Nerd TV Presents:  Arrow the Watchening or Grampa Dave is in his Rocking Chair Again

Hello?  Who’s there?  Oh, it’s you!  I didn’t notice you for a minute there, just lost in my rememberins.  I do tend to wander off into my own little world in this here rockin’ chair.  What was I remembering you ask?  Well, I was rememberin’ a time when comic book characters were colorful and the villains they fought were even more colorful!  Now, I’m not talking about actual color, mind you, I’m talking about flavor.  A character’s got to have a sort of flare to capture the hearts and minds of the people who read the funny books.  Nowadays modern TV shows and Movies, they HATE flare, it scares ‘em.  So they do their level best to deflarify beloved characters, makin’ ‘em flat, lifeless, and generally worthless.  It’s been a few weeks since I’ve sat down to watch that Arrow show, but like always, I’m watchin’ it for the first time, come, watch it with me, I see that tonight’s episode is called Vertigo.  Suspicious, Vertigo is the name of the drug that Thea took that made her crash her birthday car…which means, undoubtedly, that the man who manufactures or distributes the drug will be called, The Count.  Not Count Vertigo, because that would be actual flavor.  Nope, he’ll just be The Count because somehow that is better.  He will not have a weird vertigo-inducing device; he’ll just dose people on his drug (I saw that much in the preview from the last episode).  But I digress.  Let’s get to watching, shall we?

In the time it took Arrow to jump from one fire escape to another, the running guy ran 2/3’s down a very VERY long alley.   Shades of the Six Million Dollar Man…why is it when he’s supposed to be moving fast he’s actually moving really slowly.  Ah, so this gentleman is a Vertigo salesman.  Consider: Oliver has his ear to the ground on ALL crime in Star(ling) City.  For crying out loud, he went after a slum lord who saved $10 an apartment by installing faulty smoke detectors.  And only now has he heard of Vertigo?  Only after his sister gets arrested for being on the schtuff?  Dollars to doughnuts, The Count (oh yeah, I was right) isn’t in Oliver’s book of names, so this is a personal vendetta but it also goes to show, if your problems to not in some way directly relate to Oliver or his book, too bad, hire the A-Team…if you can find them.  “They call him The Count, that’s all I know.”  Why?  Because he loves to count?  Ah AH ehh.

The Count has blood on his hands?  Why?  All vertigo seems to do is make you unable to drive, just don’t drive while your on it and you should be fine.  You know who has a lot of blood on their hands, Oliver?  I’m not going to name names, but he comes from bOLIVia, loves black OLIVEs, gets his wands from OLIVandERs…it’s you, okay?

Oliver is giving Thea tips for getting out of trouble.  Step One: be a billionaire.  That’s it.  Maybe Step Two could be don’t dress like my grandmother at a church luncheon.

Thea are you a druggy?  Thea are you going into rehab?  Thea, is it true your family calls you Speedy for some inexplicable reason?

So, the judge ain’t havin’ it and throws out Thea’s plea agreement which means she will go to trial for being a bad driver.  “Like it or not,” he says, “You are the poster child for the menace sweeping our city.”

Now the mom is complaining that the judge is out to make an ‘example’ of Thea, “Why does it have to be her?”  She laments.  Well, and here me out on this one, it has to be her because SHE DID IT YOU WORTHLESS HUMAN BEING.  She drove around hopped up on a synthetic drug and crashed her car.   Oh, but don’t worry, Oliver is going to catch ‘The Count’ and make HIM the example for the city.  Except, we already know drug dealers are caught and punished, better if the spoiled daughter of a billionaire was jailed for 6 months to prove a point.  Try not to kill any innocent janitors on your way to saving your sister, Oliver.

Island time:  Oliver is in a cage.  His mentor stares at him through the bars.  Sad Oliver is Sad.

McKenna Hall, her name sounds like a dorm room.  Immediately they establish her character to be someone from Oliver’s wild past, who got them kicked out of a club because there was not sign saying you HAD to keep your clothes on.  Ha ha, it’s called the social contract, sweetie, you will be a terrible police officer.  Open the file, show a picture of The Count from Sesame Street, and I will never say another bad word about this show.

I would have felt a little better if The Count looked and sounded like Dieter from Spockets.  Instead, he’s doing a bad impression of The Scarecrow from Chris Nolan’s Batman movies.  Shoot The Count, shoot THE, ah damn it.

I swear to god, I spent like 20 seconds after Arrow started waiting to see a General Mills International Coffee logo, or Folgers or something.  It wasn’t until Tommy showed up that I realized I wasn’t watching a coffee commercial.  The best part of waking up is apparently not having to snuggle with Tommy Merlyn.  “Taking a hard line against criminals is a platform for the judges re-election.”  As opposed to what?  Letting all criminals go free?  What are you doing to me show?

The angry raisin makes a good point.  No one is to blame for Sarah’s death except for the person who had the boat sabotaged!  But you two don’t know that, so quit blaming Oliver and Sarah for what you believe to be an accident.

My intererestssts.  What?  This is just a picture of a television puppet.  HA, your stupid test won’t work, Oliver has no morals…of course, he probably used some island mojo taught to him by…ah HA island flash back, here we go.  Death Stroke fight club.  What, now he has to dispose of the body?  Sheesh, Russians, get it together.  Ugh, The Count, just stop it.

Thea, several of the words you used, do not have ‘s’s in them.  And most of the ones that do, just have one.  I think it would be funny if Oliver just kept making up more and more stuff that his dad ‘said’ on the boat before dying: ‘Thea, dad said specifically, don’t wear that outfit to the club.’  ‘Thea, dad said you’re looking a little fat and should hit the gym.”

DO YOU KNOW WHY THEY CALL HIM THE COUNT!!!  Oh dag, Oliver got dosed with double pure vertigo, yet still has time to live, get back to headquarters (the Arrow Cave) and for Diggle to make his magic wake-em up potion.

Only if you PROMISE not to kill me.  Oliver, you had 17 simultaneous heart attacks, how do you feel?  Like I’m getting over a hangover .  Look, I bought drugs to prove drugs are bad, how am I the bad guy here?  Try to remember your father for who we want you to remember him as and not remember him for who he actually was.  God, this family is awful.

It’s in liquid form which means it contains water?  WHAT?  Let me help you understand some basic science, water is a liquid, not all liquids are water.  Room temperature mercury, liquid nitrogen, pure alcohol, etc.

Nerdypenny knows how to do a spectrum analysis?  She works in IT, the best she should be able to do is get your windows back from blue screen of death and set up your wireless printer.

Oh man, Arrow without his arrows, now what will they call the show?  Apparently, stairs are his new Kryptonite, he’s like a rugged ED-209.  Wait, he can’t shoot his arrows properly but he can still throw knives or darts or whatever.   Oh, Arturo, prince of irony, dosed by your own drug that no less than 1, 2…56 hobos died for.

Every time with the Speedy, I die a little inside.

Classic Oliver, if he doesn’t kill you, it’s way worse.  The Count, now called Shakes the Clown, is dragged away to await his fate.

Nerdypenny, he will kill you if you reveal that you know his secret identity.  Thank god, you’re safe, for now.

Next time, on Arrow, an episode called Betrayal.  That is every second of this show, people are being betrayed, then finding out they were unbetrayed, or rebetrayed.  Thanks for telling me absolutely nothing.

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David DeMarco is Joe Patrick’s boss at Legend Comics & Coffee.  He is able to write this column because Joe Patrick does all the hard work at the shop, while Dave drinks coffee and goofs around.  This is an arrangement that is acceptable to Dave.