“Heroes” has been getting slammed a lot this season and I decided to wait until a natural breaking point to discuss it, since to my mind trying to review it as it goes is akin to reviewing a book chapter by chapter. You run into a whole “forest for the trees” thing.
Now, with the first half of the season drawing to a close, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s not actually a forest involved. It’s more of a jungle, and I’m in desperate need of a machete.
What the hëll is going on in this series?
Honest to God, what the hëll is going on?
The first season had a nice, simple through-line encapsulated in six words: “Save the cheerleader, save the world.” We were presented with a doomsday scenario and a whole bunch of normal people caught up in abnormal situations, struggling to cope with their new status quo while pursuing a fairly linear storyline. And the comic book roots of the concept were attended to by such things as the aptly named “Hiro” constantly referencing such tropes, and the events in the series being tracked through an actual comic in the show. Granted, we’ve seen the welcome return to some of those aspects, such as the comic book store being run by Seth Green, and the “long lost” final comic that surfaced last night (Kathleen was particularly happy to see that.)
But this season has been all over the place. Events were triggered by the wildly out-of-character action of Hiro directly disobeying the instruction of his father never to open a safe. I’m sorry, the Hiro who’s been established would take such a charge as a sacred duty; he wouldn’t let his curiosity cause him to violate his father’s direct, from-the-grave instruction. And it’s just been downhill from there.
Originally it seemed that the heroes’ powers were a next step in evolution, happening almost spur-of-the-moment because they were needed. Instead we’re now learning that their powers are steeped in a byzantine plot from a bunch of organizations, and I’m having trouble remembering week to week who’s where and who’s doing what to who as part of what timetable. Previous plot points are recycled (ANOTHER doomsday view of Manhattan courtesy of time travel?) and we’re seeing crosses and double crosses and triple crosses. I’m not sure whether I’m simply too stupid to follow it all, or if we’re just seeing a series being written by scattergun. Considering the series has been hemorrhaging viewers and top writers have been fired, I’m leaning toward the latter.
It’s easy to say that this season is about “Villains” as it’s called. Instead it seems to be about trying to find ways to make sure that everyone has something to do, when the fact is that thus far it seems as if you could extract entire characters and storylines from the series and not damage the main plot thread. I say “seems” because since I’m still hazy on what the thread is, I can’t say for sure.
Mohinder is doing an endless slow burn into the Fly. Sylar engages in an extended attempt to reform that hangs on him like an ill-fitting suit. Half the cast is going on spirit walks, Hiro becomes a ten year old. Nikki comes back except she’s not Nikki anymore, she’s Tracy. They killed Veronica Mars and it almost seems merciful. Past, present and future versions of characters are running around, interacting with each other with abandon. It’s like someone poured both previous seasons into a blender, started it up, yanked the top off, and the resultant explosion all over the ceiling is what we’re seeing.
There are moments, yes. Nice moments. Great moments. But it’s hard to get to them and it’s getting even harder to care about them since they’re buried deep in the jungle, the morass that constitutes this season. And who the hëll thought that setting two entire episodes during the world’s longest eclipse was a good idea? I used my DVR to capture one of those episodes and watched it during the daytime; I couldn’t see a dámņëd thing because the screen was so dark and there was daylight in the living room.
I want to see this series succeed. I’m just wondering whether anyone actually producing the show feels the same way.
PAD
• 
I’ve felt the same most of the season, but I’ve also felt that the show runners are realizing this, and the last couple of episodes seem to be cleaning things up…
Get Hiro back to being… a hero. Silar back to being a bad guy, kill off a couple of wasted characters, and start laying out a straight forward bad plot.
It’s giving me some hope.
I tire of the “yes it is/no it isn’t” that subsitutes for character development. Arthur is Dead/No he isn’t! They lost their powers/No they didn’t! Sylar is Bad/Sylar is Good! Elle hates Sylar/Elle loves Sylar! Tracey is on Nathan’s side/No she isn’t! Hiro killed Ando/No he didn’t! ad infinitum, ad nauseum. I feel like I need a spreadsheet to keep track of it all… which I’m already tempted to use to keep track of all the blonde women on the show.
It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere except in circles. I fear the mystery of the show is gone, and I just watch to see new characters introduced so I can see what his/her power is.
Nothing about the eclipse made sense.
First, it’s asking a lot of the viewer to believe that an eclipse would rob everyone of their powers. There’s nothing particularly interesting about an eclipse, the sun and the moon aren’t significantly closer to each other, we have a period of low light at least twice a day already (dusk and dawn), and… well that’s it, there’s nothing interesting about an eclipse. I know it’s a show about super powers, but everyone losing their powers in an eclipse seemed like more of a stretch than usual.
Second, it had no real affect on the story other than filler. We learned a little more about the speedster, but it didn’t affect the plot at all. Mohinder ran away from Arthur Petrelli, then he ran right back.
Third, why were they all freaking out? The older cast members have had their powers for decades and there have obviously been eclipses in that time. Of *course* they were going to get their powers back.
