User Reviews

"Thanksgiving" plays off of some powerful character drama and finally gives a generic, but understandable motive to its main villain. Thea's return was also heartwarming (if utterly predictable). While the action may have been left somewhat neglected this time around in favour of a Billy Joel concert, this episode elevates the long slog that Arrow has been suffering from lately.

In this episode we see Diggle and the team pay the price for him using an experimental steroid and concealing his neurological problem from Oliver and the entire team. This leads to a confrontation between Dig and Oliver – again! I'm getting bored with the same confrontation between Diggle and Oliver that happens over and over again throughout the series. They've been through so much together; it doesn't make sense that this conflict should be a recurring problem. The scenes lack the emotional tension that the writers were trying to convey. This whole filler episode was rife with poor writing, acting and directing. The best thing that happens is Thea waking up. This is good since we need her to put some pizazz back into the show. The actor playing William is particularly wooden. Katie Cassidy is wasted with the poor writing that shows the Black Siren basically swaggering around in her black leather with a smirk on her face in between screams. The fight scenes were so poorly choreographed that in one scene a bad guy just flips completely over as if he'd been hit, but nobody was even close to him. So silly looking. Why would Billy Joel agree to appear in something this bad? Why would an A lister like M. Emerson debase himself with this pathetic role retreading over the same old worn out territory of revenge-driven bad guy who blames Arrow for losing a loved one? I don't mean to be unkind about the way the actress who plays Felicity dresses and moves, but I've noticed over the seasons that she is obviously working out & has become somewhat muscle-bound. Unfortunately, when she walks in high heels she looks like a bow- legged cowboy who just got back from thirty days riding horseback on the range! She needs to be trained how to walk in those heels if she insists on wearing them.

Only thing i wanted to say was how it's funny and so not realistic how Thea wakes up from 6 MONTHS in a coma, and is up and alert like it was a catNap.... i was in a medically induced coma last year for 18 days and took me 2 months in hospitals and rehabs and then slow recovery on my own at home. Nearly a year later I'm pretty much okay again. And that was just 18 days for a weird freak medical trauma. Just saying, it was funny because i have seen that kinda stuff on shows and movies before and it's soooo not like that in real life at all man.

Arresting Oliver in front of his son. And that really the PD and others should had stood up to her. As really that was foul. As she could had done it after Thanksgiving.

Wished Oliver could had gone to her boss over harassment. But still the Diggle and Oliver brotherhood ship may have had it's differences and facing on how that it for the Arrow team.

Poor Oliver's family, really do not need that harassment. Really Watson just wants to have a career but she is not the first nor last arrogant fed to try to take down someone who is a hero but in her eyes she does not seem to see or care about the big picture.

What a sore sport.

Now, I see myself as a huge fan of "Arrow." This is the show that has always had everything in front of it, and has always managed to come back from dire circumstances. It has become popular to hate on Seasons 3 and 4, and while I will agree that those seasons were weaker links to the series as a whole, I don't think that "Arrow" has ever had a season that sucked. It has always been a top-notch show or right in the middle. That said, the series has had some very questionable episodes that were either pointless or plain bad. Those episodes especially plagued the second half of Season 4, which is why I think that season became weaker and weaker as it went along. Season 6 has been a hit for me so far, so it was a shock that I found this week's episode to be completely pointless and uneven. It didn't further the plot in any particular way and it had no profound effect on our characters in a good way. This is the worst episode of "Arrow" that I have seen in a very long time.

I will start out with the bad things about the episodes, because there aren't that many good ones. First of all, I found the plot to be pointless. Everything that happened in the episode seemed weirdly out-of-place and the only thing the story needed to do was to make Oliver the Green Arrow again. It succeeded with doing that, even if it's only for a short time. It also managed to take to make the vote for the anti-vigilante law pointless, as the ultimate outcome was the original decision made by the council, which makes this a subplot that wasted time in the four previous episodes.

I found the moments to be very uneven. At first, it seems like the writers tried to come up with reasons for everyone to be angry at each other, but they quickly changed that to making every character feel sympathy for each other. That only ended up making the episode seem overly sentimental and made me very confused. The writers on these shows have always shied away from simply making some things go by normally. They always have to make a huge fuss about everything, even though it mostly ends up simply becoming a heel for the episode and overarching storyline.

I'm worried about the way they are going with Cayden James. His motivations weren't really clear in the last episode, but this episode the audience got to know some valuable details about him. His son was killed in something involving the Green Arrow. Sounds familiar? Maybe because it was the exact same motivation the writers gave Prometheus for going after Oliver. And while it worked very well with Prometheus and made him intriguing, the decision to do it again seems like a huge cop out. I hope the writers come up with something better for him, or else I'll be very disappointed. I will also say that Samanda Watson is becoming more and more a cliché, and I don't like that.

Now, one of the good things about this episode was the incredible action scenes. Especially the one-shot fight scene between Team Arrow and Cayden's henchmen. They have used that method a lot in this season, and I am liking the way it is turning out.

I am also happy to see Thea back. Her character has also been hit-and-miss for me, but I thought she found her right place in Season 5. Her character work as Oliver's chief of staff; it is when she goes out as Speedy that I tune off on her. I hope that she will resume her post in this season, as that's where she belongs. So, I'm excited to see what the writers will do with her, and I also like Willa Holland's presence in the show, as well as her chemistry with Stephen Amell.