It’s no
secret that The CW, oft overlooked because it lacks the artistic
edge and money to garner the prestige of cable yet is too niche to
commercially compete with the “Big Four” broadcast networks, is telling some of
the best
superhero stories in any medium right now. After a promising yet uneven freshman
season, Arrow found its voice in a
confident, entertaining and emotionally compelling second season, and its
spin-off show The Flash already
brimmed with energy when it debuted this past fall.
Though the two shows are tonally disparate (The Flash is bouncy and at times proudly cheesy, while Arrow’s brooding darkness is more
reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films), they work well together, as evidenced
by a pair of delightful crossover episodes that aired in December. Not only do
they share a creative team, anchored by creator Greg Berlanti, but they also
succeed for many of the same reasons: talented, charismatic actors; sharp yet
understated visual flair combined with efficient pacing; and perhaps most
importantly, plots driven by characters and their relationships to each other
rather than by MacGuffins or convoluted mythology. In a way, they benefit from
not having the enormous budgets given to big-screen ventures, because they’re
forced to employ action in the service of story instead of the other way
around, and even the set pieces, of which there are still plenty, dazzle more
through impressive choreography and stunt work than expensive CGI effects,
particularly in Arrow. They suggest
that comic books, with their installment-based structure, love of twists and
cliffhangers and sprawling ensembles of characters, are much better suited to
TV than film, where even the best adaptations still often feel cumbersome and
incomplete.
Though both shows readily
embrace their comic book origins, Arrow
especially spends a lot of time playing with various stock plot and character
tropes. There’s the brooding, traumatized hero, the loyal sidekick, the tech
support, the protégé, and various villains and fridged characters (usually
women) that primarily serve as, respectively, obstacles for conflict and motivation
for the hero. Of course, the writers are good enough that all of these
characters eventually become much more layered and interesting than a simple
description suggests, but for the most part, they don’t radically depart from
the superhero action genre’s conventions. While David Ramsey’s pragmatic,
no-nonsense John Diggle and Emily Bett Rickard’s Felicity Smoak, who has
evolved into the show’s moral center, have always probably been my favorite
characters, the most fascinating and thoughtful narrative arc throughout the
series so far belongs not to them or hero Oliver Queen, but rather to resident
token love interest Laurel Lance, who’s played by a very game Katie Cassidy.
At the beginning of the show,
Laurel seemed destined to be the kind of character that would gradually and
without fanfare fade into the background. Because she was positioned as the
female lead, she was never doomed to an early death, but she seemed to exist
more out of obligation than to serve the larger story in any meaningful way. Frankly,
between Cassidy’s initially bland performance and the character’s equally
generic job as a vaguely do-gooder lawyer, Laurel was just boring. Granted,
part of this was because the show as a whole was stumbling along for much of
the first season, trying to find its footing, but considering that she was
ostensibly the show’s central female character, Laurel was especially poorly
serviced by the writers. Saddled with an uninspired love triangle and an overly
protective father, her main role throughout the first season was to generate
conflict between the three men in her life, frequently by being abducted or
somehow otherwise finding herself in harm’s way.
In short, she was a prototypical damsel-in-distress. The
damsel-in-distress is arguably the most maligned archetype in superhero stories
not just because she inherently lacks agency and draws upon sexist stereotypes
of women as passive and helpless, but also because she wreaks havoc on the
hero’s life by disrupting his plans and making him vulnerable to his enemies.
You can only watch him rescue her so many times before you start resenting her
for being ‘useless’, him for putting up with these shenanigans and the writer
for relying on such a trite, lazy trope. To be fair, Laurel was never as
obnoxious as the worst of those characters (ahem, MJ in the original Spider-Man films) since she was endowed
with basic self-defense skills, meaning she usually tried to fight back against
the villains before being inevitably overwhelmed, and that she occasionally
talked back to the men constantly bent on controlling her for the sake of
‘protecting’ her.
Still, the other characters and the writers regularly treated her more
like an object than a human being with a life of her own. The love triangle was
particularly frustrating both because Cassidy had tepid at best romantic/sexual
chemistry with her male costars and because narratively, Laurel had every
reason to outright reject both men. On one hand, you have Tommy Merlyn, played
by the easy-on-the-eyes Colin Donnell, who became more interesting once he got
a personality and storyline of his own but prior to that spent most of his
screen time pining after Laurel and sulking jealously when she seemed less
committed to him than he was to her. At one point, towards the end of the first
season, Oliver has to remind him that Laurel isn’t a prize to be won, which I
think is all you really need to know in order to understand her and Tommy’s
relationship. On the other hand, though, you have Oliver, who was cheating on
Laurel with her younger sister Sara when he went missing and was presumed dead
for five years, which sounds like a pretty cut-and-dry deal breaker, but maybe
that’s just me. Laurel was going to be difficult to salvage, if they even
attempted to do so at all, yet in retrospect, it’s clear that this initial
iteration of the character was necessary to make her long-term arc work.
The first photos of Laurel dressed in costume as the Black Canary showed
up online around mid-November of last year, but comics readers had known
this revelation was coming from the beginning, and the show teased that she
might take up her now-murdered sister’s mantle enough that it wasn’t a surprise
to people like me, who are exclusively familiar with the show, either. Being
part of comics
canon, though, didn’t guarantee that her transformation into vigilante
superhero was going to work on TV. For one thing, Arrow had already introduced the Canary a season earlier as Caity
Lotz’s Sara, who was awesome, not just because of her fighting skills and the
fact that she often used those skills to help and defend women, but also
because she faced the kind of compelling, internal moral conflict that’s all
too often reserved for male heroes.
