TV Review: Heroes, "1961"

NOTE: Watch out for spoilers with a bad mood.

In tonight’s episode of Heroes on NBC, “1961,” Angela Petrelli takes her family on a trip down memory lane, and in the process, reveals to us how the idea for the original “Company” came to be. 

During Angela’s flashbacks, we see how she and her sister Alice were taken to an internment camp where Monhinder’s father, Chandra Suresh was researching people with special abilities, presumably with the intent of learning more about them and possibly finding a cure. In the process we see how Angela became acquainted with Charles Deveraux, Daniel Linderman, and Bob Bishop—the founding members of The Company. We also see that Angela had a younger sister named Alice that she never spoke of who had a newly emerging ability to control the weather.


While the young Angela sneaks off with her new friends to try to figure out how to escape the camp (which is weird because they left the camp to try to figure out how to leave the camp?), Alice was taken to be questioned by Chandra Suresh, and ends up starting a chain of events that ends in the massacre of everyone there except Suresh and Alice.


Back in the present day, Angela is trying to find out why she is dreaming about her sister who she presumed was killed with everyone else. Ultimately she finds Alice living as a hermit nearby because Angela had lied to her and told her that if she stayed there she’d be safe. Upon learning that Angela had lied to her, Alice causes a storm that nearly kills Peter and Mohinder and then disappears before Angela can apologize.

Now that I’ve described what the episode was about, can I now tell you how utterly bored I was by it? Throughout much of it I felt like I was watching a stage play put on by a high school drama department. The dramatic moments were so forced and all they seemed to do was sit around and talk about how they felt about themselves and each other!

Lately there's beginning to be so many holes in this series that it makes it look like they can’t make up their minds on what they want this series to be. In the first episodes of Heroes, Chandra Suresh was a geneticist who was seeking out people with special abilities in order to prove a theory he’d been researching, but we were led to believe that he’d never found anyone except for Sylar. Now, according to tonight’s episode, he was involved in this whole government operation back in the early 60s? 

I know someone will probably say that Charles Deveraux most likely erased his memory that he’d ever seen any of them, but I’d say if that’s true, why didn’t they show it? I’ve often heard, and I believe that it’s true, that in storytelling it’s much better to show than it is to tell. Why save a fact for a later episode for someone like Angela to tell Mohinder, “Oh, by the way, your father didn’t remember any of that because Charles erased his memory.” It would have been much more interesting for that to be shown in tonight’s episode. In my opinion, that's where many recent episodes are falling flat. There has been just too much talking about everything when really they need to be out doing things!

It seems to me that the point of tonight’s episode was to show all of the heroes united and ready to begin a new company but I get so frustrated with all of the starting and stopping that this show is doing. I thought the old company was fine, but they destroyed it. Ok, so now we get Danko hunting down the heroes with Mr. Bennet working on the inside as a double agent as they hunt down the fugitives—good, I’m ok with that… that looks interesting. No wait… now we’re changing it again and now the heroes and Mr. Bennet are uniting against Danko? I really wish they’d make up their minds and give us a while to roll with the plotlines they’re giving us before changing things up again.


I’m having such a love/hate relationship with this show that I don’t know how much longer I’ll stick with it. I really love the premise and I want it to do well and be good but there are just some recurring things that keep driving me nuts. Also, the main reasons to stick with an ongoing story like this are because of spectacle and character drama. Well, the shows lately haven’t been very spectacular and all of the characters are so wishy-washy, whiney, pouty and annoying that I’m having a hard time caring whether or not Peter forgives Nathan, if Claire can trust Mr. Bennet, or if Mohinder can forgive or trust himself. I think I just need a really good dose of Hiro and Ando to lift my spirits.