[Andrew NDB]

I've just started watching the show a couple of weeks back. I'm about halfway through season 2.

Season 1 had some serious problems (very annoying that each and every villain is in some way directly connected to Ollie, his sister, his mother, his father, his best friend, or Diggle) but most of that I can chalk up to it finding its own feet. Saw the comparisons to Iron Fist, in that both begin with a billionaire lost for years coming back to take his place... in Iron Fist it's a big deal, here it's basically sorted out in 2 episodes. Fights are hit or miss but generally interesting to watch. Now, I have to really hand it to the season finale... that was all kinds of bad-ass and big. Pretty rare to see a season build up so many characters only to gleefully tear them down in its end. It's impressive. The spectacle too.

Season 2 so far... eh, I dunno. It's more polished in some ways, but in others it seems even more questionable. Arrow's reasoning for "I absolutely will not kill now because my friend is deeeead" is pretty dodgy and it's a little bit corny how that's the through line throughout (Laurel's father and everyone all shocked/impressed at Arrow, "Oooh, really? Are you truly turning over a new leaf now? No more killing serial killers or supervillains that will just kill the next day, pwomise?"). The stuff with the return of Laurel's missing sister sort of happened too quickly to register... could have been way more powerful if handled more capably. It was also very confusing... the first few times I saw her "attack" in costume, I swore it was just the Kelly Hu character from last season, who also had a mask and blond wig. I found the "Ollie organizing a Cash-For-Guns Rally" episode, with all the good citizens of Starling City turning in their guns like lemmings as if it's this wondrous thing to be super preachy... though there's a certain irony in that the city official he was basically doing that for, to appease, is turning out to actually be a supervillain.

I don't know about the island stuff. It's wildly inconsistent. In season 1 alone, Ollie and Deathstroke must have killed -- easily -- about 30, 40 enemy soldiers on that island. Probably more. Where are they coming from? By the end of season 1 Ollie and/or the Asian guy and/or Deathstroke have been caught and escaped from them literally about 15 times. It should have been just "Castaway" on the island, with Ollie honing his skills... not some big convoluted thing.

That's where I'm at, around episode 7 of season 2. Way, way better than something like Smallville (of which I couldn't even make it more than 5, 6 episodes into) but not nearly as pound-for-pound entertaining as really any of the Netflix Marvel shows. You could cut like 10 episodes out of Arrow season 1 and it would hardly matter. Still, not bad.