Arrow’s fourth season has been a mix of good and bad, leaning a little more towards the former but never quite committing to one or the other. It’s fitting, then, that the season finale focused on the duality in Oliver Queen’s soul and the need for darkness and vengeance to go hand in hand with light and justice. But rather than give Season 4 the ending it needed and proving that the good truly outweighed the bad, “Schism” merely ended the year on a disappointing and thoroughly unsatisfying note.

Arrow: "Schism" Photos 12 IMAGES

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For an episode where the threat of nuclear annihilation was hanging over Star City like a radioactive Sword of Damocles, there was a surprising lack of tension in this episode. Perhaps it was the relatively little time devoted to exploring the mass chaos and panic among the citizens of Star City. Perhaps it was the fact that Ollie and his friends seemed more interested in having heart-to-heart conversations and trading pep talks than responding to this imminent threat. Whatever the case, this was the most anti-climactic season finale on the show since… well, since the last one. There’s a pattern starting to form here.I can respect what the writers were trying to accomplish with this episode in terms of bringing Ollie full circle and testing whether his resolve to be a better, more inspirational hero was strong enough. The goal is clearly to morph the Green Arrow into more of a hero for the common man, one who can inspire the ordinary citizens of Star City to seize a brighter future. It’s an important and necessary step in the evolution of the character. But by the end of his final battle with Damien Darhk, Ollie’s journey felt muddled and incomplete.There was the obligatory scene of Ollie taking to the streets and halting a riot through the power of a good, old-fashioned speech about hope and resilience and so forth. This should have been one of the pivotal moments of the episode, but the speech felt so canned and generic that it simply didn’t work. I didn’t believe that the rioters would be won over by Ollie’s empty platitudes. He’s lucky that Felicity and Curtis managed to defuse the bomb just at the right moment to punctuate his words.Worse, the message the writers tried to convey through Ollie’s final confrontation felt like the wrong one. The end result of Ollie’s yearlong struggle needed to be something more powerful and resonant than “Meh, you can’t always be the good guy.” It’s not so much that Ollie broke his rule against killing. If anyone deserves to die, it’s Darhk. But if Ollie was going to kill his foe, it should have been to stop an imminent threat to Star City’s residents, not to end the life of a man who was clearly already beaten. It feels as though Ollie, rather than moving forward, has regressed as a result of this episode.It was a little bizarre how grim and depressing the final act of “Schism” was. With Thea leaving the team (after threatening to kill a child no less) and Diggle ditching both the city and his family to rejoin the military, this didn’t feel like much of a victory for anyone. The takeaway from all of this is that Ollie failed to inspire hope in his allies the way he did his city. And weirdly, the one character who should have been a depressed wreck, Felicity, was her usual chipper self throughout the episode. It’s tough to see what the point was in making Felicity an accessory to the deaths of all those civilians in Monument Point if the show isn’t going to explore the emotional fallout.In addition to the general lack of suspense to the conflict this week, the action scenes were generally underwhelming as well. All these scenes really accomplished was showcasing just how incredibly ineffective Darhk’s Ghosts are in combat. Even Stormtroopers would laugh at how poor their aim is. Despite wielding assault rifles and vastly outnumbering Team Arrow during the big shootout in the lair, the Ghosts were quickly and easily dispatched with nothing more than fists and arrows. But that’s nothing compared to the final showdown in the streets of Star City. For a brief moment, it was fun to see what seemed a very intentional homage to The Dark Knight Rises (the second one in as many weeks after last week’s Legends of Tomorrow finale) with Darhk’s troops and the Star City mob charging into one another. But the effect faded quickly. Why would these highly trained and heavily armed soldiers resort to fighting hand-to-hand? Even as the scale of the battle grew, the drama petered out.If nothing else, it should be noted that Neal McDonough delivered one last, solid performance as Darhk this week. In addition to being his usual magnetic self, McDonough had the advantage of playing a more unhinged Darhk, one traumatized by the death of his wife and who no longer cared about anything other than watching the world burn at his hand. Sadly, Darhk didn’t receive the sendoff he deserved. It’s one thing for Ollie to triumph over Darhk’s magic using the power of hope. It’s another for that magic to suddenly be flipped off like a light switch and for Darhk to be reduced to trading punches with his enemy. Their final battle reminded me of nothing if not the final “boxing match” in Rocky V. That’s about the level of grace and scope the Ollie/Darhk battle had to offer. The fact that the camera was so far removed from their battle only served to make it seem even smaller and less important.The flashbacks were of no help this week, either. Once again, a meager skeleton of a storyline was stretched out into a short, choppy mess of brief scenes. There was little weight to anything that happened on Lian Yu this week. Certainly not Reiter’s abrupt death. It was only after Amanda Waller showed up that I realized Reiter truly was gone and not preparing for one final power grab. There was some small sense of tragedy to Ollie killing Taiana, but between that character’s lack of development and her increasingly bizarre accent, there was only so much drama to be had. It’s clear in hindsight that there wasn’t nearly enough meat to this flashback material to justify a yearlong, recurring storyline. Maybe it would have worked in the form of a single episode interlude. The writers need to take a long, hard look at why the flashbacks failed this year and consider whether Season 5 needs that element at all.As for what form Season 5 will take, this episode was anything but forthcoming. There’s a weird finality to Arrow’s season finales that you don’t find on the other CW shows. Whereas both The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow planted some very compelling seeds for the fall, this episode behaved as if Arrow might not be returning at all. Other than the vague notion that it might be fun to see how Ollie handles the responsibilities of being mayor, this episode offered little reason to feel excited for Season 5. Whatever good will Season 4 managed to restore over the last seven months was lost in one fell swoop.