10 worst mistakes the Arrowverse ever made, ranked

1. Killing off The Black Canary on a Green Arrow show

It doesn't matter how much further we get from this, nor how much Arrow managed to improve itself after that ghastly fourth season; the sheer notion of a Green Arrow series killing off the Black Canary is laughable. Doing so when you have pointless, original characters who drag the show down is just disrespectful to the source material.

The grave mystery in season 4 was a complete failure, forcing tension and stakes that should have been created naturally, so to ultimately have the payoff be killing the female lead of the show in the most underwhelming of ways just so that the villain could send a message to the men in her life was the nail in the coffin (no pun intended).

Laurel Lance was one of Arrow's best developed characters. She had overcome so much during her time on the show, and yet Arrow continually gave storylines that should have been hers to other people. Her sister, an original character created for the show, was the original Canary. Felicity, an annoying original interpretation of an obscure comic book character, ended up in a romance with her love interest, Oliver Queen. So the show just gave up on her, disrespectfully killing the character off.

The fact that the writers had to come up with a convoluted explanation to bring in a new Canary before finally just bringing Katie Cassidy back as the Earth-2 version of Laurel says all you need to know about how unnecessary this storyline was. Season 4 was a horrific period for not just Arrow but the whole Arrowverse, and the unforgivable death of the Black Canary, Laurel Lance, is at the top of the reasons why.