On the DVD commentary for episode one, The Calm, Marc Guggenheim mentions that they plan out every Arrow season as if it were a movie. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how Arrow season 3 falls down the regular pitfalls of third-in-the-trilogy superhero movies. Arrow season 3 resurrects a superhero sequel issue that we’ve not really seen on the big screen since Batman & Robin as well – too many heroes. We begin the season with The Arrow, Arsenal, Canary and Diggle all out in the field. By the end, we’ve seen Black Canary, The ATOM, Wild Cat and The Flash in action as well. All this character juggling – coupled with the format-forced need to keep cutting away to Ollie’s pre-series flashbacks – means that there simply isn’t enough time to give Oliver Queen satisfying development. What he gets is a ‘can I be the hero and live my own life?’ arc that’s reminiscent of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2. This is a fine topic to discuss, but rather than really delving into it, time constraints mean that we hear this conflict mentioned a lot, but never really feel like we’re chewing into the meat of the topic. Stephen Amell has impressive charisma as always, but these multiple-plate-spinning scripts are some of the worst that he’s had to wrangle an engaging protagonist from. This isn’t to say that Arrow season 3 doesn’t have its moments, because it does. A particular highlight is the mid-season finale in which Ollie swordfights with Matt Nable’s Ra’s Al Ghul. There’s a real sense of danger here, and some eye-catching duelling choreography, too, even though the cliff-hanger ending was clearly always set up to be undone. For the most part, though, the show gets muddled with juggling so many heroes, villains and side-arcs that it forgets to spend enough time on Arrow’s greatest asset – Stephen Amell, who simply doesn’t get to be a superhero for enough of the running time. The commentary for The Climb – the Ra’s duel episode – fares better, exploring the idea of uprooting Oliver and bringing him to the League Of Assassins’ Nanda Parbat HQ. As one of the best episodes of the season, it’s good to get some more behind-the-scenes intel on this one. The CGI stubble on Matt Nable’s stunt double’s face was a particularly surprising fact. The deleted scenes are fairly interesting, too, offering extra material for a few of the villains and some more dialogue scenes that could have helped focus the show on Mr Amell a bit more. Thea gets a little extra time to shine, too. There are also featurettes aplenty, including an introduction to Brandon Routh’s Ray Palmer/ATOM character where Routh curiously wears his superhero suit for the duration of the interview (“It makes me feel legit,” he mentions). You also get an eye-opening deconstruction of the Nanda Parbat sets, a chuckle-inducing gag reel (John Barrowman has a Karate Kid moment), and a detailed discussion of the costume design behind Arrow. Also – there’s a smidge of Comic Con footage from 2014. All in all, this isn’t a great season of Arrow, but this box-set offers an impressive range of extras if you want to delve further. Arrow season 3 is out on DVD and Blu-Ray from Monday the 28th of September.
