There's no denying the impact Arrow has had over the past six years, paving the way for an entire shared superhero universe and helping The CW transition into the genre show-driven network it is today. But that being said, Arrow has often been the weakest link in the larger "Arrowverse" in recent years. That's certainly the case right now, with Season 6 likely to go down as the show's worst year yet. It's become increasingly clear over the past few months that the long-running show needs some fundamental changes if it's going to survive much longer. Much like Oliver Queen, Arrow needs to become something else.

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Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen and Josh Segarra as Adrian Chase on Arrow.

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Arrow reached a pivotal moment when Season 5 started in 2016. At that point, the show had delivered two bad seasons in a row and really needed to do something to win back wary fans. Season 5 generally succeeded in that goal, some missteps notwithstanding. Above all, the series benefited from the intense rivalry between Stephen Amell's Oliver Queen and Josh Segarra's Adrian Chase. Season 5 culminated in the series' best episode to date , leaving viewers and Ollie reeling as Chase carried out his final plan and destroyed Lian Yu with most of Team Arrow still on site.That cliffhanger should have been all the momentum Season 6 needed to start strong and build a compelling new status quo for Team Arrow. Above all, it allowed for Arrow to become a much different show than it was in its first five seasons. The show had wrapped up its five-year flashback storyline and no longer needed to look to the past for its villains and challenges for Oliver Queen. Chase's final attack seemingly ensured there would be major collateral damage. Team Arrow, assuming it even still existed, would be a far different group than it was before.Except none of that actually happened when Season 6 premiered last fall. Apart from one minor character, every member of Team Arrow survived what seemed like an impossible death trap. It wasn't long before the series settled right back into its usual pattern of slowly establishing a new threat to Star City, one with a personal grudge against Oliver Queen. Arrow had the chance to reinvent itself in a dramatic way. Instead, it settled for recycling old tropes and rapidly undoing all of the goodwill it had restored during Season 5.To be fair, Season 6 has made a few interesting changes to the usual status quo. Ollie is currently struggling with the pressures of being a father and trying to give his son the life he deserves, while still being the protector Star City needs. Early on this season, Ollie even flirted with the idea of retiring his hood and allowing John Diggle to take over. But once again, the show failed to take advantage of a major plot development and see it through to its natural conclusion. Ollie hanging up the hood would have been the perfect way for the series to move forward from its original five-year cycle, but things didn't play out that way.Assuming Season 6 doesn't experience a sudden and dramatic turnaround now that a new villain has emerged, Arrow will have delivered three good seasons and three poor seasons. That's not a great track record for any series. And with The CW's DC Comics lineup constantly expanding (to say nothing of the massive amounts of DC content in the works elsewhere ), more and more fans may reach the point where Arrow simply isn't worth their precious, limited TV time. If Arrow wants to compete in that increasingly crowded landscape, it needs to transform and become the sort of riskier, expectation-defying series we were led to expect last year.The best thing Arrow can do now is move away from the supervillain-dominated conflicts of the past and toward storylines that test Ollie in other ways. Between Deathstroke and Prometheus, it feels like the show has peaked as far as costumed villlains go. Season 6 is clearly suffering from a case of diminishing returns with its ensemble villain cast. Why does every season of every Arrowverse show need to boil down to a bitter rivalry between a hero and a villain? What's wrong with thinking outside the box for a change? Ollie is both mayor of a major metropolitan city and a father raising a son whose existence he only discovered a couple years ago. There's plenty of room for conflict and character drama that doesn't involve costumed villains seeking revenge for the murder of a loved one.It's worth remembering that it took several decades for Green Arrow to truly come into his own in the comics. Early on, the character was basically a Batman clone with a Robin Hood fetish. It was only thanks to '70s-era creators like Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil that he evolved from billionaire vigilante into a socialist firebrand concerned with addressing the ills of society -- as well as firing boxing glove arrows at evildoers. It's time for Arrow's version of Oliver Queen to undergo a similar transformation. The series needs to lean more heavily into elements like Ollie's political career and fatherhood woes. It needs to worry less about supervillains and more about the challenges of truly trying to fix a city many believe to be beyond repair. Saving Star City needs to be about more than simply stopping whatever villain happens to be trying to blow it up in any given year.None of this is to say Arrow shouldn't still be a superhero series with costumes and martial arts sequences. No one is asking Arrow to suddenly become The Wire. But if Black Lightning has proven anything in its short run so far, it's that you can craft a superhero show with a clear political message and where the hero's personal rivalries are secondary to his relationship with the people he protects. We can only hope that Arrow will take Black Lightning's example to heart and transform itself in Season 7 in ways it failed to do in Season 6.

Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter , or Kicksplode on MyIGN