Arrow: 1×01 “Pilot” (EPISODE REVIEW)

A pilot may not be the greatest helping of what the series as a whole will offer us – well, not always – but it certainly gives us a small taste of what’s to come. In many ways, I hope this gives us more than just a taste, because although this felt very cheesy in some respects, there are a lot of ways they can expand on what they’ve put forth. A good entryway. Personally, the only eye-rolling done on my end of the television was his damn annoying inner monologue – that cliché, done to bits narration that just feels so out of place. But the rest has potential.

In many ways this is a derivative of Smallville, and in many ways it isn’t. For one, the Queen Mansion is the exact same Hatley Castle that they used in Smallville for nearly every episode to portray the Luthor Mansion (and for those that like the trivial, it’s also the mansion used by Xavier in the first three X-Men films). The character was made tv famous on his appearances in Smallville as a main character in the later seasons (not that Smallville is canon in this “universe”). Many props were even reused, like the scotch glasses and filming locations. But the character of Oliver in Arrow is much different a character from his Smallville counterpart. He’s not afraid to kill for one thing, and I don’t remember Ollie visiting an island (although that too was pulled from Smallville in the form of Lex).

It’s interesting to see how he has become Arrow. He lives and breathes the role, whereas when he is asked to perform his playboy billionaire role it’s drastically different and certainly believable. I wonder what his security officer thinks of him at this stage. And what does his friend Tommy know and/or assume of his role and the enigma of the green-hooded figure that has Starling City’s back? Guess we’ll find out.

Other minor continuity errors I came up with were how he was so tech-savy after being on the island for 5 years. He develops a way to siphon large amounts of money out of one account and into another without being detected on an island with (as we know so far) no contact with the outside world and evolving intelligence. That didn’t make any sense to me. But hey, it’s television. And one of my favorite long-running series was Smallville. Long live Arrow.

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