Here’s my take on the show: It was built to be a great one season story, but they didn’t build it to go beyond that. They had an eclipse at the beginning and end of the first season, now they’re trying to build on that and it doesn’t work. Little things like the f pattern (half of a DNA strand) that pops up everywhere are a cool artistic touch that make the fans ask what they mean, but when they last longer than one season the fans give up on them having meaning. Tim Kring has actually said that he wanted to kill some characters but the network wouldn’t let him, I’m betting Sylar at the end of season 1 was one of those. The comic book is cool, but it shows that the one character they shouldn’t have killed was the artist who draws it.
The writers made a bunch of building blocks to fit the story they wanted to tell in first season. The failing of the show is that they haven’t been able to build anything as good out of those blocks in the later seasons.
Yeahhh.
You know. It’s kinda like, meh.
Still, even with that, I like it better than the 2nd season which I thought was really hodgepodge horrible.
I do think that there is some kind of a direct goal for this season, it just wasn’t stated over and over again like the cheerleader bit. It was “Stop Arthur Petrelli.”
I agree that the endless cycle of is/isn’t (oh look, now Hiro lost HIS powers!) is incredibly frustrating and annoying. Time travel was also a really bad idea, and probably should never have been allowed into the show. Sure, it worked (kind of) for some side plots, but it seems to have really screwed the show as a whole.
Exactly.
All this reminds me of what Joss Whedon said about the usual talks he had with people when he was scriptdoctoring. “The problem’s in the third act,” they’d say, and he’d read the script and realize that their third act problem started in the first act.
I think what happened with Heroes is the second season got away from them. The repercussions of that are polluting the third season. And firing writers who made the show works in season one hasn’t helped solve the problems in season three.
Time to take a chainsaw to it, cut away the fat and bad writing. Make it simple. No Byzantine plotting. No are-they-or-aren’t-they. And when somebody dies, let them stay dead. Except for Claire. She’s too cute to die.
And Hiro. Same thing.
But as for the rest, I wouldn’t mind if they just cleared the decks completely.
Miles
Yeah, I agree. I actually mostly liked Season 2, and there are moments in Season 3, but it’s a giant WTF.
I think one of the big mistakes is engaging us to start asking ‘why’ about the nature of their powers. In Season 1, we mostly went along with it as genre trope, as a necessary suspension of disbelief to have a series. In comics, we’re happy to have a simple explanation: They’re mutants, weird science experiment gone wrong, he’s an alien, etc.
But they’re trying to make it into a central mystery, and superpowers do not stand up well to scrutiny. You don’t want to put them in the way of logic. They never made sense, they never will, but now I suddenly care.
The cinematography is still really good (they do shots on Heroes that are really creative and unusual for television), and many of the actors are still very good (Masi Oka is a delight.) But the characters aren’t consistent, and they’re shining a bright light on the wires when I want to watch the puppet show.
I think there’s been too much thought put into 45 minutes weekly of a fantasy drama on TV. Either Heroes is entertaining, or it’s not.
The second season: Not entertaining.
The current season: Entertaining. True, it started off rocky, but I think that was the nonsense needing to be shaken off from the second season.
That’s all.
Pj, you just posted on a fantasy writer’s blog that there’s too much thinking being put into fantasy writing. That’s pretty much the same thing as going to a grocery store and complaining about all the vegetables.
I quit this show after season two, it sounds like it has only gotten worse.
I thought HEROES jumped the shark in season 2 when they repeated the same central problem (a vision of an apocalyptic future that the heroes have to fight to prevent), and it didn’t help that they used this *again* in season 3. PAD is absolutely right when Syler’s “redemption” didn’t fit the character at all (and when Elle was kissing him, did she forget that he not only killed her father, but also bragged about it by showing her that he now had her father’s power?) and having him bounce back and forth between good (helping Peter escape, not killing the villains after the bank robbery) and evil (killing Elle) makes little sense. Reverting Hiro into a mental child is a weak way to limit his powers, and seeing Peter somehow survive with no powers is a bit silly. (It does support my theory that there’s a mental illness called “supervillainitis” that prevents bad guys from killing anyone that has thwarted them before or could do so again.) I just don’t find it compelling or making me wonder how it’ll resolve.
Dropped it. It has just removed and basic storytelling for meaningless shock.
Dropped it. It has just removed and basic storytelling for meaningless shock.
IMHO, much of the problem stems from them making it up as they go along. There’s a lot of backstory on the older generation (Linderman, Pertrellis Sr, Matt’s and Hiro’s fathers, etc.) that they’ve presented, more that they’ve hinted at. There have been several futures presented thru Isaac’s drawings, Peter’s and Hiro’s trips, Matt’s walkabuot, etc.
But nobody seems to have thought thru how it all fits together. They’re making it up as they go along.
