Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

This season of Heroes has sucked. There. I said it out loud. With my mind.

Alright, maybe not the whole thing, but then, I’m very forgiving. It takes an awful lot for me to use the word “suck” as a blanket statement.  Still, doesn’t this season of Heroes deserve it?  When the first seven episodes are so awkward and directionless?  When the writing makes the audience cringe and cliffhangers meant to excite only frustrate?  When the show’s own creator agrees with me?  Let us contemplate some of the season’s more grotesque failings. Bitter spoilers ahead.

Too Many Characters

Off the top of my head:   Claire, Mr. Bennet, West, Mohinder, Matt Parkman, Peter, Nathan, and Mrs. Petrelli, Nikki/Jessica, Micah, Bob, Hiro, Elle, the Haitian, Maja, Alejandro, Sylar, and Adam Monroe/Kensei.  And these are just the characters who were important, to say nothing of Ando, Molly, Mr. Nakamura, Caitlin, DL, and whoever that cousin of Micah’s is.

This is, quite simply, way too many recurring characters for one and a half seasons.  It makes it impossible to distribute the screen time, which keeps many of the characters thoroughly one-dimensional, with superficial motivations for everything they do.  It disjoints the plot and makes it hard to build momentum.   You know what?  I’m thrilled that Nikki and Nathan are dead.

Love and Science Fiction Do Not Get Along

This is just true.  Love stories do not work in science fiction.  They never have, and they never will.  When I say “real science fiction,” I’m talking about any story, show, or movie in which the “science” parts dominate the setting. Battlestar Galactica is a great metaphor for our times, but there’s no show there without the spaceships and genocidal robot menace. Its love stories, when allowed to dominate the plot, only drag the show down. The most moving love story on Star Trek: The Next Generation had nothing to do with romance.  Tolkein was so completely unable to incorporate Arwen and Aragorn’s romance into The Lord of the Rings that he eventually put it in the appendix.  Did Han and Leia love each other?  Of course they did, but it was always a very distant second to the lightsabers and the Dark Side of the Force, no matter how much the fan fiction tells you otherwise (I’m looking at you, Allison). Even on sci-fi shows where love is handled well, as it was in Buffy and Angel, it can get tiresome when it becomes the main attraction.  Yes, Buffy, your love for the vampire with a soul burns with the intensity of Truth. But it is forbidden.  But it is love, true love.  But it will damn you both, for it cannot be. But we love each other!  I get it, now stop playing that damn love theme.

This brings us to Heroes, where within three episodes you had Hiro dorking over Yaeko, Peter and Caitlin moving from captor/captive to hot/bothered, and Claire and West going from awkward teenage romance to really awkward teenage romance.  That’s an awful lot of time to devote to love stories when the show is already so crammed with characters and, supposedly, a plot.  Caitlin is supposed to be Peter’s personal motivation for wanting to save the world this time around.  We were never given a chance to understand why Peter would fall for the girl (Stockholm Syndrome aside), and I don’t buy that he did.  Nevermind that Peter is the sort of person who would certainly save the world anyway, girlfriend in peril or not.  The same goes for Hiro, who was acting like such an idiot in ancient Japan (again, Population: 12) that it felt like he’d regressed to his pre-New York City self.  West and Claire? You already know what I think of that emotional fiasco.

New Orleans

People might get the wrong idea and hate me for this one, so let me make this perfectly clear.  What happened to New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina was (and is) a tragedy. It is not, however, emblematic of our times.  Emblematic of a complacent and inept government, sure, but it’s not a touchstone for the American psyche, and I have this thing about being forced to mourn.

One, it’s absurdly convenient that Micah’s extended family just happens to live in New Orleans. Two, the dialogue expressing this harsh fact is awkward, forced, stereotyped, and patently condescending. If a show simply must have New Orleans in there somewhere, it should at least have the decency to make half an attempt at expressing the ongoing aftermath of Katrina. Please do so without the ham-handed ebonics, annoying supporting characters, and wasting an actress like Nichele Nichols.

What Are You People Doing?

Speaking of Micah, what’s he been up to?  What’s this change of scenery done for him as a character?  Orphaned him, I suppose, and sent him down a path of vague criminality.  He’s also discovered that his cousin has powers of her own, which is nice, I guess.  This took eleven episodes to accomplish in little, stupid spurts.

Then there’s Maja, Alejandro, and Sylar. Granted, I hated Sylar last year, but I’m willing to admit that great things can be done with a neutered villain.  Exhibit A: Spike. Alas, Sylar is just as stupid a villain as he was last year, so terrible at masking his evil intentions that you’ve got to wonder if Maja’s powers don’t come with a learning disability.  Between Guatemala and New York, there were a couple of forgettable murders and an entirely unsurprising culmination to Sylar’s ambitions.

The Writing

Joss Whedon and Ron Moore could write circles around the clowns who are penning the Heroes scripts. I’m not saying that I, personally, could do better. I’m saying that there are other people who could definitely do better, and that these people are still alive and hireable.

But There’s Hope!

Jack Coleman (Mr. Bennet) continues to be awesome. He sells, sells, sells every scene he has, and takes potentially stupid lines and magically transforms them into things you could actually picture a human being saying.  It’s an empirical fact that the more of him there is in an episode, the better that episode is (Exhibit B: “Company Man”).  After the deal he’s cut with The Company, there will be even more delicious layers to him.

Elle is the first genuinely interesting character to be introduced on the show since this time last year. There’s some real potential there, as long as she can branch out beyond Psychotic Girl-Woman Who Can Electrocute You. I will further grant that the show gets very interesting when all the disparate plot lines are finally allowed to cross.  NBC marketed these last three episodes to death, but they lived up to it. The future was truly uncertain, the present genuinely tense. Hiro and Peter had a great little fight, particularly for a TV budget.

Season Two has been a huge disappointment over all, but the drastic increase in quality over these last few episodes bodes well for redemption.  I’m a sci-fi snob, clearly, but I’m still watching.

As always, I welcome your thoughts.  Thoughts from your minds.