Arrow Thursday: And We’re Back

I can’t believe it. They raised Arrow from the dead. There must be a Lazarus Pit in the Writer’s Room.

It’s damn hard to get a reader or viewer back once you’ve disappointed him or her, let alone stretched that disappointment over an entire season (or season and a half), but Arrow is back, and not just because John Constantine stopped by to get Sara’s soul out of the Hot Tub in Hell or Donna Smoak’s been sending texts to Oliver with teardrop emojis. It’s as if the writers looked up and said, “Wait, how do we tell a good story again?” and put the train back on the rails. There’s still evidence of the wreck, but it is once again a damn good ride. So of course I’ve been trying to figure out how they did it. My conclusion: they corrected seven key story elements that had either gone off track or never been on track at all. Needless to say, massive spoilers ahead.

1. Your story lives or dies with its protagonist.

You hear a lot about making a protagonist likable. A protagonist does not have to be likable, she or he has to be fascinating, wonderful to read/watch. One of the reasons I wasn’t crazy about Grimm in the beginning was its very likable, very boring puppy-handsome lead, a great guy with a Mary Sue girlfriend whose biggest problem was that he was an unbeatable fighter of demons. (Nick has since taken so many knocks, including becoming a zombie and watching his Mary Sue turn into a Hexenbiest, that he’s pretty interesting now.) Oliver, on the other hand, was interesting from the get-go. He was out of his depth but driven, skilled but not unbeatable, flawed and vulnerable and versatile. The guy was playing so many roles, coping with so many damaged people while trying to deal with his own demons, that he was fascinating to watch. Then his back story dragged him under and the writers finished him off by making him a grimdark, immature, selfish, hypocritical jerk.

So this year when I tuned into the pilot, I was prepared for more Green Dickhead. Instead, Oliver said, “I’ve been a jerk. Really sorry about that, I’ll do better,” and proceeded to make good on his promise. He’s mature. He’s in a committed relationship with a mature, sane woman. He treats the others around him as equals. He’s surrounded by whackjobs, some of them murderous, and his problems range from difficult to bizarre, but he’s smart, thoughtful, active, and engaged with the world. The self-pity is gone; this is a guy who knows how lucky he is and is careful not to squander that. So when he’s jealous of Felicity’s former lover, he talks to his best friend, Diggle, in a scene that is two grown-ups trying to figure out relationships (I damn near fell out of my chair, they were so adult about the whole thing). When Felicity has a meltdown that would have sent the old Oliver into a tantrum tailspin; the new Oliver says, “I’ll give you the space to work it out.” And they gave him back his sense of humor, which is good because Stephen Amell can make me laugh with a monosyllable: when Felicity told Diggle he was the mature one of the two, Oliver’s entire protest was one small “Uh?” that was both vulnerable and funny, and more than that, very non-super-hero human. And he’s been texting with Felicity’s mom. I LOVE THIS GUY.

So Oliver Queen is a hero again, but more than that, he’s a terrific protagonist, the calm center of the insanity that is the Arrow universe, and that alone would be enough to bring me back. That’s the power of the protagonist: he’s gonna make or break your story. So forget likable (that’s easy and boring) and keep him or her human, vulnerable, and dimensional. You know, like Oliver Queen, Season Four.

2. Your main plot is your main focus; everything else should feed into that, not get in its way.

I loved it that Arrow kept its stories moving and packed with detail and action. And then they overdosed on storylines, trying to keep so many subplots going that their episodes became the plotting equivalent of word salad, especially since there was no cohesion, every subplot staked out its own little territory. Making that worse was that a lot of those subplots were toxic, like the I-slept-with-sisters-when-I-was-a-dumb-ass-frat-boy-and-now-that-I’m-a-wiser-grimdark-hero-I’m-doing-it-again. That storyline was like a cold sore: you never knew when it was going to flare up and ruin everything. This year, the Lance sisters are out of Oliver’s bed for good (fingers crossed) since he’s living with Felicity and the sisters have moved on to other things: Laurel is busy being the District Attorney and the Black Canary, and Sara’s dead moving on to the Legends spin-off. With any luck at all, that corpse of a subplot has been covered in salt and buried in lime. They’ve still got a lot of subplots–Oliver’s running for mayor, Felicity’s trying to bring Palmer Tech back from the brink, Diggle is looking for vengeance for his brother, Thea has a bloodlust problem–but they’re tying them all to the main plot with antagonist Damien Dahrk: Oliver’s running for mayor even though Dahrk is doing everything he can to make sure that office is empty, Ray Palmer was a prisoner of Dahrk’s until the Arrow Team rescued him, and Diggle’s brother is a lot less dead than previously thought and entangled in Dahrk’s organization. Best of all might be Thea, whose bloodlust goes away when Dahrk tries to whammy her with his magic; the curse of the series for everybody else might be her cure. As a result of these subplots’ close ties to the main plot, the story is more cohesive than it’s been in the past, and there’s an undercurrent of authority in the text that foreshadows that everything is going to merge into one mega-plot in the end. The adults aren’t just on the screen this time; it feels like somebody in the writer’s room stood up and said, “I have a plan.”

