Arrow Season 5: Thea Gets A New Role

After 4 Seasons of pain, misery and trauma, mostly brought about by her brother, it seems Thea Queen (Willa Holland) is about to get a new role in the Arrowverse…as said brother’s Chief of Staff.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Arrow Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim stated that with Oliver’s (Stephen Amell) newfound role as mayor, comes the opportunity for Thea to help him out:

“What we’ve done is we made her Oliver’s chief of staff, perhaps, to her own surprise, she’s actually really, really good at it. All the skills that she learned by watching her mother for all those years, as well as running Verdant, she’s found very transferable to City Hall, and in many ways, she’s a much better chief of staff than Oliver is a mayor.”

The interview makes it sound as if Thea is going to be much more independent from Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman) in the upcoming season, which, given how central he was to her storyline in Season 4, means we’ll hopefully see Thea get to do more than just get angry with her father every other episode.

Arrow Season 4 ended with Oliver Queen finally becoming Mayor of Star City, whilst the rest of Team Arrow disbanded following the traumatic fight against Damien Dahrk (Neal McDonough). Season 5 of Arrow is set to premiere in the US Wednesday, October 5th 8pm on The CW, with international release following soon after.

Thor Mockumentary Debuts

Ever wondered what Thor was doing during Captain America: Civil War?

Yesterday Marvel released a hilarious short detailing what the God of Thunder was up to whilst his Avenging cohorts were busy duking it out. The hilarious video entitled, ‘While You Were Fighting: A Thor Mockumentary’, was recently shown to audiences attending San-Diego Comic-Con.

Directed by the very man bringing us ‘Thor Ragnarok’, Taika Waititi, the video offers a fantastic look at what Thor gets up to in between his blockbuster film appearances, and it seems he’s just as intrigued by the ‘purple man in the floating chair who doesn’t like standing up’ as the rest of us.

As well as being a brilliant marketing ploy to tide audiences over until the eventual release of Thor’s next outing, this video offers us our first glimpse at the tone and direction the next film could take. And if this is anything to go by, i’d say ‘Thor Ragnarok’ is shaping up to be one of Marvel’s best films to date.

Fear The Walking Dead SN2 EP8 – ‘Grotesque’

A quiet, reflective episode is a welcome change as the past is explored.

It might come as a surprise to some, but on reflection, just about every episode of this season of ‘Fear The Walking Dead’ has been action heavy. Since that initial escape from Los Angeles- one of the show’s most exciting moments that was cut disappointingly short- it doesn’t seem like this dysfunctional band of misfits has had much time to just pause and take stock of their situation. Now an emphasis on action is all well and good, but one of the main complaints about ‘The Walking Dead’ is that the balance between action and inaction isn’t always the best, and it’s a trap that ‘Fear’ is in danger of falling into as well, except viewers a probably more forgiving of a show with too much action. It should be noted then that two of the best episodes this season have been much slower paced, and involved exploring a characters past.

We saw this with Strand earlier in the season, an ultimately more mysterious character, however Nick’s flashbacks here were just as informative. Nick’s actions and behaviour have been a point of mystery over the course of the show. The idea that his addict tendencies gave him some form of connection or understanding with the walkers never quite clicked, so the flashbacks go a long way to forming some reasoning behind his mind-set. Nick has always felt distanced from his own family, and with the absence of a father, including when said father was alive but depressed, caused him to fill that void with his drug addiction. However that feeling of being an outsider never really went away, causing him to feel more at home among the walkers.

It’s not that Nick wants to remain this way though. It’s been clear throughout this season that Nick craves a functioning family dynamic, just not with his own family. There’s too much history and judgement present there, so when figures such as Strand or Celia came along, he clung to their every word in the need of having someone who actually saw his talents. So when Nick finds a new group at the end of the episode, there’s a real sense that he’s finally found somewhere he belongs, free of the clutches of his family. The hapiness he feels translates to the audience. Sure part of the reason we watch this show is to see people suffer through an apocalypse, but the suffering is so heavy that when a character gets the chance to smile, we smile with them.

Whilst the flashbacks brought about some excellent character building moments, the rest of the episode brilliantly explored the reason behind the episode title ‘Grotesque.’ Often, 30 minutes of someone wandering aimlessly around the desert wouldn’t exactly make for riveting TV. Yet ‘Fear’ manages to pack in just enough thrilling moments to make the episode exciting without hitting us with a barrage of unlikely scenarios. It’s completely plausible that whilst wandering through 100 miles of hostile territory Nick would wander into a few issues, but pile too much stuff on and it starts to get tiring.

It was fascinating to see how quickly Nick devolved being out in the wilderness on his own. After losing his supplies he resorts to drinking his own urine and eating the Walker chewed carcass of a dog. Up until now the characters on this show have had a fairly cosy time of it, so it’s great to see more ‘Grotesque’ moments pop up. It also brilliantly conveys how important company is in this world. As has been proven on the main series, being alone really isn’t an option, however we’ve never really seen much regarding why it’s so horrible. So here with Nick, watching him struggle to survive over and over not only adds to his character, but has the knock on effect of adding more understanding to characters like Michonne over on ‘The Walking Dead.’

Of course it wasn’t all flashbacks and fleabags, so other notable highlights include:

• Crazy lady with a metal bat! Gotta hand it to the marketing team for teasing this moment in the promos leading up to the episode. I’m sure the possibility of a Negan-esque character on the show drew in a few more viewers. That being said, I think I’d actually rather face Negan than the crazy woman we saw here.

• Speaking of Negan, we saw some Saviour types throughout the episode. These guys win the award for most avoidable death ever, which is something The Walking Dead social media team agree with too. There’s stupid and then there’s not running away from a marauding band of cannibalistic dead people when a perfectly good car is right behind you.

• Was a little disappointed we didn’t see the rest of the crew this episode, mainly because the storyline containing Strand’s group looks so damn interesting, but I’m all for these more self-contained episodes. Provides a much better chance of developing characters.

• So what dark and horrible secret is Nick’s newfound community harbouring? There’s always something, and if you’ve seen the trailer for this half season, you know it really could be horrible.

So, ‘Fear The Walking Dead’ pleased this week with a truly solid episode. The show has struggled getting here, but with each passing episode the show is getting better and better. The look into Nick’s past provided us with some much needed context for his actions that can only help one of the better characters on the show become even more of a fan favourite. The brutal look at solitary survival was also a welcome treat, and I look forward to learning more about this new community Nick finds himself in. In the meantime though it seems like we can look forward to catching up with Maddison and Co next week, which promises to be a treat all of its own.