Another week, another Heroes! Don’t you just love new TV season? I always hate the summer because there’s almost never anything good to watch, although I might be being kind when I classify this as good TV. Or am I? If interested, you can find me latest thoughts on the newest episode of Heroes after the jump. Be warned, however. This article does contain spoilers as it is rather impossible to breach certain topics of opinion without giving away certain scenes. However, due to this being published two days after the airing, I’m sure you’ve all had ample time to see it and digest it. And for those that haven’t, I’m going to go ahead and give a guess that you’re really not that interested in Heroes any more, which is a growing opinion as I’ve noted.
Anyways.
Remember last week when I said one of the better things about Heroes was that it was doinga better job of trimming out a lot of the fat and focusing on a smaller cast of characters at a time? Not only had we lost many members of the cast, but now we’re really only focusing on small groups. It made for a much better dynamic in the show because we have less things to follow and less reasons for the show to get jumbled up. Of course, this week focuses on the group of characters that, in all honesty, I don’t care about, and the show gives us no really compelling reason to want to follow them. In fact, this episode of the show strays from the central arc of the show, and that is our mystery carnival and carnies. I’m not exaggerating when I say this show has nothing to do with them at all until the very end of the episode, when they appear for under five minutes.
One of the people this episode deals with is everyone’s favorite Hiro. Or at least, someone who used to be everyone’s favorite. Hiro was the character we looked to in the beginning of the show as the one we could most connect with, because he saw his powers as a gift and did his best to live up to them. Hiro wanted to be the hero we all watched the show to see. However, as the show progressed, his powers and storyline became incredibly screwed up, and now he’s a Dial-A-Hero who is slowly dying, an idea Chris Claremont is bringing up in his run of X-Men Forever, that the powers burn out the person to eventual death if over used. In this episode, Hiro tries repeatedly to save one man from killing himself, only to find that every time he tries, the man finds a way to undo Hiro’s right and in fact leave him in the same place he started – on the roof of the building. Eventually, Hiro gains acceptance for his lot in life (see where the title comes from?) and comes to grips with his mortality. As he goes to tell his sister, he is engulfed in pain and disappears. Ok, so it’s an interesting sequence, but it becomes convoluted. If he could help Ando and Kimiko get together, why couldn’t he save this one man? And ultimately, where is all this going? Hiro feels like a loose end to the story that, although I’m going to throw this out there and assume it will all connect at the end, just sort of hangs in the breeze. Hiro’s goal used to be much more clear, but with this season I can’t help but not find anything enthralling about his story at all.
Then we move on to Tracey. Tracey is a character that should have never existed, and Ali Larter should have gone off the show long ago. The whole cloned triple thing… I’m not buying it. Her character has the least to do with the show, however. Originally we assumed that part of this season would be her revenge kick, btu that was knocked off right at the beginning. Now she’s trying to go back to her normal life, but as it turns out, she doesn’t want it. Ok. Great. So? Look – I’m not a fan of Ali Larter, to be honest. I don’t like her character. She has always been the one character in the show that never truly fit in. She was good for certain elements of the show, but at this point it all feels incredibly redundant. The show had made a good move when it stopped featuring Tracey Strauss, and I wish it would go back to that.
Continued belowThe episode also stars Noah, with a guest spot by Claire. I say guest spot because it really didn’t feel like “her” in the episode. It felt like she just showed up to move the story along. Noah is the only character here who has any main role to play, it seems. We have him be in doubt for the majority of the episode of where he wants to go in life before he finally resides to his old task of solving super people related mysteries and crimes. Now he’s on the case of the compass, and that’s intriguing. In fact, if not for him, we probably wouldn’t see the carnies at all, so kudos to Noah. Noah has always been an intriguing character though, especially when he was just HRG. His intense knowledge and cunning have always been welcome to the show, and he makes both a formidable hero and villain. My only wish is that he would stop flipping and flopping between his sides. He wants to be a company man, he doesn’t want to be a company man, now he wants to again? Peter also pays him a visit in what feels like a guest spot, and the two discuss the mystery of the compass in a scene I greatly enjoyed. They both mention that if this were a year ago, they’d be all over this like nobody’s business, but now they have lives. Now they have things they would rather do. This whole mysterious world doesn’t have the same allure it once had. While it was an interesting set of dialogue, I’m much happier to see where that ended up with Noah returning to his old habits. It makes for a better story, and Noah is a character I’d rather not lose.
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Finally, we have Nathan. A lot of Nathan’s story just left me groaning, and this is where my aforementioned spoiler comes in. Nathan’s story eventually leads to the return of Sylar, although to what capacity we do not know. Sylar is a character that, while I love, I need to be left alone for a while. Now, let’s be honest here – we all knew he’d be back. But really? 3 episodes in? It’s like they’re not even trying. The majority of Nathan’s story wasn’t very interesting, as he tries to deal with the flood of Sylar’s powers he slowly becomes capable of using. He remembers about how he once murdered a girl as Nathan (which doesn’t add up because he shouldn’t have memories Sylar and Matt never knew about), and the show brings back a character Bryan Fuller created for what I had assumed was a once in a show type of deal. The show has this funny need to flesh out all of it’s characters in order to show it’s interconnectivity, but it just doesn’t always work. And I’m still incredibly bugged about the return of Sylar. Look, you can bring your villain back, but bring him back in an interesting way that doesn’t involve us watching three episodes and he pops up out of dirt. Sylar needs to be gone for 14 episodes, and we can build up to that point before he realizes who he is again and goes on a killing spree. Hell, leave the character dormant for a season and bring him back at the end of the season (what they tried to do with all of Season 2). It’s just poor form, Heroes.
Ultimately, as quickly as it was getting better, the show falls back into bad old habits. The people behind this show just have such a hard time letting go that it becomes impossible to really be invested in the show anymore. There are no stakes. If a character “dies”, they’ll just be back in an episode or a season. Sure, comic books have this classic trope about no one being dead forever, but at least in comics you can wait a year or two before someone comes back (i.e. Steve Rogers or Connor Kent). What Heroes doesn’t realize is that it needs to bring a brand new story to the front in it’s entirety and focus only on that. It should stop trying to hold to the reigns of things we all have waning interest in and accept the fact that it can not return to classic format. We have an intriguing story here that makes me want to keep watching – the compass and the carnies. That’s good material. However, the show needs to keep it’s focus on that and less time trying to work with old mistakes, because if it does it’s just going to keep on it’s slippery slope into oblivion, and I’d bet that no matter how many people watch, it’ll get canned before they can give the show a real ending.
