The Arrowverse’s 5 Worst Storylines, Ranked (Including the Grave Mistake That Ruined Arrow)

For more than a decade, fans of the superhero genre were living their best television lives thanks to The CW’s Arrowverse. Kicking off with Arrow in 2012 and eventually spanning five shows (six if you go ahead and count Superman & Lois,) the shared universe inspired by DC Comics gave audiences some of the best genre stories ever as heroes like The Flash, Green Arrow, Supergirl, Batwoman, and more suited up to protect their cities and even worked together to save the world. The shows were responsible for some truly great television moments, including the highly ambitious “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover event that thrilled fans.

But while there were a great many storylines that were done well and that fans loved, there were some that just didn’t work. Some storylines just didn’t land, some that didn’t make sense, and a select few that were just awful from start to finish. From mysterious villains whose identity ended up being a wasted opportunity to some questionable deaths that still make no sense, these are the five worst storylines across the Arrowverse.

5) The Death & Rebirth of Caitlin Frost (The Flash)

The longest-running of the Arrowverse shows, The Flash, had no shortage of great storylines, but the series also had no shortage of storylines that just didn’t work, and one of the worst was a big part of the show’s final season. Season 9 of The Flash kicked off with a shocking death when Caitlin Snow, in an attempt to resurrect Frost, “died,” and a new entity calling herself Snow emerged instead. The rest of the season saw Team Flash incorporating this new character, who eventually went by the name Khione, as they tried to figure out her powers and her place — something that didn’t really work particularly well with everything else that Team Flash was dealing with in the final season.

By the time the series got to the end, Khione suddenly had insane, goddess-like powers and then just ascended to protect the natural order of things, and in her absence, Caitlin miraculously was able to return, just in time for the series to end. Nothing about the entire storyline ever made any sense, and fans felt cheated out of a beloved character who had been there from the start, getting to have any real role in the final season.

4) Savitar (The Flash)

Another misstep on The Flash’s part was the big bad of Season 3: Savitar. Savitar, as a villain, got off on a bad foot with fans of The Flash from the jump, as it marked the third season in a row where Barry Allen and his allies had to deal with speedster villains, and to say that there was some fatigue about that would be an understatement. But Savitar had a cool look, was sufficiently scary, and there was a mystery involved as the identity of the villain was unknown. It might have ended up working out despite being largely a rehash of the same sort of bad guy plot the show had already done twice, but the revelation of who was behind Savitar tanked everything.

It turns out that Savitar was actually a time remnant of Barry Allen from a future timeline who became evil because of all the pain he endured. It could have been a cool twist, but The Flash never did anything with the psychological potential of Barry’s greatest villain being himself.

3) Jennifer Pierce’s New Body (Black Lightning)

If we are being completely honest, there are a lot of storylines on Black Lightning that weren’t great or didn’t make that much sense, but they were at least compelling. Jennifer Pierce’s body swap situation does not fall into that category and stands as one of the worst in the entire Arrowverse. In Season 4, Jennifer (aka the hero Lightning) ended up exploding into energy particles after flying into the ionosphere. Her family works to bring her back, collecting the particles and putting them in a special machine that will restore her, but what comes back isn’t exactly the Jennifer they remember. She’s got a whole new body and appearance. It ends up that the new Jennifer — aka JJ — was actually a mysterious entity that used Jennifer’s DNA to make itself a real body.

The real Jennifer eventrually returned, and all ends well. While the reason for this story makes sense — China Anne McClain left the series at the start of the season so she was replaced by Laura Kariuki until the finale — the execution of how they made it work just doesn’t. It was super weird and sort of tainted the whole final season.

2) Alien Clone Sara (Legends of Tomorrow)

Legends of Tomorrow was probably the goofiest of the Arrowverse shows, but there was one storyline that was just too weird to really work. Season 6 of the series saw Sara Lance die and return, but it’s not so much her resurrection that was a miss. It’s how she came back, that is. After Sara died thanks to an alien poison, the villain Bishop brings her back by cloning, but she’s not a human clone.

Clone Sara has combined human and alien DNA, which means that she is now an alien-human hybrid with a regenerating body. It is unbelievably weird, and sure, while it meant that Sara still got to be with the team, it was just a little too kooky, even for Legends.

1) “Who’s In The Grave?” Mystery (Arrow)

Perhaps the worst storyline in the Arrowverse belongs to Arrow’s “Who’s In The Grave” Season 4 mystery. The season opens with a flash forward of Oliver Queen and Barry Allen at a grave six months in the future. Oliver is very impacted by the death of whoever is in that grave, but fans have to wait almost the entire season to find out, complete with lots of fake outs along the way. When we finally get the reveal, not only does it reinforce how lackluster the whole plot was, butit was just insulting as well.

Turns out, it was Laurel Lance, aka Black Canary, and her death really only served to give Oliver some more existential trauma. That’s right: Arrow not only delivered a bland mystery but “solved” it with a case of live-action fridging. Considering that Arrow had already not done right by Laurel previously, her pointless death made fans very angry, and it was only made worse when the series brought actor Katie Cassidy back as an evil Laurel doppelganger from another reality. Fans still aren’t over this one, even now.

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