3. Your story moves or stagnates with your antagonist.

I believe I’ve mentioned that the antagonist is the fuel for story. Like a thousand times. The antagonists in the first three seasons of Arrow were good, but they all dressed in black, scowled a lot, and chewed the scenery as they ranted about vengeance and duty. After awhile, I couldn’t tell them apart, which was something considering one of them was played by John Barrowman. This year we’ve got Damian Darhk, a cheerfully evil son of a bitch in a beautifully tailored suit who’s going to destroy the city because he thinks it’s a good idea. He loves this plan. He’s excited to be part of it. He has a can-do personality with a take-charge attitude and he commands the screen whenever he appears, in large part because he’s played by the always excellent Neal McDonough. Dahrk isn’t paying anybody back, he doesn’t brood, he doesn’t emote, he doesn’t do inexplicable things because he’s Evil, he’s just brisk, efficient, focused, smart, ruthless, cheerful, murderous, and snarky. And evil. Also he keeps a shrine in his closet where he does blood sacrifices, and he can do magic, but mostly it’s his command of snark and menace that’s powering Arrow now. The character is a much-needed change from the tortured grimdark Bad Guys of the past.

The protagonist is the one the reader/viewer cares about and follows, but the antagonist? That’s the energy, the fuel for the plot and conflict. You know how I said the protagonist doesn’t have to be likable but does have to be fascinating? The antagonist doesn’t have to be UNlikeable, but fascinating is still a requirement. Damien Dahrk is the nuclear reactor of Big Bads because he’s so enthusiastically inventive about laying waste to everything around him.

4. Your story needs to be fun for the reader/viewer.

“Fun” in this case means exciting, terrifying, enthralling, heart-warming, surprising, inventive, funny, horrifying, arousing, off-beat, or any combination of the above. Fun is the reader/viewer laughing out loud, weeping helplessly, drawing back in horror. Fun is the reason the reader picks up the book again, comes back for the next episode, fun draws the reader in so she or he can achieve catharsis at the climax. Fun is seriously under-utilized in way too many stories.

Arrow had some marvelously fun moments in the past. Anything with Moira in it was always good value. I enjoyed the hell out of Isabel, especially when Felicity hit her with a truck. The thing about Moira and Isabel, though, is that they never whined. They might stab you in the back, but they wouldn’t complain while they were doing it, so they were fun to watch. But much of last year was people moaning about betrayal and weeping about not being appreciated or being fearful about the future. It was like a kindergarten class at three o’clock: everybody needed a nap. And it was no fun.

This year Diggle and Oliver have a drink in the Arrow Cave while Diggle makes fun of his whiskey, and then two good friends talk intelligently about relationships. Ray comes back from six months of miniaturized captivity and is delighted to find out he was kidnapped by a evil supernatural conglomerate “like Spectre!” Donna Smoak shows up in a pink cocktail dress, makes Felicity crazy, and picks up Quentin Lance in a bar. Felicity picks up a machine gun and blasts the bad guys when they attack her lab. Thea faces down Damian Dahrk and disconcerts him, which is a first for the story. Ray shows up to help with a fight, Curtis looks at Oliver and mutters to himself “You’re married, he’s straight, you’re married, he’s straight,” the fight scenes are more personal and involving (clearly owing a lot to Daredevil), and nobody except for Laurel whines. I even loved the over-the-top scene where Thea beat up the leering creep who said, “You look like a no-means-yes kind of girl.” That’s low-hanging fruit, but satisfying nonetheless. This show is fun to watch again because it gives its fascinating characters interesting things to do that make a reader/viewer say, “Oh, yes, more of that, please.” The last couple of episodes have done that so well, I watched them twice. Whatever they’re drinking in the writer’s room, give them more: this stuff is wonderful.

5. Your characters’ relationships should be strong motivators for their actions and the glue that holds their community together.