Babylon 5 and, with shorter arcs, Wiseguy worked so well because it was known where the story was heading. Lost and other less successful series like The Pretender and Nowhere Man from a few years ago didn’t because they introduced these mysteries and clues but clearly had no idea what they were supposed be for. “We’ll figure out what that meant later.” Seriously, can anyone look at Maya’s story and say the series had any idea what they wanted to do with her? “Haven’t figured that out yet so for this week let’s just keep her trying to get to New York. Once we figure out what we want to do with her we’ll have her arrive.”
Heroes could be a very rich tapestry but if you’re going to have a sprawling story you need to know what it is first. As it is, they should (no new opinion here) cut out a LOT of the characters and storylines and present some smaller more linear stories until they have things figured out.
Actually, I have to agree with the person who compared this situation to Joss Wheden’s script doctoring: the problem with Season 3 of HEROES is Season 1 of HEROES.
The writers laid a lot of groundwork in Season 1, but they never built on it properly. The ending of Season 1 was totally anticlimatic, and they missed a HUGE opportunity to develop the show over time. Season 1 should have ended with a bang: a visible battle with Sylar that leveled at least a portion of the city. I understand that for budgetary reasons it may have been necessary to scale that back, but there should have been some visible repercussions of a major super-powered battle in New York City. Sylar would have been stopped, all the Heroes would have been brought together, and the people of the wider world would have been staggered by such a major catastrophe. The federal government would have been made aware of super-powered people in our midst, with the dangling threat of revealing the Heroes’ presence to the public at large. Powerful people in the know could have started trying to recruit the Heroes (or other supers) to their own causes. On and on . . . There was huge potential there to give the show an epic scale, plot out a long-term story, give the cast some cohesion by bringing them all together and making them work as a group, and really analyzing the superhero genre.
But instead, the producers chose to take a more soap-opera approach, keeping the characters separated and working on their own little threads, and generally making a hodge-podge mess of a show that had incredible potential.
It’s really sad, frankly.
I am very hopeful that the addition of Mark Verheiden (Battlestar Galactica) and the return of Byran Fuller (Pushing Daisies) will get the series back on track.
Timewalker, I just hope the show lasts long enough for those additions to help. I know that Bryan Fuller came back late enough that he’s going to have very little impact on the second half of this season. Tim Kring has said they’re going to shift to shorter stories, but I think that’s also going to be after the rest of this season plays out.
There is hope to believe that the fourth season could be good again, but the way the show is going it could get cancelled before then.
I still like Heroes, and am willing to take a “let’s see what happens” approach. Even so, part of me isn’t so sure the show can regain its focus. At times I feel Heroes is putting on the leather jacket and walking toward the motorcycle. Will it get on the cycle, head for the shark tank and make the jump? Too soon to tell. But the show does seem to be thinking about making the jump.
Regarding Sylar, I’ll ask you folks the same question I asked a co-worker. Is there a danger that Sylar will become the Joker of Heroes, the mass murderer who should either have long since been locked away for life or killed (whether by the state or someone with a grudge)? My answer is yes, especially if he’s still around in say, season 5.
If you regard the relationship between Batman and the Joker as involving mythic archetypes and not stories meant to be set in a realistic milieu, that’s one thing; but most comics stories today are meant to take place as much as possible in the more-or-less real world (which is why we’re not likely to see such stories as the one where Captain Marvel literally fought the Earth (as depicted in a recent Showcase compilation)). And in the real world, the Joker wouldn’t keep coming back.
Likewise, Heroes is presented as taking place in the real world. So why is Sylar still around? To use a Buffy term, he was the Big Bad of season 1 and his story should’ve been done at the end of that season.
Or he should’ve been killed when he was powerless in season 2, maybe by Noah Bennett; maybe by Mohinder; or even some random guy who learned Sylar’s the one who killed a friend or loved one.
That scenario brings to mind the scenes in A Clockwork Orange where Alex, conditioned against committing acts of violence, is tormented by one of his former victims. One the one hand, you feel Alex is getting what he deserves; on the other, he can’t do anything to defend himself. It’d have been interesting to have seen the audience having similar feelings about Sylar.
The long and short of it is that Sylar needs to be in jail or dead. He can’t keep coming back.
I refused to believe Sylar was really a Petrelli, and I’m glad to see that I was right about them yanking his chain all along. It seemed a bit of a stretch for Claire to be related to Nathan and Peter, but bringing Sylar into mix would have stretched credulity. What’s next? Revealing that all the characters’ had ancestors in the same carriage at Wold-Newton?
Oh, and Noah Bennett and Elle sent Gabriel Gray on the path to becoming Sylar? Doesn’t give Noah much of a moral leg to stand on at this point. I’d liked to have see the revelation that Noah more or less created Sylar become common knowledge among the Heroes.
On the subject of character deaths, you know Arthur could come back. He did take Adam’s powers, don’t forget.
(And how will the Bennett family (AKA the Butler family) explain that not only is Claire alive, but there’s no sign she was ever shot? Who wants to bet that little detail will be ignored?)
And I’m guessing Arthur time traveled using Peter’s stolen abilities.
