Heroes: WTF??? November 20, 2008
Posted by ce9999 in Heroes.Tags: Ali Larter, Arthur Petrelli, Claire Bennet, Elle Bishop, Heroes, Hiro Nakamura, HRG, Kristin Bell, Maya Herrera, Mohinder Suresh, NBC, Noah Bennet, Peter Petrelli, Sylar, West Rosen
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I’m not the only person who seems to be having difficulty with the current (3rd) season of Heroes. A couple of weeks ago, a couple of the show’s producers/writers got canned by NBC, in response, apparently, to massive complaints about the show. Well, hopefully whatever further action is taken by NBC will eventually improve things, but for the time being, the episodes we’re seeing this fall (or spring, for southern hemisphere folks) were finished while the old writing/production team was still in place.
So what the hell is going on, anyway? This is perhaps the broadest question that comes to mind when I caught up with the latest two episodes a few nights ago. I’ve decided that there is too much going on for me to gain any benefit from watching the show every week. It seems to work better when I can watch at least two episodes back-to-back, and I suspect four would be better…the problem there, of course, is that doing so would require waiting a month or more between viewings. As is, waiting two weeks is bad enough. I am not sure if it helps me more to have more material presented at once, or hurts due to the increased time since the previous installment. Perhaps what I need to do is go back and rewatch the entire season so far! I’ll probably do that once the “Villians” storyline is completed anyway—I always seem to enjoy a show more when I can watch multiple episodes at once.
In any case, the biggest bugaboo for me on the show right now is the “two Peters” question. At any given time, I find myself not really knowing which Peter I am looking at. At first, it was easy to tell the two Peters apart, but as the Peter storyline has progressed, somehow I’ve gotten confused to the point that even the facial scars don’t help me anymore. Which leads to another question which really bugs the hell out of me, namely HOW exactly did “future-Peter” get those scars? Wouldn’t the healing power he got from Claire have healed them? Obviously it would have, so that means future-Peter didn’t have that power. But that raises the further question of why future-Peter didn’t have that power, when present-Peter does. (Or did, since he now doesn’t.) Is future-Peter a direct causal descendant of the events that are currently happening? Or is he a direct causal descendant of no-longer-existing events, meaning the scar happened in a future that is no longer possible? Or what?
There’s also the question of the missing-in-action characters. Ali Larter’s previous characters are apparantly dead now, and all the New Orleans characters, I guess, are not going to be reappearing. Are they? And where is Maya? I can’t even remember what happened to her now—did bug-Mohinder wrap her up in one of those cocoon thingees? Or wait—did Papa Petrelli suck her evil power out of her? I can’t even remember. She does seem to be gone now, though. Claire’s flying boyfriend (West Rosen) from season two appears to be MIA as well, which is too bad. They took him out of the picture right when I was just starting to like him. On the other hand, would he have served any useful purpose by continuing to be on the show? All he was good for, at first, was looking sympathetically at Claire. That was annoying. In fact, he sort of reminded me of that annoying boyfriend guy from the first season of Alias (who annoyed me so much that I stopped watching the show). What saved West from going down that path, though, was when him and HRG started kicking some butt. He seems to be gone now, though. Oh well.
On the other hand, there is a positive note in that Sparky (Kristen Bell) is still around. I know, her name is really “Elle.” But I can’t understand why some character on the show hasn’t figured out that “Sparky” would be a perfect nickname for her. It would be amusing. :) I also find myself liking the transformation in Sylar this season. Having him continue to be an unabashed villain would have been a rerun of where he was in season one, and what would have been the point of that? I understand that a lot of fans have been displeased by him turning into a sort-of good guy, but frankly I think it makes his character much more interesting because, you know, he could revert back to his old self at any time. He’s still scary and dangerous, he’s just acting nice at the moment. You never know when he might decide that all this redemption stuff is just not worth it, and that he’d much rather get back to slicing people’s skulls off. :)
A character who I am more confused by, for now at least, is HRG. His shifting, back-and-forth morality would be challenging enough, but when we also see him in year-old flashbacks it makes it even more complicated. I continually have to re-ask myself the question of whether I like this guy or not, and that’s kind of irritating. I think the main problem is that, like a lot of the characters on the show, he’s not getting enough screentime to maintain character continuity, and it happens to be more confusing with him because of the complexity of his character.
Well. Hopefully some of these issues will be addressed in the second half of this season. We’re already coming up on the end of the “Villains” story, only two more episodes on that, as far as I know. How on earth they are going to resolve all this is beyond me. I am not even entirely sure what all needs to be resolved. Papa Petrelli needs to be gotten rid of, obviously, but beyond that, what else? Does Peter get his powers back? Will “the formula” be destroyed? Does Mohinder get to be a regular human being again, or is he going to be stuck in semi-insect form from now on? Is Hiro Nakamura going to remain a perpetual 10-year-old now? Perhaps most importantly, which characters are going to get killed? You know they’re going to have to get rid of some of them, because there are just too many of them for the writers to manage. So, who’s going to get offed? Whichever way they go with that question, I find myself dreading the inevitable deaths.