Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

If you haven’t seen all of the first season of Heroes, you may want to skip this entry. Massive spoilers ahead. This is part one of two: all the things I hated about Heroes.  Part two covers everything I loved.

The first season of Heroes has finally come to a close, and despite the somewhat anticlimactic finish there’s still quite a bit worth talking about. Heroes has been a ratings hit for NBC, relatively speaking at least, in an otherwise disastrous year for the network. The success of the show is a little unusual. American audiences grant popular success to one science fiction show per decade and this is it, apparently. Battlestar Galactica, for all its brilliance and critical acclaim, is still floating around in relative obscurity on the SciFi Channel. And let’s not rehash FOX’s criminal treatment of Firefly a few years back. I wonder if Heroes would have been picked up for renewal, or as a series at all, if NBC were still in the glory days where Seinfeld, Frasier, and Friends ruled comedy, and ER wasn’t some soulless doppleganger of its former self.

If anything hurt Heroes this year, it was NBC’s strained attempts to generate interest in a show that had already generated plenty of interest by itself. While the constant whisperings of “Save the cheerleader, save the world,” got annoying after a while, they at least had resonance with the show’s overarching plot. “Are you on the list?” was a far worse idea, and it’s a shame that NBC wasted so much time relentlessly hyping what turned out to be a secondary plot element. The infuriating hiatuses that punctuated the season were meant to elongate the ratings run for NBC, but backfired and hurt the show’s following. Hopefully Heroes: Origins will solve this problem next year, although I find the idea of a midseason spin-off show—where the audience gets to pick which character will join the main series—to be both desperate on the part of the network and creatively questionable on the part of the writers. This, however, is what television has come to. Television on demand, internet downloads, and series DVDs have thoroughly destroyed the fundamental assumption of television networks: that viewers will tune in week after week at a specific time to follow their favorite narratives. Popular as Heroes may be, it’s still nowhere near American Idol, which maintains its popularity because that show is done live every week and requires audience participation.

The writing on Heroes could be a whole hell of a lot better. There, I said it. I can appreciate that Heroes emulates a comic book on all levels, and that each script is essentially a Frankenstein of independently written scenes that are then sewn together by a head writer. Still, the lack of subtlety on the show bothers me. Characters tend to club you over the head with what they’re feeling and thinking. “THE FUTURE ISN’T WRITTEN IN STONE!” delicately intones Claire. The intriguing plot, well paced action, and excellent performances from a few key players generally make up for the negligent attitude toward dialogue, but I’d give anything to see Joss Whedon take a crack at writing some real words for these characters. He’s writing several X-Men plots as we speak, and that’s a real comic.

Last point on the writing. They need to find a word to describe these people. “Supers” doesn’t sound right, and has already been used by The Incredibles. “Heroes” has all sorts of positive connotations that won’t work for a number of the characters. “Specials” sounds too politically correct. It’s been really hilarious watching the writers dodge the word MUTANT for twenty-three episodes, but something needs to be done. Come up with a word to describe the phenomenon and stick with it.

So let’s talk characters. Dumbest of the bunch? D. L. Hawkins. It’s not really his fault that he, Niki/Jessica, and Micah were so separate from the main story for so long, but it’s hard to forgive him for being so consistently stupid. He’s so clueless about what’s going on around him that it’s almost funny at times. Buddy, shouldn’t you be a little quicker to suspicion when your wife, who used to resort to taking off her clothes for money and who you know has an evil split personality, suddenly starts going on extended “business trips” and raking in the cash? D. L.’s idiocy is compounded by his uselessness. Killing Linderman was a good thing (I hope), but this was supposed to prove what, exactly? That you and Niki love each other? How?

I’m actually thrilled that Linderman has been killed, if for no other reason than it released Malcolm McDowell from his torment. McDowell is great, don’t be me wrong, but he’s played the Ominous Mastermind so many times in his career that I’m glad he’s been put out of his typecasted misery on this one.

Mohinder Suresh gets the prize for King of Overbearing Narration. Again, it’s more the writers’ fault than his. Mohinder’s opening and closing monologues are nothing but a pretentious cocktail of half-baked philosophy and semi-poetic rambling. It’s all meaningless and irrelevant, and the show would absolutely be better without it. Mohinder himself often gets the metaphorical shaft from the writers. For a scientific genius, his deductive reasoning skills are shockingly poor.

Sylar. God, but I hate you. And not for the reasons that the writers would like. What’s not to hate? The super cheesey villain dialogue. The tossed-off and poorly elaborated motivation for becoming a mass murderer. The eyebrows that go to 11. The weirdly breathy transvestite-in-training voice. The strange Norman Bates mama fixation that they tried to toss in toward the end there. I liked you so much better, I had so much more respect for you, when you were just a menacing silhouette in a baseball cap.

A number of characters simply dropped off the face of the Earth. Claire’s questionably gay friend Zack, Bennet’s wife, not to mention Claude the Invisible Man. Heroes already has more characters than the Bible, so the inattention to these smaller roles is understandable. Still, what happened to that wife of his?

As for the season finale, I actually have very little in the way of criticism. People were expecting a BIG fight between Peter and Sylar, but I wasn’t. The show simply doesn’t have the money for something like that, especially given the high cost of the weekly special effects. I didn’t have a problem with it. I did, however, have a problem with Claire not shooting Peter. Of all people, she should have the least problem with this. She knows Peter has her regenerative powers and, let’s not forget, has already shot a nuclear man to save the day once before. Nathan zipping in to save the day may have been redeeming for his character, but it asks us to accept some pretty tremendous plot contrivances.

Stay tuned for part two: the things I love.