I don’t like recasting Ali Larter as Nikki’s identical twin cousin… er… I mean long lost unknown sister. It doesn’t work for me. I’d rather have Tracey been another personality if they had to bring in a new character for Larter to play.
Except for Micah’s brief cameo, we’ve heard nothing more about that family. What’s become of Monica? I like many of the core characters, and can understand the actors wanting the financial security of being on a show for more than one season, but think how much stronger the story would be if Nathan and Peter had actually sacrificed themselves to save the world? If, for whatever reason, Peter didn’t push Nathan away (and Nathan refused to fly away), and wasn’t able to recover after “exploding.”
What if Hiro wasn’t able to return from feudal Japan? He’d have experienced the bittersweet revelation that he was his own childhood hero (but at great personal cost), but would never see his family and friends, or even know if they’d succeeded in saving the world.
These character departures (and others, perhaps) would have let us see meet more new characters, such as Monica, rather than kept us with the status quo.
Back to Sylar, he took Elle’s powers when they were in that cell together, without killing her. So why’d he kill her on the beach? If his “hunger” is to acquire powers from others, he now knows he can do it without making such a mess.
And speaking of Elle, didn’t the “we shouldn’t be doing this to the poor man” Elle who protested the assignment to Sylarize Gabriel Gray seem more than a little out of place, given she’d been established as more or less a sociopathic character?
And speaking of that whole sequence, didn’t they place it at the wrong point in the timeline? I got the impression that Gabriel’s attempted suicide came after he killed Brian Davis but before he killed Chandra Suresh. Yet I seem to recall seeing Noah get into a cab driven by Mohinder in that flashback scene.
Very confusing.
Like I said, I haven’t completely given up on the show, but I really wish it would step away from the motorcycle and the shark tank.
To continue the comics analogy, Heroes started out as a newsstand comic, but now seems to have become a direct market only comic. Yes, even with the serialized storytelling, I think season 1 overall was more accessible to new viewers (especially those unfamiliar with comics and the tropes therein) than season 3 is. I tried to introduce my Mom to it last week when I was over for dinner. She was turned off by all the violence. To paraphrase Steve McCroskey in Airplane, looks like I picked the wrong week to introduce my Mom to Heroes.
As to the eclipse, my first thought was that it somehow activated the powers of those who were given them by artificial means (which seems to be the bulk of the original cast). But that wouldn’t explain Arthur being powerless. Nor does it explain why the eclipses caused the powers to turn on and off again. But hey, it’s not like Heroes has a lot of WTF moments.
And yes I will watch next week. I hope they have a great wrap up for this volume and a strong hook to bring people back in February?!? Yeah, that makes sense. “We’re losing viewers left, right and center. Let’s go off the air for two months.”
To quote Daffy Duck, “what a way to run a railroad.”
Or a TV series, as the case may be.
Rick
P.S. Jason Bryant said Heroes was built to be a great one-season story. I assumed the same about 24 when it first aired. Should shows of this type be one season stories, a maxi series, if you will? It would certainly allow for more creative freedom. Just because such and such person is the “star” wouldn’t mean he or she would make it to the end.
I gave up on Heroes weeks ago. It’s getting too dámņ bogged down by its continuity and it’s long since lost the magic of someone discovering they have an ability.
I laughed–LAUGHED–at Mohinder’s plight. Because I had just said in my own blog a few days earlier that I had every confidence that he was guaranteed to do the stupidest option available. And I was right.
The only fun this season was the battle between Hiro and Daphne. Frankly, I would have depowered them all with the eclipse and start fresh with a new batch of characters and a new situation.
One of the many things that bothers me about Heroes is the idea that the eclipse is significant. I know this was addressed above by Jason Bryant but what he didn’t mention was that eclipses are regular, predictable events. NASA has a website listing all the upcoming eclipses. They don’t just occur without warning. For two total eclipses to happen at the same area of the earth two years apart is a cosmological impossibility. Of course so is self-regeneration and flying, but those are supposed to be the “suspension of disbelief” elements.
And since Rick Keating mentioned “24”, what year is it in that world? Since it’s first season it think there have been 6 presidents. 1) Whoever was president when David Palmer was running. 2) David Palmer. 3) David Palmer’s brother. 4) The corrupt guy who was married to Jean Smart. 5) Powers Booth and now, 6) Cherry Jones. I suppose not all of them served 8 or even 4 years but it seems significantly more time has passed than 7 years.
George,
I read a year or so ago that while the producers of 24 try to keep it in the perpetual “now”, the actual year that season 6 took place would be about 2013. With season 1 presumably taking place in 2000, the (election) year before it actually aired.
Now what year season 7 would take place, I don’t know.
Rick
Forgive the snark but..Watching an episode of Heroes this season for me has been similar to reading most mainstream comics lately: Giant world status quo chaning plots were characters are forced to behave counter to what we’ve come to expect form them to fit in with the larger story / “This week everything you know about so and so is about to change FOREVER….until next week when we change it all back to the way it was” / “This is it…the monent you’ve been wating for….the chance to wait for the following week when we reveail what will happen next month” / ( and my personal favorite ) New York = Earth.