I’m good with dysfunctional relationships, but they have to make sense, and for a long time, the conflicts in Arrow’s plots stemmed from characters acting like morons to create big scenes where everybody bitched at each other. This year, when two people in relationships important to the plot have a conflict, it’s because somebody really screwed up. Diggle’s mad at Oliver for kidnapping his wife; they work it out. Thea gets fed up with Oliver being a buzzkill, Oliver apologizes; later Thea admits he might have been right, Oliver lets it go. Oliver finds out Captain Lance is working with the Big Bad and is furious, Lance explains, Oliver’s still mad but he and Lance work out a plan. Felicity’s tense at home and fights with her mother, her mother brings her warm milk and the best advice ever given on TV, telling Felicity to talk it out with Oliver because “You’re never going to find another guy who’s that hot and cooks.” (I love Donna Smoak, she can do no wrong.) These people have real conflicts with understandable motivations, they resolve the conflicts, and then they move on because they have to: they can’t survive without these relationships. They don’t have time to obsess and whine, and they don’t seem to have any interest in it, either. It’s that adult thing.

That’s important because every negotiation and compromise strengthens the community overall, and community is a huge part of the success of a narrative: if readers/viewers don’t want to hang out in the story world, they’ll leave. Again, that doesn’t mean the world has to be likable, but it does have to be a fascinating place full of fascinating people doing fascinating things that are well motivated and believable in the context of that world, which is made up of people in relationships.

The relationship that’s most often screwed up in stories is the romance. Don’t get me started on the Oliver/Laurel hate-fest that was supposed to be the Great Romance of Arrow. This year, sanity reins. Laurel and Oliver have explicitly stated that their past is so toxic that they’ll never be together, and they’ve formed a new relationship as partners in the fight against evil. HUGE improvement. And then, after three long years of Oliver banging every woman under thirty except Felicity and his sister, and Felicity making puppy dog eyes at him and then finding another billionaire to sleep with, they finally rode off into the sunset together at the end of Season Three, and I braced myself for whatever contrived Terrible Thing would drive them apart in Season Four, some Big Misunderstanding the writers would drag out over twenty-two episodes. Nope. Oliver and Felicity are living together, they’re happy, everybody accepts them as a couple, and that’s all believable because they’ve been working together for three years like a well-oiled machine; they’ve just added sex and omelets to the mix.

What I really love about this is that it’s not a subplot. Oliver and Felicity’s relationship is just a fact, shown in small things like the way they look at each other when they’re trying to figure something out, the way Oliver puts his hand on her shoulder as he leans over to look at her computer, the way they sit on the couch and talk about the day’s events. It’s a hundred throwaway things, like Felicity on the new PA system saying, “This is your overlord, Felicity Smoak,” and Oliver saying mildly, “I’m going to regret putting that in.” It’s a huge relief to have all that angst over with and the romance contract clear, it’s a lot of fun to have that relationship playing in the background, and it’s a clear refutation of the idea that committed relationships are death to storytelling. Plus the stability of the relationship adds a lot to Oliver’s stability and maturity as a character. He’s not brooding any more because he’s happy. THIS is the way relationships on series should be done. I have to admit I had grave doubts about how Oliver was going to handle Ray coming back into Felicity’s life, but the writers nailed it, using the conflict to reinforce the strength of the relationship and Oliver’s maturity. This may be the best relationship on television, at least until Quentin and Donna hook up.

6. You need change to keep a long-running story vibrant and engaging.

In a hundred thousand word novel, you need turning points to shake things up. A long running TV series has the same need. Arrow has a great cast, but they’ve been bouncing off each other for three years now, doing the same damn things–Oliver telling Felicity he can’t be with her because it would put her in danger (don’t get me started on that one), Felicity babbling double entendres, Diggle being quietly wise, Thea complaining that everybody lies to her, Lance ranting about the Arrow and obsessing over his Oliver-obsessed daughters, Laurel bitching about everything in general . . . that stuff got old. This year, everybody’s new again–Oliver’s sane, Diggle’s driven, Felicity has stopped babbling and taken charge, Lance is a double-agent, and Laurel . . . argh. Better yet, there are new faces. Now that Felicity’s a CEO, she needs an assistant. Enter Curtis Holt, with the brains, charm, and babble of the old Felicity, Felicity 2.0 in fact. And there’s Alex Davis, Oliver’s new political strategist, who patiently points out the weaknesses in Oliver’s mayoral campaign while Oliver cheerfully overrules him; the undercurrent of you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me in this character is a great counter-balance to Oliver’s I’m-gonna-be-mayor confidence, plus he’s hitting on Thea, the one with the bloodlust issues, so that has huge possibilities. There’s no whining or soap (mostly), just dimensional characters interacting with other dimensional characters in such a way that you want to see them interact more. Add the excellently evil Dahrk and the just-visiting John Constantine, and the new kids in town are bringing new life to the old crowd, creating new expectations.

