I was hooked almost instantly. The concept is phenomenal, the characters were engaging, and the storyline was stellar. It was somewhat like the X-men, but the X-men never seemed like normal people trying to cope with superpowers so much as super people trying to be like normal people. Watching these everyday average people dealing with these new powers that they don't understand and can hardly control really taps into the dream of having such powers yourself. And what person can honestly say they never spent a large portion of their childhood imagining what it would be like to have some superpower or other? (And most of you will probably admit you still do it. Frequently.)
One of the most powerful aspects of that glorious first season was the way that all of the different paths intersected, but it never felt contrived or forced. It seemed like crazy random happenstance that brought their stories into the overall arc and eventually to the amazing finale. Needless to say, I was very excited for the second season.
And then it happened, and things quickly went awry. We have a new villain now that Sylar has been stabbed and is currently out of the picture. Bob, the boring accountant. I don't have much to say about Bob, but he is a completely unconvincing and uninteresting villain. They have also added some new characters, Maya and Alejandro, and nobody gives a shit about them. And if you do give a shit about them, I would love to hear why that is. Hiro (my absolute favorite character from season 1) is trapped in Feudal Japan for more than half of the season on an incredibly slow paced and boring adventure, and then the writers strike hit and we have a ridiculously fast paced wrap up of the mediocre threat.
Now, while season 2 was incredibly disappointing, I was able to forgive it. There was a strike after all, and I have no way of knowing how things would have turned out with an extra ten episodes worth of storytelling. So while I wasn't very excited about season 3 starting, I also wasn't dreading it, and I truly hoped they could write themselves out of the hole created by season 2. Two episodes into the new season and I am very unconvinced. Season 2 involved a lot of the characters acting very much not like what we had come to expect from that first glorious season, and that still seems to be the case.
One of my main problems is that none of these characters have progressed in any meaningful way. Peter is the face of the show, and apparently is setup to be the most heroic of them all (They even feel the need to directly point this out to us in season 3 "Now I know you're lying, nobody is that heroic") but he's still a whiny, neurotic, angsty, and generally useless person. (And if future Peter is any indication, the angst just keeps on comin). Claire has potential with a pretty cool power, but they are going absolutely nowhere with the character, so I'm pretty sure everyone has completely lost interest.
And then we have Hiro. As I mentioned, my personal favorite from season 1 is now one of the characters I hate the most. Our introduction to him this season is him whining about having no great destiny to fill (apparently he doesn't even think saving the world twice is good enough) so he disobeys direct orders from his father, intentionally putting the world at risk, and then repeatedly fucking up every single opportunity he has to put it right. What the hell? He's able to basically single-handedly save the world but can't manage to get anything right? And his whole "I don't trust you Ando because I saw you in the future killing me even though we've already proven a thousand times in this show that the future is always changing" is beyond irritating.
One possible reason why they're having issues actually progressing the characters is because there's so goddamn many of them, and the writers are keen on getting everyone into every episode so we get at most a few minutes on one of the many plot lines before we're unceremoniously transitioned into the middle of another.
My final major issue I'd like to discuss is villains. Early in the life of Heroes I thought the writers had a firm grasp of cool villains. We had Horn Rimmed Glasses man, and Sylar. Both were mysterious, though only Sylar was obviously evil. HRG was pretty ambiguous, but that made him really freakin' cool. They have ruined them both. Now HRG doesn't have anything mysterious to him, and Sylar has been given a back story that makes him a crybaby with mommy issues. They introduced four new villains so far this season, and it took all of three episodes to kill half of them (in really lame ways too).
I have a suspicion that I will continue to watch Heroes, if only because I can see what it could be, although maybe that's why it's so hard for me to accept what it is.
7 comments:
Well, I have to say, this is a nice change of pace for this blog. It’s nice to contemplate something besides politics, especially with the VP debate (read: hilarity guaranteed) tonight.
I have to admit, I fall in the category of people who still, even at 24, frequently imagine what it would be like to have admantium claws, or energy beams for eyes, or a set of completely hideable wings. I am in the same camp as you in that I was a little skeptical about Heroes in the beginning. Being a long-time comic book fan, and having been injured so badly by the Spiderman movies, I wasn't too enthused about having my childhood fantasies trampled over on a weekly basis. But when I did give it a try, I agree, awesome.
The 2nd season I didn't really view as bad. I viewed it as a struggle to re-capture the success of the 1st season. Which, in retrospect, was a mistake. It feels like Heroes is suffering from last century's style of drama writing. The writers pen a 1 season story arch, and sell it to the production companies. If it's picked up, then they write a larger story arch for seasons 2-7 and hope they are around long enough to complete it. The later Star Trek's are a good example of this, as the last 6 seasons seem to relate to the 1st only in that the characters and settings are the same. More recent shows like Battlestar Galactica are written with a finite story arch right from the pilot. And if the story isn't told in full, then that’s just too bad. [On a side note, Joss Whedon's firefly was one of the 1st shows (I think) to do this and was butchered by the production companies, but it paved the way for shows like Ronald Moore's BSG to take up the mantle]. Getting back to my point, I don't think the writer's strike had as big an impact as you make it seem. And I don't think it is forgivable. The writers were screwed for season 2 right from the get-go, and that surely, is a mistake.
Now I WILL blame the 3rd season on the strike. Without the right preparation, season 3 is shaping up to be just as much of a dead end as season 2, and I hope that if they have a grand scheme, they are getting to it fast.