There are exeptions to be sure.
Forgive the snark but..Watching an episode of Heroes this season for me has been similar to reading most mainstream comics lately: Giant world status quo chaning plots were characters are forced to behave counter to what we’ve come to expect form them to fit in with the larger story / “This week everything you know about so and so is about to change FOREVER….until next week when we change it all back to the way it was” / “This is it…the monent you’ve been wating for….the chance to wait for the following week when we reveail what will happen next month” / ( and my personal favorite ) New York = Earth.
There are exeptions to be sure.
I watched the whole first season of Heroes, even though basically nothing happened for the first six episodes. By the end of the season I felt like I’d watched about 4 episodes of story stretched out to a full season, and with a bunch of basically unlikeable characters.
Since my girlfriend was enjoying it, we watched the second season, which was more entertaining than the first season (stuff happened!), but still pretty badly written all around.
I bailed after this point.
I never really understood what all the fuss was about. Do people *enjoy* being bored, so they watch this stuff?
I wonder if this could have been a good series if it had just focused on Hiro. Guess we’ll never know.
Heroes is making me miss The 4400 even more. Both shows are/were esentially about a bunch of people who aquired superpowers but The 4400 seemed to be much more in touch with where it was going compared to the occassioanlly confusing Heroes.
Every week i continue to watch heroes and every week I post a list of complaints about what i’ve just watched on a forum I frequent. People then ask me why i continue to watch it and i have to tell them i want the show to be good, but am always sorely disapointed.
Problems are all over the place but it mainly can all be down to one fault – bad writing. Heroes don’t behave in character, but rather act purely in the interest of furthering the plot or creating tension. As well as what PAD mentioned about hiro this season we’ve had Elle get on a place while her powers are screwed, Claire Bennet who cannot die going to the house of the one man who can kill her for her first job as a villain hunter. Hiro when hunting the pre-cog gets hit in the head repeatedly seeming to forget he can stop time. Noah talks to the Haitian about finding sylars weakness, the same Haitian who takes away powers.
The last couple of eps have been horrible imo, the 9th wonder comics are a good concept but when they’re used as scripts for the characters that taking the concept way too far. Elles goes from hating sylar to loving him to encouraging to kill to feeling guilty for creating the monster. Not only that but they’ve ruined my favourite character (Noah) by making him into a pervert who watches sylar and elle get it on rather then take a shot. The Parkman plot is pathetic, he loves her simply because he knows they end up together, and she loves him, what has he honestly done to earn her love? Nothing as far as i know. and do not get me started on the mess that his mohinders plot line, who goes from homicidal psycho to good doctor on a whim.
Then there was this weeks, where Arthur turns up 16 years in the past suddenly without an explanation or any build up before or afterwards. This is the kinda thing that needed to be either A. Hinted at before or B. Explained afterwards how he knew to be there at that exact time.
Funny fact: The heroes writer have a litmus test, where they play around with an idea for 150 hours and if they still like it, they run with it. How the hëll did the hiro as a 10 year old idea last for 150 seconds? let alone hours
And the constant name-dropping of the writers marvel comics works annoys the hëll out of me as well. If i was writing the show i’d kill a large amount of the cast off and make noah the main character, he’s the only good character on the show anyway.
Every week i continue to watch heroes and every week I post a list of complaints about what i’ve just watched on a forum I frequent. People then ask me why i continue to watch it and i have to tell them i want the show to be good, but am always sorely disapointed.
Problems are all over the place but it mainly can all be down to one fault – bad writing. Heroes don’t behave in character, but rather act purely in the interest of furthering the plot or creating tension. As well as what PAD mentioned about hiro this season we’ve had Elle get on a place while her powers are screwed, Claire Bennet who cannot die going to the house of the one man who can kill her for her first job as a villain hunter. Hiro when hunting the pre-cog gets hit in the head repeatedly seeming to forget he can stop time. Noah talks to the Haitian about finding sylars weakness, the same Haitian who takes away powers.
The last couple of eps have been horrible imo, the 9th wonder comics are a good concept but when they’re used as scripts for the characters that taking the concept way too far. Elles goes from hating sylar to loving him to encouraging to kill to feeling guilty for creating the monster. Not only that but they’ve ruined my favourite character (Noah) by making him into a pervert who watches sylar and elle get it on rather then take a shot. The Parkman plot is pathetic, he loves her simply because he knows they end up together, and she loves him, what has he honestly done to earn her love? Nothing as far as i know. and do not get me started on the mess that his mohinders plot line, who goes from homicidal psycho to good doctor on a whim.
Then there was this weeks, where Arthur turns up 16 years in the past suddenly without an explanation or any build up before or afterwards. This is the kinda thing that needed to be either A. Hinted at before or B. Explained afterwards how he knew to be there at that exact time.
Funny fact: The heroes writer have a litmus test, where they play around with an idea for 150 hours and if they still like it, they run with it. How the hëll did the hiro as a 10 year old idea last for 150 seconds? let alone hours
And the constant name-dropping of the writers marvel comics works annoys the hëll out of me as well. If i was writing the show i’d kill a large amount of the cast off and make noah the main character, he’s the only good character on the show anyway.
