Heroes

There are moments in your life when a person asks, why am I still in this situation? It started out great, but it's gotten progressively worse and worse, and now it's sucking the life out of me. For many, it's like being in a high paying job that makes you work long hours with demanding bosses and no time to relax, or being in a bad relationship with a smoking hot girl who cheats on you and steals your credit card and your soul. For me, it's watching the show Heroes.

Season 1 of Heroes was a breakthrough show. It was a great look into what it would be like if there were seemingly normal people with superpowers, and the different ways each person reacted, in the backdrop of a climactic, world ending storyline with a great mystery that also acted as great marketing line "Save the cheerleader, save the world." Season 1 didn't end on such a high note, with the anticlimatic fight between the Heroes and Sylar in the middle of New York City, if NY had a population of 5 people. Still, it was a fun show to watch, and it had so much potential because of the comic book genre lends to interesting, fun storytelling.

But the first season, it's becoming relentlessly stupid. The uneven second season, which moved very slowly could be excused because of the writer's strike. The "Peter loses his memory" story was really dumb, and even worse was the storyline where Claire falls in love with a guy so out of her league they don't even play the same sport and I'm not entirely convinced he's even an athlete. Those were bad, but the Hiro in Japan stuff was a lot of fun. And the season finale, while not original, was still well done and left a lot of potential for a dynamic third season.

However, that didn't happen. The writers may as well have stayed on strike. Every character has become retarded this season, best evidenced by Angela Petrilli's "This piece of paper contains a formula that could possibly be the downfall of humanity, which is why we decided... to tear it in half." explanation of this season's threat to the world, or how Hiro inexplicably turned into a 10 year old in a 28 year old man's body, or Daphne falling in love with Parkman just because Parkman says he had a vision that they were going to fall in love, which he found out by taking drugs from an African guy with headphones. All of this culminated in a breath-takingly stupid episode last night where Elle tries to kill Sylar, who killed her father which obviously hurt her feelings, but Sylar pleads with her to let go of her pain, which she decides to within 15 seconds, and Sylar ends up absorbing her power and probably could've banged her if he wanted to in the process. If that previous run-on sentence seems like incoherent, unintelligible scrabble, you're right.

The big hook for this season is that the cast has been split into Heroes and Villains. The Villains have Knox, who can manipulate fears, Flint, who can shoot fireballs, and Arthur Petrelli, who can absorb anything and take powers away from everybody. While the Heroes have Claire, who can get her ass kicked without getting hurt but can't fight, Peter, who lost all his powers except for the one that can smell gas, and Angela who's power is dreaming about how much Arthur can kick everyone's ass.

Seems like a mismatch. So naturally, in the previews, they're teasing that this eclipse that happened 2 years ago that gave them their powers will happen again, but this time it will take their powers away. That's kind of like changing the difficulty level from Insane to Casual in Gears of War, and then throwing the XBox 360 out the window.

The problem with the show is that it's falling into the traps of meandering plotlines and turning their characters into unlikable robots. There are too many characters on the show, and on top of that you have two different versions of each character (Peter and Claire specifically) on the show: Future and Present. And apparently the Future version is a totally different person from the Present version. Future Peter may be a evil, paranoid loser, but Present Peter is a good, paranoid loser. It's not impossible to have a large cast and have a great show, The Sopranos and The Wire had that in spades. The problem with Heroes is that there's no one that grounds the show. Each episode is just a bunch of scenes with different characters hurdling to the next plot point.

Every character they kill somehow comes back in one form or another. It's taking bullets out of the gun and filling it with blanks. The Sopranos did start a renaissance in TV dramas, but if there's any negative to that, it's that shows think that the best way to invigorate a show is by killing off characters. It's taken to one extreme by 24, where every main character including Jack is expected to die at some point to the point where there probably won't be any main characters in Season 8. It's taken to the other extreme by Heroes, where every character is expected to die, but it doesn't matter because they'll just come back in some variation.

Still, I'm going to continue to watch it, despite all of it's failings this year. I'm holding out hope that things will turn out all right in the end, and that things may seem bad now, but if I stick with it, I will be rewarded in the end.

I would have made a great soldier in General Custer's Army.