I agree with you on your character flaws point though, and would add a few more problems. As you stated, the great part of the show was being able to relate to the characters discovering their powers and this larger plan that they were intertwined in. However, ALL of the characters have swayed away from that. We know everyone's powers, and so do they, and now the only way to relate to the characters is through amnesia. And I would argue that memory-loss is a futile attempt because it still doesn't connect us to the character. We still know more than they do. If the audience knows more than the character, it begins to smack of bad B horror.
Villains....sigh. I must admit, this talk of villains in TV and media, has become quite magnified in the wake of awesome that is the Dark Knight. I think it is a little un-fair to all-of-a-sudden expect theatrical and epic villains from a syndicated TV show. Even in season 1, they weren't THAT great. Not like villains can be in other media (Joker, Magneto, Hannibal, ect.). I have always looked to comics for great villains in literature (term used loosely), and Anime for great villains in syndication, and never really to American prime-time TV. While discounting heroes for a lack of good villains is unfair for its pre-DK episodes, I agree that there needs now, to be a step up in all villains post DK.
I thought that’s what they were doing with Level 5 (SPOILER ALERT, but if you're this far in the blog, I suspect you knew that already). They even had a master of magnetism (neat that he's German, while Magneto was a victim of the Holocaust)! If these characters were on level 5...shouldn't they be the biggest and baddest of baddies that existed before Sylar? And if that’s the case, why rob a bank? "The German" alone could probably take out Ft. Knox. But instead, he teamed up with a Bronx homeboy, and a tattooed Mexican (racial profiling of criminals anyone?), and robbed a bank. A FREAKIN BANK! And on top of all that, he closed the blinds with his powers. Didn’t mash all the security guard's guns with his power, didn't control anyone's body or make them sleep (props Xmen 1). But what he did do? He moved the dials on the vault, so it unlocked. HOLY COW THAT IS AWESOME!!! waaaaay cooler than just ripping the effing safe to shreds, or warping the door off, or just hucking the entire safe at police cars until it broke, NOOOOOO. psh.
Magneto was the best villain in the Xmen, and while you will say "'The German' isn't Magneto!" I will say that the similarities are obviously an intentional nod to him, and to put him on level 5 implies he's bad-to-the-ass. I would expect him to be weaker than Magneto, because level 5 would never hold the master of magnetism. But to make the German so weak is almost as sour as the death of Cyclops.
Sorry for the really long comment, but this is the type of blog topic I really like!
Lastly,
If heroes isn't your cup of tea anymore, I might suggest Fringe.
It’s a bit like the X-Files + 80 pounds of cheese, but it’s the best we got right now. And it’s getting better as it finds its feet.
-Ty
while I don't think season 2 would have necessarily been good sans writers strike, it very clearly had a negative impact if only because they got half as many episodes as initially planned to fill out their plans but didn't know that was going to happen until they were already involved, so we got an extremely rushed and uninteresting end to the season.
Another problem that the writers have written themselves into is the infinitely powerful characters. Peter and Sylar can single-handedly ruin the show just by being too powerful to make sense with the other heroes. Imagine a typical RPG where you start out maxed level but you still have to play through the beginning where you fight a bunch of level 1 baddies. They need to take them out of the show, but they have no way of explaining that since they can't be killed. (I actually read a really cool idea on how to pull it off, but it's a bit of a lengthy explanation, I'll tell it to you sometime if you want to hear it).
As for villains, I think we only need to look to shows like BSG or Firefly to see that there is no reason for TV to be without amazing villains. Two by Two Hands of Blue from Firefly were phenomenal, Badger wasn't extremely villainous but he provided a good antagonist, and again YoSafBridge was a really fascinating character, though not strictly a villain, she was still obviously not one of the good guys. And the Cylons of BSG are pretty freakin' awesome.
And Heroes started out REALLY well. Keeping HRG as an ambiguous character who showed up in places you didn't really expect him and whose allegiance you never understood and operated under unknown motives provided an interesting offset to Sylar, who we didn't know anything about but we recognized that he was assuredly evil. Once we got intricate back stories on them they lost almost all of their intrigue, and now I just cannot care about them anymore.
yeah, I meant to bring up the fact that Sylar and Peter are too powerful. That is getting really annoying. Back to my Magneto v. The German example, why doesn't peter or/and sylar just use their amazing powers to solve all of their problems quick and easy? I guess the answer is because then there'd be no show, but we're not far from that now.
And I think we can both agree that Firefly and BSG were/are the few shining examples of what everything could be.
as for HRG, you can't keep him mysterious forever. The only reason he is interesting while mysterious is because you know in the back of your head that all the things he is involved in are connected somehow. If it was just random, or without a larger storyarch for HRG (noah) it would be pointless. oh look, there's that random guy again. that noah, he's crazy!
on a similar note, I think the partnership between Noah and Sylar has potential.
and remind me to ask you about your idea...I will most likely forget.
I agree that HRG had to eventually lose at least some of the mystique in order to become a real character, but not only did he lose all of it, there is nobody to replace him. Can you point to any character in the Heroes universe and say "You know, I am DYING to know their back story...Seriously, what's their deal?" You likely cannot because any character of interest has had their entire life story spelled out for us.
Even random new wise black man in Africa has already told us that his entire life has centered around painting pictures of Parkman's future, and we've only had like, 4 scenes with him.
you're actually advocating that they have MORE characters?
And I could say that while not mysterious, Id like to know Ando's backstory. What makes him Hero's bitch?
No, I'm advocating they kill off most of the characters and give us new interesting ones.
And I would venture a guess their explanation for Ando is the generic best friends since they were little kids and one of them is the leader.
lame.
I won't stop watching,
I didn't even (really) stop watching Atlantis.
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