Arrow: Series Finale - "Fadeout" Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Warning: this review contains full spoilers for the series finale of Arrow! If you need a refresher on where we left off, here's our review for Season 8, Episode 9 and our full review of the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. [poilib element="accentDivider"] It's a strange experience writing the final review for a series that's been a part of my personal and professional life for eight years. Before Arrow existed, Smallville was the closest thing to a fully realized, live-action superhero universe on TV. Now we have a whole Arrowverse, one that keeps getting bigger and crazier and comic book-ier with each passing year. Oliver Queen changed a lot over the course of eight years, as did world around him. It's fitting that the series takes its final bow not by putting Ollie in the spotlight, but by examining how his crusade affected the lives of everyone around him. To be frank, Arrow didn't even necessarily need a series finale in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Ollie already made his grand, heroic sacrifice and finally achieved his goal of saving Star City. What more even needs to be said at this point? But in a way, that works to the benefit of "Fadeout." The hardest part is already over. There's really no way to unstick the landing, so the finale is less an epic climax to the series than it is a quiet epilogue and an opportunity to spend one last hour with old friends. Quite a few old friends, as it turns out. "Fadeout" shows us Lex Luthor wasn't the only one to manipulate reality and create a new Earth more to his liking. Ollie apparently tweaked Earth-Prime so that doppelgangers of nearly all the loved ones who died over the course of the series are now living in the reborn Star City. It's a clever twist that allows the series to end on a very upbeat and hopeful note despite, you know, everyone grieving for the dead main character. It says a lot about Ollie that he went through the trouble of giving all these people - his mother, Tommy, even poor, twisted Emiko - a second chance without trying to reclaim his own life. And perhaps most importantly, the method behind these "resurrections" dances around any concerns about cheapening their original deaths. Those deaths still happened, just in a universe that no longer exists. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=arrow-fadeout-photos&captions=true"] It's great seeing so many familiar cast members back, including Susanna Thompson's Moira Queen, Colin Donnell's Tommy Merlyn, Katrina Law's Nyssa al Ghul and even Joe Dinicol's Rory Regan. The complaint with nearly all these returning characters is that we didn't get to see enough of them, but there's really only so much that can be expected of one episode. And certainly, writers Marc Guggenheim and Beth Schwartz knew their biggest priority had to be Emily Bett Rickards' Felicity. Season 8 has been able to coast by without Felicity up to now, but it would have been unthinkable to wrap up without bringing her back. Rickards delivers an emotionally charged performance to cap off her Arrowverse tenure, with Felicity juggling her grief over Ollie, her fear at losing William too and the profoundly strange sensation of meeting an adult version of her infant daughter. And fittingly, it all culminates in a sequence that finally reveals what became of 2040's Felicity at the end of Season 7. This episode is somewhat vague (intentionally, no doubt) as to whether Ollie still exists in Spectre form or is truly and completely dead, but all that really matters is he and Felicity finally get that happy ending they failed to achieve at the end of Seasons 3 and 7. If "Fadeout" does anything right, it's in passing the torch from Ollie to Diggle. David Ramsey really shines here as a man mourning his brother and struggling to decide what his purpose is in a world that no longer needs Team Arrow. The flashbacks help highlight that brotherly dynamic and show just how far the two have come since 2012. And happily, this episode implies we'll be seeing a lot more of the Diggle family beyond Ramsey's guest role in next week's The Flash. Their move to Metropolis suggests John and/or Lyla might be part of the supporting cast on Superman & Lois. And it sure seems like that John Diggle: Green Lantern fan theory has well and truly come to pass. The actual conflict in the finale is nothing terribly remarkable. Post-Prometheus, the idea of an old enemy from Season 1 returning to strike at Oliver Queen where he's most vulnerable seems a little redundant. But that subplot and the flashback scenes get the job done in terms of adding a little variety to the mix. You don't want to devote an entire hour to people crying in front of tombstones and statues, especially when James Bamford is directing. And there's something highly amusing about the very last villain in Arrow being named after the influential and infamously cantankerous comic creator John Byrne. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/01/18/crisis-on-infinite-earths-crossover-review"] While emotionally stirring in all the right ways, "Fadeout" does fall short in a few key ways. Anyone who's followed my Arrow reviews over the years probably knows what I'm going to say next. It's hugely disappointing that Manu Bennett's Slade Wilson never made a significant return appearance in Season 8. Slade is easily the best villain Arrow ever produced, and he only Reverse-Flash rivals him as the best Arrowverse villain of them all. The series will always feel irritatingly incomplete in that regard. We do get that early rehash of the pivotal Slade/Moira scene from Season 2 early on, but one has to assume Bamford and his team fudged the end result using archival footage rather than actually flying Bennett out to film a couple quick shots of being punched in the face. Otherwise, why not give Slade a meatier role and actually provide the character with the closure Season 6 never quite achieved? There are several possible reasons why Bennett never returned for Season 8 when nearly every other fan-favorite actor did. Maybe the scheduling never worked out. Maybe, as with Michael Rosenbaum's refusal to take part in Crisis, The CW was never able to provide Bennett with the compensation he felt he deserved. Or maybe Slade is just another casualty of WB's strange dislike of having multiple simultaneous versions of the same character. With Deathstroke playing such a huge role in Titans: Season 2, it could be that Bennett's return was never going to be an option. Whatever the explanation, the almost complete lack of Slade Wilson in the finale causes the series to end on a needlessly sour note. It's also strange how much the events of "Fadeout" seem to clash with last week's "Green Arrow and the Canaries." That episode revealed Dinah fled to the year 2040 after discovering no trace of her existence remains in 2020. How exactly does that gel with what we see here? There's also little sense of how and why Laurel comes to be in 2040. These glaring inconsistencies stand out all the more because this episode does reference William's kidnapping in "Green Arrow and the Canaries," so it's not as if the two hands aren't talking to each other. For these and other reasons, Arrow's final episode does stumble a bit as it crosses the finish line. There are a few too many loose ends that will probably have to be wrapped up in other Arrowverse series. But at least the core trinity of Ollie, Felicity and Diggle are given the sendoffs they deserve. Much as it has throughout its tumultuous existence, Arrow succeeds where it matters most. [poilib element="poll" parameters="id=240f520d-32b1-4811-b0d7-7dd17217cf83"]

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