Warning: this review contains full spoilers for Arrow: Season 8, Episode 9, which serves as a backdoor pilot for the proposed “Green Arrow and the Canaries” spinoff. We’re checking in with all the Arrowverse shows this week to see how they build on the fallout of the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. You can check out our reviews for Batwoman Season 1, Episode 10, Supergirl Season 5, Episode 10 and Black Lightning Season 3, Episode 10, with our Legends of Tomorrow: Season 5 Premiere review coming soon.
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It’s difficult not to feel ambivalence toward The CW’s upcoming Green Arrow and the Canaries spinoff series. On one hand, that spinoff promises to dull the sting of losing a show that’s been a part of fans’ lives for eight years. On the other, it does so by doubling down on the weakest elements of the past three seasons of Arrow. With its penultimate episode, Arrow attempts to build a stronger case for that spinoff in the form of a backdoor pilot. But after watching “Green Arrow and the Canaries,” the jury is still out.
It’s not as if this detour doesn’t come at the right time. Oliver Queen is dead, having sacrificed his life twice in Crisis to save the multiverse. There’s little for Arrow to do now but reflect on that sacrifice and the legacy of the Arrowverse’s first hero. There’s something fitting about the series opting to look ahead before it looks back and explores how Oliver’s daughter chooses to carry on his mission two decades down the line.
Still, there’s little getting around the fact that the recurring flash-forward storyline has never been one of Arrow’s more compelling plot points. Once the initial novelty wore off, the flash-forwards devolved into a dull, rote look at the future of Star City – more a way of continuing one of Arrow’s most recognizable storytelling tropes than a truly necessary addition to the series. It’s only when the flash-forwards have managed to forge a direct link between past and present (such as when Mia and her friends were dragged back into 2019) that this storyline has achieved any real resonance. So what reason is there to be optimistic for a spinoff that completely detaches itself from the past?
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That’s the fundamental question this episode tries and never quite manages to answer. In its favor, “Green Arrow and the Canaries” attempts to give viewers a clean break from the previous flash-forward material. The fallout of Crisis has resulted in Mia and her friends returning to 2040 and having their memories realign to fit a world where Ollie’s sacrifice has made Star City into the safest place in the country. That alone helps this episode feel like a proper Arrow coda. After seven seasons of Ollie fighting and losing so much and never making true, lasting headway in saving his city, it’s good to have tangible proof it was all worth it in the end.
The obvious criticism with this soft reboot of the 2040 setting is that it prevents viewers from getting full closure with the pre-Crisis conflict. A lot of that material goes unresolved here. But A) who really cares at this point? And B) with both Mia and JJ having their memories restored, we’re still going to see ramifications from their pre-Crisis rivalry. If anything, this shake-up creates a more real and effective link between the two. In one life, they were bitter enemies. In the other, they were lovers. Now they have to reconcile the two.
The revamped timeline also adds a new layer to Connor, who’s become a much much darker and more troubled character. Presumably, we’re seeing the unintended ramifications of Sara Diggle being restored to existence in Crisis. Because Dig and Lyla now have two children to raise, they probably never adopt Connor and never have that powerful influence over him as a child.
In general, Arrow is doing a lot more than its sister shows to explore the psychological effects of heroes having their post-Crisis memories overwritten by pre-Crisis memories. Elsewhere, it’s been like flipping a switch, whereas here the warring sets of memories create major emotional trauma. Maybe that’s a discrepancy between shows, but it’s easy enough to explain by assuming the process is much more painful and destructive because these characters have been living their new lives for 20 years.
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This episode also finds sufficient narrative reason to pair Mia with the two Black Canaries of old. Laurel is now a woman without a world thanks to Crisis, so it’s not difficult to see why she’d just as soon make her home in the future than stay in 2020. As for Dinah, the reveal that Crisis seems to have erased all record of her existence is an interesting development, one that may hint at similar problems across the Arrowverse. You don’t make an Earth-Prime without breaking a few people. For whatever Dinah has brought to Arrow over the past few years, she’s also managed to make an already convoluted take on Black Canary that much more complicated. Wiping the slate clean and reinventing her as a bored jazz singer getting back in touch with her inner vigilante isn’t the worst way to reinvigorate Dinah.
The team-building in this episode does little to contradict the idea that Green Arrow and the Canaries is channeling Birds of Prey under a different name. Sure, this team has double the Black Canary and no Batgirl, but otherwise it hits many of the same notes. They’re even based out of a watchtower and rubbing elbows with a member of the Bertinelli family. Given that WB’s movie division probably has all things BoP on lockdown for now, this is probably the closest we’ll get on the TV side. And whatever the spinoff chooses to call itself, looking to BoP and the work of creators like Gail Simone can only help the series grow.
All told, the flash-forward setting definitely carries a bit more weight and oomph than it did before. Whether that’s enough to justify an ongoing series is another matter. Arrow has struggled enough just to keep the momentum going in brief, weekly vignettes. What happens when those vignettes become the main attraction? That’s mostly where “Green Arrow and the Canaries” falls short as a backdoor pilot. We get some idea of the conflict fueling the spinoff series in its first season. There’s a new threat to Star City, one seemingly fated to end in the city’s destruction and Mia becoming a pariah. Unfortunately, that new enemy isn’t developed well enough here. This episode is far too open-ended and anticlimactic on that front, which also leaves Arrow in a weird spot leading into its series finale.
The overarching conflict established here suggests Green Arrow and the Canaries will fall into the exact same storytelling pattern as its predecessor – an endless series of mastermind villains plotting to destroy the city while the Green Arrow risks everything to stop them. Star City circa-2040 barely looks any different than it does in the present, so at some point the spinoff is in danger of becoming Arrow with a different lead character. (And maybe that’s the whole point.)
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Also frustrating is the way the 2040 storyline continues treating Deathstroke like a disposable villain, letting any random goon who wants to destroy the city don the mask. Deathstroke is probably the Arrowverse’s best villain, but only because of that deep connection to Oliver Queen that was forged over the course of two years. You can’t replicate that appeal simply by slapping the mask on another character and pretending they’re the next Slade Wilson. Yet like Arrow, Green Arrow and the Canaries seems determined to try.
This episode needed to show its cards more than it actually does. It improves on a less than thrilling formula, but not to the point that it makes a convincing case for that formula as a weekly series. If the Star City of the future is in danger, why not simply pawn off the problem on the Legends of Tomorrow and call it a day? The success of Green Arrow and the Canaries may come down less to how well it springboards off of Arrow and more in how much it channels the fun and camaraderie of Birds of Prey. Like Oliver Queen, the spawn of Arrow needs to evolve into something else.