As far as what year 24 is at, there have been four presidental elections. So let’s call season 1 as 2000. Season 3 was 2004 (with season 2 somewhere in between).
Season 4-5 were betwen 2005-2008 in which one president is hurt when Air Force 1 is shot down, and his VP who took over under the 25th ammendent either resigned or was impeached, so his VP became president and may have been the one who lost to Wayne Palmer whi was elected in 2008.
Season 6 was in early 2009. The TV movie took place on Jan. 20, 2013 (assuming the VP who took over for Wayne was not re-elected, which I don’t think he was)and season 7 will be soon after that. So nearly 13 years have passed in all.
David
I find myself in complete agreeance Pete. I watched the first season in a tardy fashion, writing the show off as traditional genre crap. I was wrong. The first season was passionate, funand engaging. The second season meandered and was cut off prematurely. The third season has steadily turned into a train wreck. I find myself tuning out entirely during most characters’ segments – the only characters I really care for at this point are Sylar and Noah. Peter is a mewling buffoon and Hiro seems intent to never learnresponsibility… despite his unpleasant lessons. Its shotty writing and, likely, they don’t actually know what they want to do. More and more I find myself wishing I’d stuck to my cynical guns and refused to ever engage the show.
I have spent so many weeks defending Heroes but… i’m friggin’ exhausted! I can’t do it anymore! Maybe now that Bryan Fuller’s on board, we can get some of the good season one stuff back but right now… yeah, I agree, it’s a mess. I was really excited about this chapter, “Villains.” I loved the way in Babylon 5 and Buffy, we had the bad guys slowly emerge during the season and characters choosing their sides. But as others have mentioned, in Heroes we have the “he’s a good guy. No he’s a bad guy! No wait!!” form of storytelling. We are, what? one episode away from the end of the volume, and yet I don’t really feel like I know what’s going on. And I know this is called Villains, but really? Can’t we let the good guys win occasionally? Hiro went through this whole episode only to lose his powers and lose the catalyst within minuites of getting it. That just sucks.
Another problem: very vauge threat.
The first season had a very clear threat, New York gets nuked. It turned out that there was a lot more going on and the whole world would be affected, but New York getting nuked was a very straightforward starting point.
This season the threat is that everyone in the world will get powers and somehow that will result in the world blowing up. Did they ever really state how the wolrd would blow up or who was behind it? I don’t think so, if they did it was easy to miss. I can kind of see their point, history has shown that a society where everyone has a gun isn’t always a safe sociity, but that’s not a clear point. It’s easy to say that they should have just found the guy who blew up the world and stopped him.
Overall, HEROES’ third season feels like bad fanfic. Really bad fanfic. Excruciatingly bad fanfic.
There have been a few good moments: Almost any scene with Daphne, for instance. And Kristen Bell’s acting was as good as always, even if the actions of Elle didn’t make a lick of sense much of the time.
But overall … it’s ghastly. I liked the eclipse two-parter when I first watched it, but in retrospect, it starts sinking into the same mud as the rest of it. The mission to go get The Haitian felt like a mini-mission in a video game, for instance. Ditto tracking down the comic book store (even if Seth Green and Breckin Meyer were entertaining) and worse, tracking down the unpublished comic book.
I hadn’t known Mark Verheiden was joining the team. That could bode well. It could end up doing nothing. Maybe this show only had one good season in it. I do know that every time a character seems to die and then returns, I find myself yelling “Come ON!” at the screen.
“Posted by: thunderstrike78 at December 10, 2008 02:51 PM
Actually, I have to agree with the person who compared this situation to Joss Wheden’s script doctoring: the problem with Season 3 of HEROES is Season 1 of HEROES.
The writers laid a lot of groundwork in Season 1, but they never built on it properly. The ending of Season 1 was totally anticlimatic, and they missed a HUGE opportunity to develop the show over time. “
Very True. I think the problem is that the writers came up with really good characters — a lot of them — and they were lucky enough to get actors who directors who performed the characters well, but they didn’t have much beyond that.
Season one did a good job of presenting the characters to us, but was only OK beyond that. Even at this stage they already had problems figuring out what to do with the characters. Even then there was a certain lack of focus which resulted in some slow chapters, as well as all the characters that were carelessly dropped along the way. But the main problem was that didn’t really know what to do with the characters, how to take them beyond their original sketch, to take them to the next level.
That was why the first season finale was anticlimactic. It was supposed to be the culmination of the character’s journey which would then lead to the next stage in their development, but it did not happen for most of them. They were all there, but they didn’t grow as characters. Despite all that Claire and hero went through, and the weight given to them, their role in the final scene was passive and insignificant. So was Matt’s. And even Peter was mostly passive. Nikki did discover that she can have the powers too without being Jessica, but it was not that important either. So only Nathan actually went through a major change.
