So Arrow has just killed Laurel Lance. I maintain that she was DOA.
Katie Cassidy is definitely a decent actress, but she never convinced most of us that she was Dinah Lance from the comics. And she wasn’t, she was a character unique to Arrow, as evidenced by them calling her by her middle name, “Laurel.” No version of Black Canary to my knowledge has been involved in the legal profession, but they kept the part about her being the daughter of a cop, who then turned to vigilantism. Dinah never really had an arc where she was dealing with alcoholism or jealousy with a boyfriend-stealing sister. She also trained with Wildcat longer than one summer to learn her martial arts skills, and was trained in one incarnation by the master that trained Lady Shiva herself. Her Canary Cry at some point became organic, a metahuman power. So they established from the beginning that this take on Black Canary was going to be particular to this TV show.
The problem with that stems from the fact that this Laurel’s story was tied to Oliver’s from their youth, and that’s never been the case in the comics. Dinah Drake and her daughter Dinah Lance have always had their own journey and path into becoming Black Canary. She and Oliver meet as adults, after they’ve been separately fighting crime for a while. Laurel was almost always a reactionary character. She wasn’t really pushing for anything until something related to Oliver happened, and then she created a new set of goals based on that. Her Canary origin experiences then became split between herself and her wayward sister, Sara. Sara was the one that kept the blonde wig thing going, Laurel abandoned it quickly. Sara had the true martial arts training. Sara introduced the Canary Cry, but it was technology, and Laurel had it upgraded by Cisco Ramone from Arrow's sister show, The Flash. Sara was the one that came back from the dead through the Lazarus Pit. Sara was the one who had Sin as a protégé. And Sara was the one that struggled with the morality of killing.
All that to say that the fierceness, the independence, the martial arts mastery, the separate life experiences, and the moral dilemmas that characterized Dinah Lance from the comics all belonged to someone else on Arrow. So Laurel was relegated to alcoholism, depicted as a first year clumsy vigilante, and then graduated very quickly to having a mastery of martial arts that she couldn’t have earned in that short amount of time. All of this adds up to us not fully buying her as the Canary she was supposed to be.
And then they redeemed her on some level by making her an integral part of Team Arrow. She did something that very few lead characters ever do: recognize they weren’t where they needed to be, and swallow some humble pills. She decided to stop griping about what she didn’t have, and start working with what she did have. She recognized that her connection with her father was highly valuable, and she refocused on her lawyering skills. She also agreed to let Oliver take her training to a new level. It can be argued that all of this happened because Laurel the character, and Katie the actress was relegated to second-class citizen status because of the rise of Felicity. But both Laurel and Katie handled those changes with class. Which made her imminently more likable than she was in the earlier seasons. Her mantra ceased to be complaints and she turned that energy into a stronger work ethic.
It also became painfully evident that she never stopped loving Oliver. Like Chloe Sullivan of Smallville fame, she figured if she couldn’t have him, she would at least stay in his world and help him. And therein lies the secondary crux of her failure as a character in this incarnation. The Black Canary from the comics was never a second-class anything. Not second-class as a hero, or a fighter, or a friend. The Black Canary was also in most incarnations an integral part of the Justice League and the Birds of Prey team. So Laurel, from the beginning, was literally one third of a character that she never fully inhabited. The character itself was incredible, but they never let Laurel become that person. Sara and Felicity got the best of Dinah Lance, and Laurel got storylines that kept her lagging behind.
The biggest source of pain in her demise, however, is that in this last season, and particularly in these last several episodes, she seemed like she was coming into her own. She seemed like she had finally gotten comfortable in her own skin, and realized that she was making a difference on every level; in the courtroom, in the streets, and in Oliver’s life. She wasn’t the fierce person from the comics, and probably never would be, but we no longer cared. The Laurel that she had grown into had become just fine with us as an audience.
And then…they killed her. For no literary reason. Her death was not necessary to propel Oliver forward to anything, because Oliver as a character has been on a steady march backwards. He’s a worse fighter, a worse leader, a worse vigilante, and a worse friend than he was when the show started. It doesn’t seem that that trend is showing any signs of stopping. What it looked like was, the Oliver-Laurel relationship was being moved back into the forefront. As I said on Twitter, if everything Felicity said in her breakup speech was true, then Laurel was always the perfect match for Oliver. Laurel was able to deal with every single element of Oliver’s life and character, from his betrayal, to his darkness, to his illegitimate son, to his haunted past. She never left him and never judged him negatively for any of it. Felicity’s super power is to always make everything about her, and Laurel in this last season did no such thing. So many comic fans thought that finally, finally, we were going to get at least some version of Green Arrow and Black Canary, because they are just as iconic as Clark and Lois, or Barry and Iris.
And now she’s dead. She’s dead because she was never really Dinah Lance to begin with. Notice that they brought Sara Lance back, which is a tacit admission that it was a mistake to kill her. Know why? Because both the actress, Caity Lotz, and her storylines, were closer to what Canary should be. Laurel got the leftovers at almost every turn. Laurel Lance was DOA because she was never written to be the fully realized Canary at any point, which is a shame. The true Black Canary is a combination of Laurel and Sara with a little Felicity sprinkled in. (A very little.) And the Laurel character had finally become sympathetic enough for us to root for her, and was finally positioned to move into a more significant role in Oliver’s (remember him, the main character of Arrow?) life. But no more. Now she’s another death that will haunt Oliver for the rest of the series, and it will be realized in not many days hence that, just like Sara’s ridiculous demise, it was a mistake to kill Laurel. She was finally coming into her own.
So #RipLaurelLance. Kudos to you Katie Cassidy for being a professional and a class act about your whole story arc. Truth be told, you never really had the chance that you deserved. And we ended up loving the hero you were becoming.
You shall be missed more than any of us thought you’d be.
David Taylor II
@DT2Author
Books@DT2Author.org
http://amzn.to/1UYKIua
Brilliant post. Simply brilliant.
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