Green Arrow and the Canaries proves that women rule the Arrowverse
By Shaun Stacy
With The CW’s Arrow winding down its final season, its penultimate episode gives us a glimpse of Star City’s future — and it is full of girl power.
While we’ve known for sometime this would be the final season of Arrow, audiences still aren’t ready to say goodbye to the vigilante archer and his friends. Arrow was the genesis of the Arrowverse, much like Iron Man was the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, focusing on playboy-turned-hero Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and his fight to save his hometown from criminal corruption. The show would go on to give birth to The Flash, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow, creating a universe full of superheroes on the small screen. After eight seasons, Ollie is hanging up his hood, but we’re still holding out hope he’ll pass the torch to his daughter, Mia.
In Tuesday night’s episode of Arrow titled “Green Arrow and the Canaries,” we go back to the future following the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Like most of The CW’s superhero shows, there have been a few changes to the world — mainly that Mia Queen (Smoak), played by Kat McNamara, is now a happy socialite with no memory of her past as the angry hero who fought alongside her father.
We eventually find out that somehow Earth-2 Laurel Lance (Arrowverse mainstay Katie Cassidy) and Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy) were pulled into the future as well with their full memories intact, some 20 years after Oliver Queen’s death. Laurel tracks down Dinah to get her help in getting Mia to remember her past life and to team up to save the daughter of Helena Bertinelli (Huntress), Bianca.
Even though it takes place in 2040, the episode echoed a lot of the main themes of Arrow, like family, legacy, responsibility and callings. The chemistry between Cassidy and Harkavy is palpable and playful, with Cassidy’s snarky Laurel taking shots at the newly laidback Dinah, who now owns a bar and moonlights as a lounge singer. Both actresses seem to sparkle more than they have in long time with new dimensions to the roles they’ve been playing for years.
McNamara fits in just fine and holds her own in both the action and the dramatic scenes. Speaking of the action scenes, they were reminiscent of the action from the Charlie’s Angels movies of the early 2000s (in a good way). The budget was on point, as special effects were top notch as well. The episode also left enough storylines with a few cliffhangers, which feels like more than enough to be the catalyst for an entirely new show.
This is the penultimate episode to Arrow‘s finale and is a planned backdoor pilot for a possible spin-off series, also titled Green Arrow and the Canaries. Female characters have always been a strong part of the Arrowverse, but this would be the first time a CW show has more than one female character sharing the title card. (We still love you, Supergirl and Batwoman.) By the end of the episode, it feels like the show that The WB’s 2002 Birds of Prey was meant to be, complete with a clocktower base of operations. Birds of Prey was largely considered ahead of it’s time, but we think it’s definitely time these female superheroes to soar.
Superbat: The future of the Arrowverse is female. dark. Next