That’s the real key to adding new things: they shift everything, creating new possibilities in the reader/viewer’s mind. If you know that if Character X says this, Character Y will say this because that’s what she’s been saying for three freaking years, your reader/viewer’s expectation is colored with exasperation and boredom. Throw a new character or plot event into the story, and the reader/viewer sits up and says, “OMG, what if . . .” and is engaged again. And if that reinvention is a logical extension of the story you’ve been telling all along, it can actually help rejuvenate the past because it led to this . . . Arrow’s new season is a textbook example of how to do just that.

7. Your theme has to be inherent in the story line, coded not stated.

I got really tired of hearing Oliver say he needed to save his city, especially since Star(ling) City gets worse every year. In the latest episode, Oliver stated what I think might be the series theme, but he didn’t do it as a pronouncement this time, he did it as a passionate argument for why Diggle needed to give his brother another chance:

I’m asking you to hold out hope for Andy because I need that hope. I need to believe that no matter what happens in our lives, no matter how much darkness infects us, I need to believe that we can come back from that.

He wasn’t saying, “This is what I believe;” that’s theme-mongering. He was saying, “This is what I need to do in order to keep believing in what I desperately need to believe, so this is what we’re going to do.” Couched in action and character, that theme takes on more resonance that it could possibly have divorced from the story. And in so doing, it almost justifies those awful flashbacks because they lend weight to the “darkness infects us” line. Theme isn’t something that’s plastered on a story like a label, it’s the underlying idea of the entire story, the beating heart of the story. Most of that time, that beating heart does not need to be exposed (bleah), it’s enough to know it’s there and it’s working.

All of these fixes are making Arrow excellent again, but there are still a couple of things that could be better.

1. Stay in the now of the story.

Don’t screw with time in your storytelling: readers/viewers will pick a time they like best and be annoyed with the other storyline for getting in its way. In the case of Arrow, it’s those damn flashbacks taking story real estate away from the the whole Dahrk’s-gonna-destroy-the-city-Oliver’s-gonna-save-it lovely clear conflict. Instead we’re forced to watch Oliver run a slave camp as an undercover Argus agent and rescue another beautiful woman. I will admit that seeing Oliver with John Constantine made the island almost bearable, but otherwise, I do not care about the drug overlord who is the latest in the long line of Evil Bastards torturing Oliver on Lian Yu. And when the third eligible woman showed up on the impossible-to-find island, I laughed. That Oliver is a chick-magnet even castaway in that terrible wig. This year, it’s an improvement to see an older, skilled Oliver holding his own without the wig, but the flashbacks are still the equivalent of your little brother standing in front of the TV, preventing you from seeing the show you want to see (“Greg, move your head”), which is the one set in the present. Focus on your main plot; it’s your bread-and-butter and everything else should be in service to it, not standing in its way.

2. Don’t write characters that are boring or, worse, irritating when you think they’re charming.

The writers must hate Laurel Lance: they give her terrible story lines and selfish, stupid dialogue. Her latest plot line of raising her sister from the dead, finding out she’s created a soulless murdering zombie in a bustier, chaining her up in the basement of her apartment building (WTF?), and then omitting to tell anybody because she’s afraid people will yell at her when Zombie Sara escapes and starts a killing spree . . . . You know, I’m good with over the top. When SharkMan showed up on The Flash, I cheered. The guy on Arrow a couple of weeks ago who peeled off his tattoos and killed people with them? Loved him. John Cho walking around on Sleepy Hollow with his head snapped back? Bring it on. But Laurel bitching at Oliver for not treating her like an equal because he’s displeased with her for loosing a killer zombie on the populace? She’s the equivalent of your best friend’s awful significant other: You just moan when she shows up. Also her Canary wig is almost as bad as Oliver’s island rug. It’s all right to get rid of a character who isn’t working, especially all right to get rid of a character who’s screwing up your story world. The only way I can see to make Laurel fun is to make her evil, although that usually carries with it the penalty of death. I’m okay with that. The Arrow Cave is too crowded anyway.

Summing up:

1. Your story moves and breathes, lives and dies, with your protagonist and antagonist. Making them fascinating and getting them vividly on the page/screen in strong, focused conflict is key to the success of your (linear) story.

2. Cut any manufactured angst, unmotivated conflict, irritating and unnecessary characters, untethered subplots that clog up the narrative, back story that gives information the reader doesn’t want or care about, and anything that doesn’t serve the main story directly and efficiently.

3. Use character relationships as background instead of plot (unless you’re writing a relationship story) to create, evolve, deepen, and stabilize the story world.

4. Show your theme in action and motivation, don’t have your characters announce it.

5. Watch Arrow. It’s really good this year.

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