TV Review: Arrow Season 4, Episode 5: Haunted

This was the episode that everyone was really excited for because it featured Matt Ryan playing Constantine, after his show on NBC was cancelled last season. I found it hard to really get into that, considering that I never watched the show and didn't feel a particular compulsion to watch it. What mattered was how he worked in this episode, which oddly made it a good counterpoint to this week's episode of The Flash. Both of them featured a character with a lot of extra baggage attached (Constantine here, Wells there), but while The Flash used it to kickstart the plotline for the season, here most of it went to this one episode, not having quite as large of hooks for the main storyline.

TV Review: Arrow Season 4 Episode 1 "Green Arrow"

First thing being first, I did not hate Season 3 of Arrow. I know that it got a lot of hatred for a lot of things that it did, and while I think that Season 2 was definitely superior, I still liked Season 3 quite a bit. Most of the problems were coming from the logic of the world, not the emotional and character work, and I find that to be a decent trade off to make.

A Quick Note About How I Met Your Mother

I'm not going to be reviewing How I Met Your Mother, even though it's one of only two currently running shows that a) I'm caught up on and b) I care enough about to watch. I hadn't even considered reviewing it before now, but looking at the last few episodes, I don't think it'd be a good candidate for a show to review.

I doubt this is the case, but it feels like the producers really liked Season 4 of Arrested Development. More than likely, they're being forced into it because of circumstance, but I'm just getting such a strong vibe from this that it's impossible to ignore. Everything is over such a short period of time, jumping forward and back in time, we're dealing with small groups of characters rather than all of them in a room at the same time, and it feels like they designed the season for being watched all at once instead of over the course of several months like they're aired. That's the reason I won't review it as episodes air, since it seems to be more of a package deal. However, I want to talk about the last episode, just a little thing.

My biggest problem with Season 4 of Arrested Development is that it didn't look good. It looked very cheap, and they either didn't have time to finish the effects, or didn't have the capability, or something. I don't really know what it was, but the end result was something that ended up looking really cheap. The last episode of How I Met Your Mother had a scene with all those problems. In a scene with Ted and Barney on the beach, there's some rather terrible green screen for the beach behind them, but that's not the worst of it. The audio in that scene is also noticeably terrible, especially when it starts raining. It almost feels like they tried to record the audio while using a rain machine rather than using ADR. Did they run out of time, or what? Did they think it would work? Did they not care? I don't really know, but it baffles me that it was just so cheap and technically lacking.

In the end, I have no real conclusion to this, but just an observation. I got the feeling that there was no way this show's final season could really lead to a satisfying conclusion, but I didn't expect to be disappointed on the technical side of the show. I'll just have to wait and see, but it's not in the most reassuring place right now.