Thunderstrike: “Season 1 should have ended with a bang: a visible battle with Sylar that leveled at least a portion of the city. I understand that for budgetary reasons it may have been necessary to scale that back, but there should have been some visible repercussions of a major super-powered battle in New York City. Sylar would have been stopped, all the Heroes would have been brought together, and the people of the wider world would have been staggered by such a major catastrophe. The federal government would have been made aware of super-powered people in our midst, with the dangling threat of revealing the Heroes’ presence to the public at large. Powerful people in the know could have started trying to recruit the Heroes (or other supers) to their own causes. On and on . . . There was huge potential there to give the show an epic scale, plot out a long-term story, give the cast some cohesion by bringing them all together and making them work as a group, and really analyzing the superhero genre. But instead, the producers chose to take a more soap-opera approach, keeping the characters separated and working on their own little threads, and generally making a hodge-podge mess of a show that had incredible potential.”
That would have been great. You’re right. The stories and the world they place in did not grow or change as the story progressed, and the characters did not grow as a group as well as individually. Instead of asking what’s the natural growth of the characters and the world in the aftermath of season 1, most of the old characters (except Matt in season 2) seemed to be stuck in seasons 2-3. Instead of becoming more interesting and more developed as a result of what happened and what they were going through, they seemed to have floundered or regressed to who they were in the beginning. Every time Claire seemed to grow, they wheeled her back in to the shadow of her father. Peter became dull with all the powers in the world now but no direction. Hiro was supposedly on a Hero’s journey which included losing his father, living in the past and meeting his hero, but they also held him back in the same stage he was in when he started. In fact they were so desperate to keep him the lovable and clueless nerd they turned him into a 10 year old. Matt and Nikki’s growth was erased. Nathan is still stuck as the politician who is considering becoming a hero, jumping between being a cold hearted politician and wandering aimlessly.
New characters like Elle and Monica and Daphne were great. But Monica story ended before it could begin, and Elle and Daphne were all over the place.
In a way the future selves of the characters seemed more interesting than the present ones.
Compare this to Buffy or Battlestar Galactica in which the characters grew and changed organically as the story developed, and the story grew too. And Buffy didn’t even have a big Lost-style mystery.
Why keep watching it? Because its a mainstream network show about superheroes that is not on CW.
How long to watch it? I don’t know. I kept watching 24 up to the beginning of season 5, I think. There were terrorists and weapons of mass destruction and torturing.
How bad has it become.
Hiro, who can blink out of the way of bullets, can’t get out of the way of an old man grabbing him…TWICE!
And eclipses, which was a bad plot device in the first place, follow a narrow path across the sky. They do not happen all over the Western Hemisphere simultaneously.
Gather round, it’s shark jumping time.
I wasn’t overly upset with this season until “The Eclipse.” Those two episodes were just horrendous. The season hasnt been a standout, but its been enjoyable. I do find the writing to be sub-par on occasion, with way too many plotholes and continuity errors. Too many contradictions on a week to week basis.
And I hate to say it, but the acting on the show is just garbage. Outside of the main characters of Sylar, Noah, Hiro and Angela…everyone else needs acting lessons. BADLY.
Someone also pointed out that the eclipse should only be visible to an area of 167 square miles, or something, and therefore, not visible to characters in Kansas, Haiti and New York.
And what about that Irish lass that Peter left in an alternate future (that probably doesn’t exist anymore now)
Also: Does Isaac Mendes write/draw well ahead of any other artist in comics, and anyway, weren’t all his paintings meant to be along the original timeline where Manhattan goes boom boom?
It’s so goddam obvious – “Heroes” is being written by the manatees!
“And what about that Irish lass that Peter left in an alternate future (that probably doesn’t exist anymore now)”
When asked about this recently, Kring said they were never going to follow up on that plot.
I’ve been nothing short of astonished watching Heroes swallow itself since those heady days of season 1 when the show could do no wrong. And lest we forget, the show WAS possessed of genuine greatness back then, racking up cliffhanger after cliffhanger – and I still remember jumping from my ášš-groove and full out cheering when Peter made Sylar’s trademark forehead incision vanish and then fought back.
But ever since that wholly anti-climactic season one finale…sheesh. This show simply doesn’t know how to do super-fights, which I find stunning given the amount of superhero comics, movies out there which feature masks beating the living tripe out of each other on a regular basis. I completely agree with a point made above that the show reads like “excruciatingly bad fanfic” – that’s exactly the vibe I’d been getting from watching, as if some 11 year old had been let loose in the toybox and can’t believe his luck.
Nikki dead – pah! She’s got a clone sister – easy fix! Who’s the villain? Ummmmm – Peter’s Dad!!! Yeah, cool!!! And SYLAR is TOTALLY his BROTHER, dude!!! Well. Maybe.
What annoys me most is remembering an interview with the showrunners during the season 2 – season 3 gap. Oh, they had it alllllll figured out. Romance isn’t our thing. Sorry guys! No-one wants to see origin stories anymore – soooo season 1. Sorry guys! Not enough cliffhangers anymore. Sorry guys! Everyone wants a lil’ less conversation, a lil’ more action. You got it guys!
