despite how redundant Dinah felt once Laurel, albeit the Earth-2 version, became the Black Canary again in seasons 7 and 8, I honestly really liked Dinah as a character. Except for the majority of season 6 simply because, well, nobody was written well that season and it’s best if I just move on from that until I get to that season in the show, because, yes, I will be reviewing Arrow soon.

Even though she’s mentioned in the description on the back cover of the book, I was surprised that Sara Lance shows up in the novel. Mainly because she’d been on Legends of Tomorrow for several seasons at this point and the TV show didn’t really have her come back very often outside of the annual crossovers due to scheduling logistics that make it impossible for the most part. Sara has always been one of my favourite characters in the Arrowverse and anytime she returned to Arrow was something I celebrated.

The one criticism that I have about this book is that it feels almost like fan fiction. To be fair most tie-in novels to TV shows feel this way because many of them aren’t canon to the show they’re based on, but with this one it feels even more so. I don’t know how canon this book is considering it was co-written by one of the show’s showrunners at the time, and both the beginning of the book and the end of the book are canon since they’re scenes that appear in episodes of the show. But, at the same time, because these events aren’t mentioned by anyone on Arrow or by Sara on Legends, it’s doubtful that it’s canon outside of the opening and closing of the book. If it is canon though it puts to rest whether Doctor Schwartz, who we see a lot of in seasons 4, 5, and 6, knows that Oliver is the Green Arrow or not as the show leaves it ambiguous throughout her time on the show.

Overall, I really enjoy this book. It feels like a five-or-six-episode arc of the show, that take place over several months, and all the characters feel like the versions on the show. I think this is also the only novel based on Arrow where the Flash doesn’t appear, though Cisco is referred to a few times in the novel. If you’re a fan of the show, I highly recommend you pick this book up. I’m pretty sure it’s still in print, though I could be wrong about that since the show has been over for two years now and it came out four years ago.

I think that will be it for me for today, but I will be back in the not too far future to look at Charlotte’s Web (1973). Until then have a wonderful rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.