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 two of two: all the things I loved about Heroes. Part one covers everything I hated.

For all its flaws, Heroes has done more good than bad for the world of television. It’s a quality show, and I certainly favor its existence over something like, say, The Real Wedding Crashers. NBC, how desperate were you, exactly?

Heroes is—and I promise this is the last time I’ll say it—notable for being a popular science fiction show. That doesn’t happen too often. Lost is kind of, sort of science fiction, but then again it isn’t. Talking about Lost confuses me, especially since I haven’t seen much of it, so I’m going to drop this line of thought. Suffice to say that people like Heroes, but not nearly as much as some other shows. Most weeks, Heroes fails to crack the Nielsen top ten, losing out to the usual suspects of American Idol, CSI, Desperate Housewives, and Bob Barker: 50 Years. Bob Barker? Embarrassing. Again, you’ve got to wonder if Heroes would be getting so much attention from NBC if it hadn’t been such an unbelievably bad year for the network.

Science fiction on television more often than not means special effects, and Heroes has a lot of them. People are flying, bursting into flames, moving objects with their minds, healing their wounds in fast-forward, and in general doing very cool things. Heroes has what are probably the best special effects of its class ever seen on television. The effects look great. Heroes doesn’t shy away from blood and it manages to make the most impossible powers look like they belong in the world. It’s important to understand just how difficult that is, and I’d like to explain by example.

Check out the much vaunted “Burly Brawl” fight from The Matrix Reloaded. It’s the one where Neo fights 100 Agent Smiths. To make this fight possible, the effects artists perfected a process called “Universal Capture” which allowed them to generate image-based models of the actors. The models are therefore visually flawless. They are perfectly realistic replicas of the real thing. To look at the detailed test shots from the Universal Capture system is to look at the real Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving. Yet the scene was derided for looking “so CG” and “like something from a videogame.” Why? Neo and Smith are still doing impossible things, executing moves that no human being could ever pull off. Despite the fidelity of Universal Capture, the brain fails to accept what it is seeing, and suspension of disbelief is fundamentally broken. The point is this: it’s not just the quality of the effects, it’s how you use them.

Heroes does an excellent job in this area; all of the visual effects are smooth and natural, often masked or visually embellished in clever ways. Nathan’s ability to fly is a prime example. He doesn’t do much of it, and that’s a good thing. Humans don’t fly, nor do they look like they can fly, and if you use a computer to launch one skyward, you’re going to induce that visual belief problem. So whenever you see Nathan fly it’s extremely brief. He zips in and out of the scene quickly and there’s a lot of motion blur (or in the case of the pilot, some close camera work). It stops you from getting a clear look at the mechanics of Nathan’s flight power and maintains the believability of the effect. It’s actually pretty brilliant, if you step back to appreciate the details. The same is true for Ted’s nuclear meltdown. Lots of visual distortion and color processing help distract you from the fact that it’s just an actor wiggling around on the floor.

Thank you for humoring the special effects dork inside me. If you survived to this point, congratulations, we get to talk about characters now.

I think everyone who watches this show loves Hiro Nakamura. It’s nice to see that they person writing his character really knows his stuff when it comes to sci-fi references.  Masi Oka’s portrayal of the time-stopping dork is by turns hilarious, heart warming, and compelling. He’s a fool following a dream, certain that he has a destiny to find but unsure of what that destiny may be, and who can’t identify with that? Ditto his buddy Ando, one of the few “normals” on the show. And let’s spare a moment to congratulate George Takei on doing a LOT with a little as Hiro’s father, Kaito Nakamura. In the words of Ze Frank, what is your power move? I want to know. Thanks to Oka’s great performance and the triangle between his friend and father, he’s one of the few characters that demonstrates organic character growth over the season. The 1,000 paper cranes scene? Beautiful.

As previously documented, I love Jack Coleman as Mr. Bennet. Initially a far better villain than Sylar, then an antihero, then a hero in his own right. His character is equal parts Danny Tanner and Jack Bauer, and somehow it works. He may not have super powers, but he’s much more interesting than a lot of the other characters on the show. His back story episode, “Company Man,” stands out, I think, as the season’s best. Again, an excellent performance combines with some of the better writing on the show to create real character growth. Bennet transforms from a semi-malevolent man in charge to a worried father on the run from his own allegiances. It’s great stuff.

Let’s also give a special shout-out to Noah Gray-Cabey as Micah Sanders, for being both incredibly likable and smarter than half the other characters put together. Gotta respect a kid who’s always on the page.

I may have had problems with some of the writing on the show, but it definitely improved (usually) as the season went on, particularly from “Five Years Gone” forward. Jessica’s somewhat playful, “Didn’t I throw you out a window?” line to Parkman injected some much needed humor into the nonstop melodrama circus, and a little can go a long way.  What can I say? I like it when characters interact with each other, as opposed to just being pulled in various directions by their powers. That may, by the way, have been the major problem with the show so far. The whole season was set in motion by a prophecy about the future, so rather than being pushed towards a climax by their own motives and desires, the characters are pulled towards something that comes off as possibly inevitable, well developed motives or not.

Again, I find myself with surprisingly little to say about the season finale.  It was anticlimactic, especially since Sylar was allowed to slither away.  There’s certainly a lot being set up for next season.  Kring and company have a rough sketch of the plot for the next four years, and in a show where supernatural powers and shocking twists are the norm, predictions are fairly futile.  Smart money says that Molly Walker’s “worse boogeyman” ends up eating Sylar next season just to prove how evil he is, though.