Too real, ChrisD, too real.

Yeah, but I enjoy how over his shit Thea is. Her utter dismissiveness kept it fresh.

Some very solid chain wrestling in that one too. Didn't hit the finisher, but a solid match overall.

I just really like Thea, shut up you guys!

I love everything about this.

I have a lot of thoughts on how a show could handle stuff like this, and I might even try to work it into a For Our Consideration or something someday, but it mostly all boils down to, "Genre shows should be more like Farscape." Which they bloody well should.

I'm not saying you're saying this, but "It's okay because 24 did it that way" is shaky ground when assessing coherent, logical storytelling. And I say that with no particular issue with what 24 was.

In that moment, I kinda wished Arrow could just go full Justified, with random henchmen having implausibly locquacious conversations before proving themselves to be total dumbasses. Basically just infuse a whole ton of Elmore Leonard into the show, and never, ever kill off Neal McDonough.

That's *probably* fair, but I have a pretty ironclad rule (that I probably break all the time) not to judge a show for things it may or may not do in the future.

It looks like there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of time left to redirect it, so she may have been limited. Or maybe she only knew how to spoof GPS coordinates at *exactly* a 20-mile distance. Plausible!

In fairness, I wouldn't say they present it as a victory. I just don't think they give it enough space to really register as their worst ever defeat.

Thanks! Honestly, the part everyone should care about is the ~1,200 words I write offering a take on the episode and/or the show at large, not the single letter I slap on it at the end of the process after about 10 seconds of thought. I get why that isn't always going to be the case, but I'll always be the first to…

Those actually weren't awful flashbacks though! The issue isn't so much when the flashbacks are set as the insistence that every episode needs them. Making flashbacks an occasional thing — which is functionally what they are whenever the show flashes back to something that isn't the ongoing "Oliver five years go"…

"I'm not just a cutthroat political operative, I can also count at least to five!"

Presence of Neal McDonough aside, this isn't Justified, so I can't just give out A's willy-nilly.

Nah man, we're going next level with this shit by flashing back to season one. Katy Cassidy and Colin Donnell are standing by! (Susanna Thompson ain't coming back though, just to make things extra awkward.)

I assumed they just wanted to group all the murders/suicides Oliver has witnessed together, then move onto the other stuff. Keep things thematically tidy, ya know?

I seriously have no idea what I'm doing with the grades anymore. Like, even less so than I do for any other show. I'm kind of working on the assumption this is setting the stage for a general upward tick as the season wraps up, so I want to leave room for improvement. Also, as I said toward the end there, some of the…

I'm not even remotely expert enough to answer that, though I do hope Leicester winning with a couple weeks left gives everyone sufficient time to recognize them as champions who are both massively improbable and just so, so fucking weird.

I was going to say that in some places these days you can get both, but there's really nothing casual about that racism.