Serious Talk about Heroes

Well, it's time for a long, serious discussion of Heroes. Monday's episode was obviously meant to be the key episode to let everyone know that it's time to get back to business, and, well, we should respect that.

I would like to start by saying that, while I'm glad they finally got around to giving us Monday's episode, I still feel disappointed in them. For those first 6 episodes or so, they were stalling by keeping Peter, Hiro, and Sylar out of the picture. In the meantime, they were trying out having a variety of only vaguely related sub-plots as the various "special people" tried to deal with their abilities (amongst other things). As a concept, it's not a terrible way to stall. It should be interesting to watch them try to go about their lives after saving the world. Well, it could be interesting. But, it wasn't.

So, instead, we got Monday's episode. They gave up and just gave the audience want the audience was screaming for (which of course isn't really what the audience wanted at all). They're going to give us season one all over again. By the looks of it, almost exactly, too. Everyone is going to need to unite once again and work together to save the world and prevent a disaster, which has already been set in motion. Linderman has been replaced by Adam as the evil guy bringing this all together, and um, yeah, everything else is the same.

(Heavy, sad, sigh...)

What a disappointment. I remember, before the start of season 2, trying to imagine where they were going to go next with Heroes. I was hoping there would be some sort of reaction by the general public to the fact that a giant bomb had gone off in the sky. I had hoped that Nathan Patrelli had died, leaving Peter feeling guilty and borderline useless as he blames himself for Nathan's sacrifice (instead of the other way around, minus the dying). I had hoped the company would start doing something interesting now that their leader was dead. I was not really hoping for some new disaster for our Heroes to prevent.

But, whatever, that's what we got. Okay, fine, we'll make some lemonade and we'll like it, thank you very much.

First off, let's talk about Adam. Our new villain masterminding disaster. I have a confession to make. I totally misread his character when we were introduced to him in the past. As soon as we saw him healing, I was certain that he was a fellow time traveling mutant (oops, did I just say mutant out loud) and he was just leading Hiro on. There were a couple reason I thought this. The first one was the silly convenience of it all, that Hiro's hero was a "special person". It made more sense to me that someone with a variety of powers including healing and time traveling would potentially use them to go around being a dick throughout history (and therefore be a legend throughout history). Given all that time, I could totally imagine him learning Japanese so that he could be a hero there too (or an Englishman being Kensei could just be for the purpose of reducing the quantity of subtitles used in the show).

In my defense, there was one other reason I thought he was from the future. I assumed (and, yes, I know that assuming makes and ass out of you and Ming), that the mutations necessary to create the Heroes requires multiple generations of random mutations to occur. This was supported by the fact that we assume there has suddenly been an explosion of these people arising in the last two generations (as opposed to thinking that these people have been around throughout history). This is especially true because it is so clearly hereditary (unless Angela Patrelli has a power we don't know about, Nathan and Peter's father passed on the gift to both of them...although the chick whose dad was a former Hero didn't have any powers, so it's not guaranteed). So, considering these two details, it didn't occur to me that all the necessary mutations would have happened in one individual a long ass time before they occurred in anyone else, ever.

But, I was wrong (or the writers didn't care...they were too busy negotiating for higher percentages or something, I don't know...not that I don't support the strike or anything...of course). An alternative (and fun!) theory, considering that we currently now believe Adam has been around for a long time, is that all of the current Heroes are somehow related to him. That maybe he decided it was time to just start making babies and see how the investment would pan out. I kind of like that theory, if only because it's weird and random.

One more brief complaint (brief, huh?). I was really annoyed with how they used Peter's ability to move the plot forward. That was not at all how they did it last season. They're still being good with that series of 8 paintings or whatever, but Peter's was just a cop out. That power is supposed to show what happens in the future, not cause it. The closest we've ever seen it coming to causing the future (also happened when Peter painted), and that was when it provided enough information to get him to where he already wanted to go (Claire's high school). Admittedly, it showed him there, so you might be able to argue that it was causing the future, but he might have potentially figured out where to go anyways (since he was at least trying).

Compare this to his painting at Caitlin's (I don't remember the spelling, but that's my guess) house. They don't know where to go or what to do. So he paints them at some building in Montreal. Therefore, they go to this building at Montreal, not knowing what it is or why they're going there. It's just a stupid way to move the plot forward (also known as Dues Ex Machina, but whatever, it's not like we haven't seen plenty of that in Heroes already).

So, Heroes is moving into high gear. Hiro is back and ready to get revenge on the person who killed his father. Matt's dad is decommissioned for now, so our pseudo-evil filler villain is all done. Peter even has his memory back (admittedly, he's with Adam right now, but I think it's safe to say that Peter is probably not going to side with him for too long). Now we're just waiting on Sylar to get his powers back and start wreaking havoc on all sorts of innocent people (unless the show decides to go super, crazy, lame and makes him do something good, but I have faith that they'll keep him as the awesome psycho...assuming they let him have his powers back soon).

We're also starting to really wonder why Claire still counts as a main character (besides as fan service, of course). I mean, for goodness sake, she has the least helpful power ever. She can heal herself. Whoo! Until someone plates her skeleton with adamantium and gives her big ass claws for ripping into people, she's never going to do anything useful (except for give Peter her power, which she did last season). And, I'm serious here, why do we have to have another "Find the cheerleader!" mission? Do the writers really have that little imagination? It's totally pointless. Besides, why do they even think she'll be useful?

So, Jessica (or Nikki, I don't really care) has the virus that's going to destroy the world. Okay then, let's bring in a mutant that can regenerate. She'll totally be able to provide us with new antibodies to fight the virus and stop the end of the world. All I can say is: "NO!" That makes no sense at all. The virus takes away people's abilities. Therefore, it seems pretty likely that if Claire gets exposed to the virus, she won't be able to heal anymore and will therefore be even more useless. And, even if she was still able to regenerate and therefore not die, she still wouldn't have any antibodies. Her power would be keeping her alive by regenerating everything the virus destroys. So, in either case, you don't need her.

A better (read as equally terrible) plan would be to look for a new Hero who has the power to raise the dead (we could even magically say that the siblings from Mexico can use their powers together, or something, I don't know, to bring people back to life). This new Hero could then raise Linderman from the dead for us and then Linderman could heal Nikki (or Jessica, I don't care). I think that plan has better odds (if they wanted to cheat, they could try to find that guy on Pushing Daisies or whatever and just introduce him to Peter, and that would probably work too, plus you could keep a pretty tight leash on Linderman that way).

Alright, that's all I have to say about Heroes for now. I'm glad that they've decided to move the plot forward. I'm proud of them for that. I guess.

That is all.

Francis