@Cockycent:
After giving it some time to breathe, i've come up with my final ranking of seasons
8 S4
7 S6
6 S3
5 S7
4 S8
3 S1
2 S5
1 S2
I remember doing the Smallville rewatch a month after it ended. I'll wait a year or so b4 I do an Arrow rewatch
I agree with all of this, except personally I like season 3 more than season 7.
I still maintain that the first half of season 3 is the classic Arrow like the first two seasons literally up until the point Oliver falls off the mountain. Right after that the show took a tailspin of bad writing up until season 5 saved it.
It's such a perfect cliffhanger for a midseason finale too! I really don't know how they fucked it up.
Up until that point here is what we know:
Malcolm was targeted by Ra's Al Ghul because of the Undertaking violated the League's code. Malcolm was terrified of Ra's so he trained Thea, then manipulated her into killing Sarah so that he would have leverage to force Oliver to fight Ra's.
As in this was Malcolm's plan. This is the cunning strategist who engineered a citywide conspiracy that resulted in it being leveled, the guy who manipulated his daughter who hated him into training with him. So clearly when Oliver is DESTROYED in his fight with Ra's it had to be of some bigger plan. Right? Right?
Nope, cut to the second half of the season and it turns out that literally was Malcolms plan. He's not shocked by it either, so it begs the question…...WHY?
When the point of the second half of the season is Malcolm saying "we can only do this by working together", getting Thea in the fold, having Oliver ultimately play double agent and make Malcolm become the new Ra's. If that was the point, why not have started with that instead of sending Oliver to a solo fight on a mountain? Malcolm was the one who shared with the League that "Thea" killed Sarah. He could have easily just blackmailed Oliver with that evidence to say "Ok we need to team up to stop him".
And of course that's only second to the dumbest thing of that season; Oliver surviving the mountain with ZERO explanation. He falls off the mountain after being stabbed through the chest, with multiple other cuts. Then he just...lives. Tatsu says he's been "revived", yet the next episode they just casually say something along the lines of "you're healing well". Then an episode later he's just walking about.
They could have easily just had it be a part of Malcolm's plan for him to nearly die like that. Ra's wouldn't attack Thea because he honored Oliver's stand, Ra's collects Oliver from the bottom of the mountain, and then uses stolen Lazarus Pit water to revive him. Bam, there ya go.
Instead we got horrible moments like Malcolm saying "there's not body, clearly he was buried in a snowstorm. But I just so happen to find Ra's sword, test the blood I bet it's Oliver's" while Felicity cries about it.