Warning: SPOILERS.
At the beginning of the fall season of Heroes on NBC, I was pretty hard on the show. I was worried that they were taking the danger out of the mix by killing characters and then bringing them back as if nothing had happened. Well, anyone who has been watching the series since this season began will have learned, along with myself that many of my criticisms were uncalled for. They actually did kill off Niki/Jessica and it doesn’t look like they’re bringing DL back either. So while the writers of Heroes have done many things to increase my interest in the show, I’m also starting to notice some other things that are really going to bother me if they continue.
In tonight’s episode, Claire goes behind Noah’s back and rescues a potential target and then confesses to her mother what she and Noah were really doing when they were supposed to be college shopping. Hiro learns that he doesn’t need powers to be a hero. Nathan gets a skeptical new boss that he needs to convince that there really are people in the world with almost “magical” abilities. And Sylar learns that his new sidekick, Luke, knows the truth that will lead Sylar to his father.
I really like the apparent direction the show is going. The prospect of having our heroes living in the underground as they try to elude the government has the potential to present some very exciting television. Heroes is definitely a show that I intend to keep my Tivo programmed to record every week and I’m sure I’ll want to buy the rest of the DVDs as they come available
I finally figured out as I was watching tonight’s episode, however, why my enthusiasm for this show sometimes wavers. It came to me as I thought of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Most of that movie seemed to be centered around the build-up to the climactic battle at Helm’s Deep and the associated tension that went along with it. As long as that build-up continued, every element of it ratcheted up the tension more and more until, when the battle actually commenced, all of that tension was released and the resulting energy paid off all of my expectations, and more.
It seems to me that Heroes is forever stuck in the “build-up” mode and the eventual releasing of the tension that is supposed to happen at the end of their volumes isn’t as satisfying as it should be. This goes back all the way to the very first season which I loved, but by the time the season finale arrived, the climactic battle that had been hyped for the entire season, just kind of happened in a very staged way that left me feeling kind of cheated out of all of my efforts as a viewer.
So you might be asking, what do I like about this show? Well, I do like the Peter Petrelli, Matt Parkman, and Mohinder Suresh team-up. I still really enjoy Hiro and Ando and I hope that Hiro gets his powers back soon. I really like the threat of the government hunting down people with abilities and I think some exciting times are in store with that storyline.
What don’t I like? I’m not thrilled with Sylar. Personally I think Sylar should have died at the end of the first season so the heroes could encounter a new and different threat. I don’t like Noah’s flip-flopping between is-he-good-or-is-he-bad? I like him when he’s good, and I like him when he’s bad, I just wish they’d make up their freakin’ mind! (Something that the preview for next week is promising to resolve… yeah, we’ll see.) And I’m starting to get really annoyed by Claire. She’s starting to seem like one of those annoying kids you see in movies who’s always wandering off chasing their lost pet and getting into trouble that almost kills everyone, but nobody ever does anything to stop the kid in the first place. They either need to lock Claire up like they keep threatening to, or Claire needs to finally go out on her own and get over her misguided loyalty to Noah and her attachment to her real father/creep Nathan.
I still have high-hopes for this show. I think the storylines have real potential but I think that the writers need to be brave enough to break out of some of the seemingly crippling formulas they’ve developed. And for crying out loud, it’s OK not to show us every one of the main characters in every episode. You can cover just one storyline from start to finish in a show and I don’t think the world would end.
But really… I do like this show.