And hey, bisexual representation!
Though Sara’s death was far from
meaningless, serving as the driving force behind the third season, she was on
the show for such a short amount of time that it’s hard not to be at least a
little peeved that the writers essentially replaced her with Laurel. Couldn’t
we have both of them at the same time? Yet, as much as I still miss Sara, what
excites me about Laurel becoming the Black Canary isn’t necessarily that Katie
Cassidy will presumably now have more screen time and material to work with or
that she can finally, really get in on some of the action. Rather, her decision
to put on the leather jacket and mask signals just how far she has come from
that first season. While the ability to carry one’s self in combat is hardly a
surefire indicator of good characterization and certainly doesn’t automatically
mean a female character is well-written, in Laurel’s case, it’s as much an
outward illustration of how she has changed mentally as it is evidence of her
increased physical fitness.
In last week’s episode
“Canaries” (3.13), the show openly addressed the tension stemming from Laurel’s
decision to follow her sister’s footsteps by staging a direct confrontation
between the two women when Laurel got injected with the hallucinogenic drug
Vertigo. Though it could easily have come across as a cheap way of forcing closure
onto a relationship that had been interesting in part because of its messiness,
the writers instead used it to push Laurel in a slightly different direction,
driving home the purpose of her entire Black Canary/transformation storyline.
In a way, Laurel has always been the most insecure and volatile character on Arrow, not just because, until now, she
couldn’t hide her fear or emotions behind a literal mask or under a hood, but
because she’s never been exceptional. Even (or, perhaps, especially) Felicity
and Diggle, who don’t have superhero alter-egos, seem elevated above the
average person in terms of their skills as, respectively, a hacker and soldier and
their moral character. By contrast, in her flaws, mistakes and self-destructive
tendencies, Laurel always seems human.
This was particularly evident during the pivotal second season, when she
struggled with depression and the substance abuse problems that apparently run
in the Lance family while everyone else was navigating grand moral quandaries
and busy saving Starling City. Following Tommy’s death, the once idealistic,
firmly by-the-books lawyer edged closer to the dark side as she coped with her
grief by numbing herself with pills and alcohol, lashing out at anyone who
tried to help her and abandoning the principles she long defended. Her growing
disillusionment with the legal system and the concept of justice was initially
represented by her disdain for the Arrow, whom she had previously supported
despite some doubts. More than that, as corny as it sounds, she lost faith in
herself. This kind of nihilistic arc can be difficult to orchestrate and
frustrating to watch, yet by letting Laurel be unlikable and emotionally – instead
of physically – vulnerable, the show took her from being an object of desire
dependent on the whims and actions of others to being a person of her own, with
all the complications and pettiness that entails. She still needed to be
rescued, but from her personal demons rather than external villains, and over
the course of the next season and a half, she realized that only she could save
herself. As Katie Cassidy has
said, she needed to hit rock bottom in order to come out on top.
Her story is as much about self-discovery as it is about a downfall and
redemption, duel themes that were highlighted as the arc culminated (for now,
at least) in “Canaries”. Torn between
the desire to help others and her private fear that she’s too weak and selfish
and just all-out not good enough to follow in her sister’s footsteps, Laurel
finally faced her past and, with some
help, accepted that she couldn’t take Sara’s place, not because she’s not
worthy of it, but because she shouldn’t have been trying to in the first place.
After years of chasing ghosts and being seemingly bent on becoming one herself,
she came to terms with Sara’s death while realizing that the perfect, invincible
hero who can fix everything, an ideal she’d tried to impose to varying extents
on her father, Sara and Oliver, doesn’t exist. There are only people doing the
best they can with what they have in the limited ways they know how.
Felicity Smoak, making the world a better place, one truth
bomb at a time
Ultimately, Arrow’s vision of
heroism remains so enticing after almost three years because it never portrays
being a good person as something that comes easily. It must be earned and then
earned again, and again, a process filled with struggle, pain and uncertainty
and that is always in danger of being undone by one mistake or bad decision. In
the world of Starling City, heroes can be compromised, arrogant, afraid,
fallible and sometimes not very heroic at all. While this more ambiguous
approach to our fictional saviors is often dismissed as cynical and tiresome
nowadays, it both ensures that there will be a constant source of internal, as
well as external, conflict, which is the basis of traditional storytelling, and
suggests that you don’t have to be an unimpeachable person to do decent things
– or a wholly evil person to do bad things. Not everyone may be a born hero,
but they are capable of becoming one. After encountering so many comic heroines
who have been forced into the roles of either an untouchable Mary Sue (a la Pepper
Potts, Lois Lane) or a disempowered victim who has been manipulated and had Bad
Things done to her by Bad People (Black Widow, Gamora), it’s been incredibly satisfying
to see Laurel find her strength and courage by discovering a sense of agency
and identity, instead of having them stripped from her. She’s stumbled more
than a few times along the way and will no doubt do so again in the future, but
those failures make the successes just that much sweeter. In a show that’s
spent plenty of time exploring the futility and generally negative consequences
of the paternalistic impulse to protect everyone else (from evil, from the
truth, from each other, from themselves), it seems fitting that the damsel-in-distress
has broken out of her cage and become her own hero.
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