brief comments on the heroes season premiere
Spoilers ahead. Not that there’s much to spoil at this point.
At long last, the summer hiatus has ended and Heroes has returned for its second season. I have never been the type to judge a show on the merits (or lack thereof) of a single episode, but if I were a new viewer coming into this episode with no prior exposure to the show, I’d be disappointed. The episode felt slow and disjointed. For instance, it takes Hiro roughly forever to realize that his hero, Kensei, is just an opportunistic English vagrant roaming feudal Japan for booze and girls. You’d think that Hiro’s multiple encounters with the mob, evil strippers, and preternatural psychopaths last season would have sharpened him up a little.
Can we talk about this version of feudal Japan for a second? I realize that most of the budget on this show has to go towards making people fly and shoot blue lightning, but I’m pretty sure feudal Japan had more than ten people in it. Then again, it’s an island nation and it was very isolated in the 1600s, so I don’t know. I feel like the producers could’ve put a little more effort into making ancient Japan look a little more convincing, or at least, a little less cheap. Maybe borrow some extras from Journeyman. I didn’t stick around to watch anything beyond the first scene, but apparently the protagonist works for The Extremely Well Funded Times. That office was gigantic, is what I’m trying to communicate here. It was also populated by enough extras to temporarily depopulate every restaurant in L. A.
In the first post I ever wrote about Heroes, I said the show was well written. That changed drastically somewhere along the line, probably around the time that Sylar’s face was revealed. I recognize that part of the beauty of the show is that it’s a comic book, but comic book dialogue is like a comic book costume. It doesn’t really work in front of a camera. The X-Men movies smartly ditched Wolverine’s yellow spandex, and likewise, Heroes needs to excise things like:
Parkman: Hey, I want to take to you about these drawings you made, Molly.
Molly: I SAID I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT!!!!!!
Behind the scenes fun fact: This scene is actually a digital composite of nine separate takes, as the camera kept shattering after every individual word in Molly’s response.
Molly’s outburst was neither realistic nor convincing. It was so exaggerated as to be ridiculous, and it didn’t feel right for either character.
Likewise, maybe I’ve lost the ability to appreciate teenage high school romance. Maybe I’m finally past the point where its depiction on TV can resonate with me on any level. Maybe I can’t get behind a character named for a cardinal direction. All these things are possible, but it’s also possible that the strange meet-cute scenario between Claire and West (yes, that’s actually his name) is just written really poorly.
West’s puckish talk of robots and aliens is clearly charming young Claire. It’s not so much that I don’t buy that these two could be interested in each other, it’s that the things West says would never work. Try it some time. Walk up to someone you like and wax whimsical about how society can be divided into the robots and the aliens, and how, gosh, I sure hope you’re an alien. See if this gets you anything more than a blank stare and a mental note reading “Bizarre. Possibly emo. Avoid,” appended to your name.
I’m retroactively a little miffed at last season’s finale. Half the season was building up to a winner-take-all showdown between Peter and Sylar, and instead we got a somewhat clumsy battle royale, sort of. It’s forgivable, but the kicker in season two? Everyone lived. Sure, people have lost a lot of things. The Bennets have lost their old lives, Hiro lost modernity, Nathan lost his Mach 3 Turbo, and Peter, Days of Our Lives style, lost his memory. Evidence suggests that Sylar lives, and may be trapped in some kind of fantasy world. Hmm. Male villain lost in his own immersive fantasy hallucination? That sounds oddly familiar.
I weep for George Takei. I have high hopes for flashbacks. In fact, I have high hopes for the rest of the season in general. I like it, all things considered. I just can’t say I’m in the “ZOMGHEROES” camp.
And no, I do not want a Nissan Rogue. Yes, even if you play three essentially identical advertisements in a row to try to make me want one. Even if Claire is driving one. Even if I’m told that Nissan is sponsoring this episode of Heroes with limited commercial interruptions. You can see a picture of the Nissan Rogue next to “backfire” in the dictionary. Ironic for so many reasons.
