Arrow: Unfinished Business Review

Our verdict on the nineteenth episode of The CW's hit superhero drama!
If there's one certainty that you can fathom these days about plenty of long-run US dramas, it's that getting the final few episodes of a season right is amongst the toughest of challenges for the production team. With this in mind, Unfinished Business falls prey to a number of narrative issues largely due to the fact that there's an irksome sense of filler material on show here. It's not a bad episode, for sure, but it's definitely not amongst the show's best.

Perhaps the greatest mistake an episode towards the end of a series' run can make is reducing or reverting elements of interesting narrative arcs. Indeed, it felt as if on multiple occasions here, once-intriguing plot threads in the show's continuity were either left aside or grotesquely mishandled. Tommy's sudden mistrust of Oliver and reversal to the side of his corrupt father was an unrealistic turn of events, clearly set in place to fulfill a rushed final arc for the season finale, while Detective Lance's equally new upheaval of Oliver's club thrust him once again back into the guise of a predictable paternal-crazy cop who we've seen in countless incarnations of superhero shows before. Throw in very little progress on the Deadshot front and the unnecessary return of the Count in a filler standalone romp , and you've got a storyline which was clearly misfocused in its attempts to deal with multiple major arcs.

There were some positive aspects to this latest instalment, though. Although the flashback sequences are still hardly revolutionary in tone or narrative styles, at the very least it was interesting to see Oliver begin to develop visually in the Hood-clad archer we see before us today. On top of that, there were at the very least indications towards the episode's end that Laurel might make an impact on her father's habits in days to come. If these elements of the show can be further emphasized in the remaining four episodes of this season, then we might have hope for a truly spectacular finale.

Nevertheless, right now we're in firmly mediocre territory with Episode 19. Ever since the second mid-season premiere, it's seemed that Arrow has struggled to regain its position as a truly innovative and ambitious US drama, dwelling on many of its once-thrilling season arcs in unnecessary filler-esque ways. Arrow: Unfinished Business does little to buck that trend, and one can only hope that with four episodes left to go before the season reaches its climax, the show's writers have got their unnecessary unfinished business plot strands out of the way so as to leave a satisfying legacy ahead of Autumn's Season Two.
3/5