And boy, did we ever get it. The only romance this season, between Matt and the Speedster, completely skipped the falling in love part that usually makes us give a crap.
We haven’t seen a single origin story – Arthur, perhaps, excluded – because that would perhaps entail a slower pace and not leave room for the SHOCK OF THE FIVE MINUTES!
Cliffhangers…pah! You only get one a week – dude, what’s up with that? Why not have forty-seven per episode?
And action…oh hëll yeah, lots of action. Well, lots of teleporting and mind-reading and zooming anyway, which is kind of the same as action, isn’t it? ‘Cos who needs tension and suspense and emotional investment when you’ve got another three plot twists in the next five minutes to prepare for!
Personally speaking, it’s dispiriting to me when I would give my right eye to work in television and to have the keys to a box of delights such as the premise behind “Heroes” that this is the best that those who actually succeeded in that goal can come up with.
There’s a nice little interview with Fuller about the show, including some of the problems he saw and some of the solutions the Heroes writing team are going to try and implement.
I think by the sounds of it they might just be able to get things flowing again. The only question then is if the network has enough patience to let it happen.
Dropped it awhile ago. I watched the episode where Arthur stole Peter’s powers, thought, “Well, that was an improvement,” and then realized I still hadn’t actually enjoyed it. The moment I realize I’m only watching something because I’ve been watching it is the time to stop watching it.
Honestly. I hate most of the ‘new’ characters. The Latin chick. SUcks. Daphne. Melodramatic and juvenile. Elle has no depth, the attempt to give failed miserably. Come to think of it… why are all the new characters hot chicks? I think there’s a pattern. They’re trying to hook us with the ‘next big sex bomb’.
Me, I wanna know why, every time someone has a vision of a future and draws what they saw (Isaac Mendez, Urulu, Arthur Petrelli), it always comes out in the the same apparent style, almost as if they were all drawn by the same guy…
🙂
“Me, I wanna know why, every time someone has a vision of a future and draws what they saw (Isaac Mendez, Urulu, Arthur Petrelli), it always comes out in the the same apparent style, almost as if they were all drawn by the same guy…”
OMG! Is the “Long Halloween” a vision of the future?
The only bad thing about watching The Office (the only NBC show I watch) is being violated by promos for Heroes. I can’t believe anyone can actually sit through the actual show.
Yeah, the first season was awesome (I liked even the fimale), I used to love this show. Now… now I completely agree with PAD. What the hëll happened?
The second season was crappy, and in trying to fix the problems in second season they went the opposite way, so 3rd season is sort of the 1st season all over again, but with triple the speed, no pretense of real world atmosphere anymore, and no time for us to even get used to a certain situation before it’s reversed and then reversed again and again.
There are still some great scenes, some great concepts, but we don’t have time to appreciate them. 3rd season is like a comic book written by Grant Morrison, if Grant had lost about 80% of his talent, but retained the crazy intensity.
The best thing I can say of the 3rd season is that it’s still better than the 2nd, but that is very faint praise indeed.
I fear the show is done. I’ll keep watching, because I’m a sucker for superhero stuff, but I don’t think the show will survive for a 4th season.
To Micha and Thunderstrike –
Any of you guys watched “the 4400”? I liked that show, but it made me realize why a superhero TV show has certain limitations imposed by budget.
Revealing the Heroes to the world and taking the show to the next step and the natural resolution of the cast coming together is a great idea, but I don’t think they have the budget for something epic with lots of big sets and lots of crowd scenes that such a direction would entail.
I know Heroes has a much bigger budget than 4400, but even so… every time they tried to do a big screen scene in 4400 featuring the wars and revolutions and social movements inherent in a world with many known superhumans, the show came awfully short, everything seeming to take place in a Wal-Mart back lot or something.
Sorry if someone else has already said this, but…
PAD, I reject your notion of reviewing Heroes being like reviewing chapters of a book. Books do not get written and published in weekly chapter installments. If I want to read twenty chapters in twenty weeks, I may. If I want to read twenty chapters in one sitting, I may.
Any television show that be entertaining until an entire block of episodes have been seen (like reading a complete book) is A BAD TELEVISION SHOW. Come on, people buy entire books and still throw them out after reading the first few boring chapters. Anyone in the television industry that believes their show’s viewers shouldn’t be able to demand weekly installments of interesting and at least marginally self-contained viewing experiences does not deserve to helm a show.
That last paragraph should start with “Any show that CANNOT be entertaining until an entire block of episodes have been seen (like reading a complete book) is A BAD TELEVISION SHOW.”
And I know someone might try to say that PAD wasn’t waiting until they were all interesting, he was waiting until it was a good time to summarize. In that case, I say the exact same thing as before.
Blake: “Books do not get written and published in weekly chapter installments.”
Actually, many novels were first published in installments. Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and Stephen King’s The Green Mile are just a few examples of books that were originally published in a serialized format.