Oh, and Jack Coleman is still totally awesome. Give him a few dozen Emmys, please.
My off-the-cuff reaction to the first episode: This show sucks balls. I think I’m gonna quit watching it this season. The writing is just abysmal, so bad I can hardly believe it.
Off the top of my head, how about Matt Parkman’s little police “exam”? Where the job is apparently to storm into the building and shoot everybody he sees. And how, when there are two (apparently) unarmed people and it’s not clear who the bad guy is, there is a “correct” answer about which one to shoot?
These things are very “comic-booky”, in the most derogatory sense of that term. Excellent comics artist Eddie Campbell famously remarked about X-Men artist Jim Lee, “the artist is drawing people in suits but he doesn’t appear to have ever actually seen a suit.” These people are writing this stuff based on the most ridiculous, cartoony, make-believe versions of them. With Heroes being on NBC, you’d think they could skip over to the Law & Order writers’ room and get some feedback on whether this police stuff bears ANY relation to the real world.
And the “teenage” stuff is the same way. That little “robots & aliens” thing was definitely meant to be charming in an offbeat way, but it just sounded dull.
Also–if Mr. Bennett’s boss does NOT immediately fire him, call the cops and have him arrested, then this show might as well call itself “La La Make Believe Fantasy Land In Which People Behave Nothing Like Any People You Have Ever Met”.
And, for the dramatic conclusion to this week’s Very Special Heroes–AMNESIA!
The most reviled, ridiculous, cliched plot development in the history of serialized drama. 24 didn’t even really get away with doing the amnesia bit, but that was the first season so it’s somewhat forgiveable.
Maybe next we’ll get Claire in the woods menaced by a cougar!
Good lord this show is dumb :)
Jeff,
I think you’re being a little harsh here. Like I said, I’m not the type to judge an entire season on one episode. The first season had its problems, but currently the balance sheet is tipped in favor of “worth watching,” so I’ll be tuning in next week.
I agree that the writers should probably dial things back a bit and try to be a little more realistic. After all, half the appeal of the show is that extraordinary powers are intersecting with ordinary people. That said, do you really think Law & Order is the place to go for realism?
I also agree that Peter’s amnesia is, well, dumb. First, the type of amnesia you see on TV, what professionals would call transient global amnesia and what I would call “Gilligan Syndrome,” almost never happens. Real life cases are exceptionally rare, and there’s always some controversy as to whether the patient has a reason for faking it. Second, it’s a total cliche. I’m not saying I could write this show better, but total amnesia? Really? It was decided that this was the best of all possible ideas? Come on.
And I’m willing to say I enjoyed Bennett’s confrontation with his boss, simply on the grounds that it allowed Jack Coleman to be completely awesome. He makes anything good. Contrast that scene to Mohinder’s silly looking stairway slam with the guy from The Company.
Who knows where they’re going with the amnesia thing. For myself, they lost what goodwill I had towards the show when the climax consisted of this carefully assembled team of heroes with a variety of useful powers standing around watching two guys face off, one of whom was really just fighting his own powers for some inexplicable reason.
I don’t have firsthand knowledge (I don’t know any cops), but Law & Order seems pretty realistic to me. The cops on that show aren’t action heroes, when they go into a confrontation or a hostage situation (like Parkman had in his exam) there are pretty specific and common sense steps they take. Barging in and shooting everybody isn’t one of them. If that really WAS a hostage situation, the hostage would be dead as soon as the cop barged in and started shooting everyone.
I liked Mr Bennett as a villain and never really bought his transition to morally tortured family man so I don’t have much sympathy for his character either.
I can forgive a lot of dumbness in writing if the characters appeal to me or if something just feels right about a show, and in this case, I can’t say it does. I don’t have much hope for the show–last season I stopped watching midway through but kinda picked it up again because most of my friends were watching it. We’ll see how it goes this season.