Arrow S01E01 "Pilot" (2012) Ten Years Later Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Today marks the 10th Anniversary of the debut of the first comic book based TV show to be successful enough to launch a live action comic book TV universe, and the first to relaunch comic book based live action content on TV. In honour of that debut I watched the pilot episode of Arrow this morning and now I'm here to review it. There will be spoilers so if you haven't seen this episode after ten years, well, that's on you and I have no control over what you do or don't do. Let's get into it.

2012 was a hell of a year. The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Avengers were released in theatres to varying degrees of success, I was 25 years old, almost 26, and two years out of college, and DC Comics had just rebooted the entire DC Universe with the New 52 in September 2011 angering the entitled comic book fanboys that get angry no matter what a comic book publisher does. Amidst all of that though The CW greenlit a TV show based on the Green Arrow comic book series published by DC Comics and commissioned Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg to develop and produce the series. Little did they know that their idea for a Green Arrow TV series would explode into this massive block of TV shows based on comic books published not only by DC Comics, but also by Marvel, Image, and others as well. 

Back in 2012 I wasn't following comic book TV show news because it wasn't as easy as it is today. Mostly because, aside from animated series like Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Green Lantern: The Animated Series, and Young Justice, there weren't a whole lot of comic book based shows on TV back in the early 2010s. Except for Smallville and that had ended in 2011. So I had no idea that Arrow was coming out. I found out about it because two days before the premiere my mom happened to see it in the TV listings for Wednesday of that week. Being that I wasn't being bombarded by the hype for the show, I decided to check it out as I didn't know a thing about Green Arrow as I'd never read a Green Arrow comic before and I missed the character, played by Justin Hartley, on Smallville as the show moved networks here in Canada at the beginning of season 6. So I was intrigued to see why Warner Bros. and DC Comics decided to produce a series based on Green Arrow.

And just like I was ten years ago, watching the pilot this morning sucked me right back into the world it was building. Stephen Amell was the perfect choice to play Oliver Queen. In fact the whole cast was wonderful though the only two I had known of prior to watching this episode was Willa Holland, who played Oliver's sister, Thea, and had replaced Shailene Woodley as Marissa Cooper's younger sister, Kaitlin in seasons 3 and 4 of The O.C., and Susanna Thompson, who played Oliver and Thea's mom, Moira, and had played the Borg Queen in several episodes of Star Trek: Voyager in seasons 5, 6, and 7.

Apart from Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen/The Hood and David Ramsey as John Diggle, who doesn't actually have that big of a role in this episode, my favourite character was Colin Donnell as Tommy Merlyn. I've watched this episode a few times since I got the first season on DVD but this is the first time I realized how suspicious Tommy is about Oliver and his connection to the guy in the green hood who supposedly saved them after Moira's little stint at finding out what Oliver knew about her liaison with Malcolm Merlyn, and what they're planning with the Undertaking. Which we as the audience don't find out about for another four or five episodes. 

Like, okay, Tommy knows that Oliver isn't quite telling the truth about what happened in that warehouse, but I also don't think, at this point anyway, that he suspects that Oliver is secretly running around as a Robin Hood-esque vigilante. He might, but he's definitely not as fooled by Oliver's put on playboy persona. Which, by the way, is almost offputting given that he drops it after episode 5 "Damaged" where he uses it as a cover to get Detective Lance off his trail as the Hood. 

Also, Laurel didn't have as much to do in the episode as I thought she did. Mind you she doesn't have much to do in the first half of this season. Laurel became one of my favourite characters in the first three and a half seasons of the show, before she was killed off in the fourth season and then replaced with Earth Two doppelganger. Katie Cassidy was great in the role. There are deleted scenes for this episode on the DVD, but I don't know if any of them expanded on Laurel's legal case against Adam Hunt, the man Oliver ends up going after as the Hood.

The flashbacks were minimal and better balanced in this first episode. Oliver didn't even make it onto Lian Yu by the end of the episode. He was still in the life raft by the time the credits rolled. What made me do a double take is that this episode is the only one in the entire series where Sara Lance isn't played by Caity Lotz. Instead she's played by Jacqueline MacInnes Wood. Which is weird, because in flashbacks in an episode of season 2, the footage of Ollie and Sara together on the Queen's Gambit, with Sara being blown out of the ship when the hull in their room gets breached, was reshot with Caity Lotz. None of the showrunners for the series have ever said why Jacqueline MacInnes Wood didn't return as Sara when it was revealed in season 2 that she was still alive. Even on the Arrowverse Wiki, there's no mention of the change over in casting. 

The tone of the episode is perfect. Mostly because it reminds me of Mike Grell's run on Green Arrow in the '80s and early '90s. Yet it was inspired by The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005-2012). Which bugs me because the majority of the first season was the show wanting to be a Batman show, but couldn't because Gotham (2014-2019) was in development at Fox, and when Arrow was in development, The Dark Knight Rises had yet to come out. Not to mention Batman villains like Firefly, Deadshot, the Royal Flush Gang, and Ra's al Ghul kept showing up on the series as if Berlanti, Guggenheim, and Kreisberg just wanted to make a Batman show. 

The funny thing is is that Justin Hartley's Green Arrow was supposed to get a spin-off due to his popularity on Smallville, but WB and The CW chose to go with Berlanti, Guggenheim, and Kreisberg's Green Arrow: Year One (2007) based TV series, which became Arrow, instead. Which is fine because the spin-off might not have become as popular as Arrow because it might not have grabbed people who had never watched Smallville, as they did so much with the character on that show during the second half of the series. 

Even though the series had it's waves of flopping between being good and being bad, I still love Arrow. To this day it's still the only show that I watched as it aired from start to finish. Never once did I walk away from the show, even though there were certain seasons which made me consider it for five seconds. I never missed an episode. I even resorted to watching them online the next day when I was in the hospital and didn't have a TV in my room. 

No matter how you feel about it, Arrow was the show that proved to network executives that comic book based TV shows were what people wanted. Despite it's popularity in the 2000s, Smallville was never able to do that. It tried when The WB produced Birds of Prey in 2002, but that show only lasted for thirteen episodes before being canceled, and no other live action DC, or Marvel, show was attempted beyond a few pilots that never made it to air such as Aquaman, starring Justin Hartley as the titular character, in 2006, though the pilot did end up airing on CTV and YTV here in Canada according to Wikipedia, and Wonder Woman, with Adrianne Palicki starring as Wonder Woman, in 2011. Because of Arrow we have shows like Superman & Lois, the Marvel Netflix shows, which, in turn, gave us the Marvel Disney+ shows, and Titans, Doom Patrol, Stargirl, and Peacemaker.

It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since Arrow debuted. The comic book and superhero TV series landscape was much different back in 2012 and I don't think any of us knew what we were going to be getting in the years since then. But I'm glad that Arrow was successful enough to start an entire TV show universe. One that seems to be ending next year with season 9 of The Flash (2014-2023).

Alright my friends, that's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow for my review of DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990). So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.