Question about Arrow on WB (spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

I started watching the Arrow show just recently. I liked the first season. They did the integrated flashbacks pretty well, but a few episodes into the second season the flashback timeline seems to have gone off the rails.

My question is simple, who trained Oliver Queen to be badass? In the first season it seems like it is going to be original guy in the green hood, but he barely taught him anything before switching sides and ultimately getting killed. His daughter stepped in and at least taught him some basics of using a bow, then she died, too.

Oliver still needs to learn martial arts, master archery, and learn Chinese. Who is there to teach him these things? Deathstroke is going insane, Sara/Black Canary hasn’t been trained herself yet, and the russian mobster does not seem to have the rigth skills to be his mentor.

Are these flash backs going to continue to push back his training till the very end of the five years? Is someone coming back from the dead? Who turns whiny oliver into the badass vigilante?

2

I’ve watched through most of Season 3 on Netflix.

The thing you need to realize about Arrow (if you haven’t already) is that the story is being told in the present and past simultaneously. Keep watching, and you’ll learn a LOT more about Oliver’s past.

3

He packs a lot of adversity into that 5 years, during which he has to become really good at stuff or die. He didn’t die.

He didn’t spend all of that time on the island, either.

4

I get that, I really do. During the flashbacks, it is trying to show how he gained a certain skill, or why he acts a certain way, but later flashbacks undercut it. Why wear the green hood to honor I guy who tormented him for a bit and then taught him for a couple of weeks, then died?

Early on Oliver uses a technique to fake killing someone to prove his bonafides to some Russians. The flashback shows old guy in the hood using it on Oliver, but how did Oliver learn it? The old guy and his daughter both died before he got to where he would even be able to understand what was happening, much less pick up the move after it was done on him once.

5

They don’t show every technique and ability being learned, a lot is implied. Keep watching. Oliver becomes much more of a bad ass in the season 3 flashbacks.

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6

The simple, non-spoilery answer is “Everybody.”

Green-hood guy, Slade Wilson, Shado, Ras al’Ghul, Nyssa al’Ghul, the Bratva, the original Canary, Malcolm Merlin, maybe picked up a few things from Tatsu Yamashiro…

Seriously, the guy’s a sponge. Everybody he ever hung out with, he sparred with or learned something from them.