News > TW FEATURE: Five Reasons You Should Stop Being So Excited About Heroes
October 19, 2007
Why? Here's why.
They don’t have the balls to kill off anyone who matters
Of the roughly eight hundred characters who were put in easy positions to die at the end of last season (Parkman, Sylar, Peter, Nathan, DL, Candice, Linderman), the only ones to actually die were the ones whose deaths meant the absolute least to the arc of the series – DL and Linderman.
The reason those two characters in particular had to die is simple: the writers needed something emotionally new for Nikki/Jessica to do during season two. She’s already gotten her multiple personality disorder in check, so she can’t spend half the season fighting with herself; Linderman’s story has been pretty much played out, so she can’t continually remain under his thumb; the only way to give Nikki/Jessica anything interesting to do during the second season seems to involve widowing her, thus giving the show a chance to explore The Plight Of A Single Mother In Modern America during the moments where Nikki/Jessica isn’t pursuing a “cure” plotline within The Company. It also seems to be an idea the writers had over the summer, as DL seemed to be one of the healthier characters by the end of last season – DL got shot once, stood up, and walked around, then died over the summer, but Parkman gets shot eight goddamn times, is last seen being loaded into an ambulance, and then somehow survives for season two.
Tim Kring kept talking about how three or four major heroes were going to die during last season’s finale, and when the time finally came, none of the deaths were relevant or even particularly surprising (save for Linderman’s, anyway, and I’m not entirely sure he’s dead for good); yeah, Ted Sprague died, too, but the second the audience was told that an exploding man would destroy Manhattan, nobody couldn’t have seen Sprague’s death coming.
Heroes loves putting its protagonists in danger, without ever pulling the plug on them if they’ve lasted more than six or seven episodes. The only truly surprising deaths of the first season were those of Eve and Simone, though not because the characters truly mattered so much as the gruesome suddenness of their deaths. That’s the irritating thing, really: Heroes knows how to effectively kill off characters, but it tends to only reserve that privilege to the characters who have no real effect on the plot, or the audience’s emotions. Hiro won’t die because we all love Hiro, same as Claire and Mohinder and Sylar probably won’t die because the audience actually gives two shits about them.
AMNESIA CLICHÉ
Honestly, why do people use this device anymore? During the first season of 24, the writers utilized it to add some spice to Teri Bauer’s subplot until they realized what a dumbass mistake they were making and immediately gave her her memory back an episode later.
Meanwhile, on Heroes, Peter has had amnesia for four friggin episodes with no clear end in sight. I think I can see what the writers were trying to do by temporarily erasing Peter’s memory -- it prolongs any questions about the end of last season, it brings him back to a state of ignorance about his powers and the plot so he doesn’t kick the asses of anyone who even looks at him funny, and it allows him to fall in with a bad crowd so we can worry about his well being. Yeah, the amnesia device has some upsides. But it’s still a fucking amnesia device. The most overdramatic, absurd, clichéd, unrealistic plot device of all time, and the Heroes writers chose to open the goddamned season with it. At least 24 used amnesia when they’d run out of ideas ¾ of the way through the season: Heroes presented the amnesia bullshit in the very first episode.
The first season’s best writer isn’t on the show anymore
Bryan Fuller, writer of the single best episode of the entire first season (“Company Man,” wherein we learn about HRG’s past and his connection to Claude Rains), has now moved onto Pushing Daisies, an ABC family show about a guy who has the power to bring the dead back to life.
Fuller was perhaps the only writer who could actually write believable dialogue for the Heroes characters, and knew how to tug on the audiences’ heartstrings in a way most of the other scribes can only aspire to. Nobody – but nobody – can watch the end of “Company Man,” where HRG forces the Haitian to shoot him in front of Claire (brilliantly paralleling the earlier flashback scene in which HRG shoots the Invisible Man) and not feel a glut of emotion. The other writers made the characters cool and badass, but Fuller made you truly care about them. He also prevented you from cringing at their dialogue, which, let’s be honest, is a pretty common occurrence in Heroes.*
The show’s concept of time travel makes absolutely no sense
NERD ALERT: the following will probably not matter in the slightest to anyone who wishes to watch and enjoy Heroes without thinking too hard about the logic of it, but if you’re the type who can’t help but analyze stories you enjoy for major plot holes, it may be of interest.
There are roughly three logical, established types of time travel logic used in fiction.
1. Time cannot be changed: everything that has happened has already happened, and any attempts to change it will simply result in a self-fulfilling prophecy: your attempt to stop a bomb will actually make it go off. Examples: 12 Monkeys, the first 99% of Deja Vu.
2. Time can be changed, but only the Time Traveler will know the difference because every change creates a parallel universe: when Marty McFly goes back in time and breaks his parents up, then reunites them, he's the only one who can possibly remember both his past and the alternate past he created because he, the Time Traveler, is around for both. We do not see confusing things that are later explained to be part of the time travel scenario, because those things do not happen in any universe until the Time Traveler makes it so. Example: we don't see Kratos appear at the beginning of God of War II because he has yet to travel back in time in that universe. Once Kratos DOES go back and appears right before Zeus kills him, a separate universe is created. Easier example: Bill and Ted.
3. Time Traveler can change the future/past, but, once part of events, cannot go back on his own personal timeline because of his status as a time traveler. Example: Doctor Who can meet the Daleks and destroy them in 1936, but he can't go back to a time before they appeared in order to defeat them, because his absence in 1936 will subsequently allow the Daleks to take over the planet and ruin the timeline. If he attempts to go back right after leaving 1936, he will run into himself and create a paradox. Logically, this doesn't make much sense, but it works as a plot device so the audience isn't asking, "Why didn't you just go back in time before the bad guy was born and kill his mother?"
Heroes adheres to none of these scenarios, instead opting to make shit up as it goes along. Consider the following:
- If Future Hiro and Present Hiro come from the same timeline (which they logically must, because Mohinder remembers when Future Hiro talked to Peter -- if Future Hiro and Present Hiro come from different timelines, then Future Mohinder would have no recollection of this happening because Future Hiro would have never gone back in this particular timeline), then why doesn't Future Hiro have all the memories of Present Hiro, including what Present Hiro is doing in Isaac Mendez's apartment, and, furthermore, how Future Hiro dies. If they have the same memories, Future Hiro shouldn't have seen Present Hiro in Isaac Mendez's apartment and basically asked him what the hell he was doing there – he should have already known.
- If Hiro gets the motivation for all of his actions (getting his sword, stabbing Sylar) from a comic book written by a guy who can see the future (Isaac Mendez), and if he wouldn’t have done any of these things without the comic book, then where did the future as known by Isaac come from in the first place? There must be some timeline when Hiro got his sword and stabbed Sylar of his own volition, but, as Future Hiro and Past Hiro evidently belong to the same timeline, we never see where either of the Hiros got this idea and are thus presented with a major paradox.
-Similarly, Peter only thinks he’s going to explode because he saw a vision where he did explode – before he gets this vision, we have no reason to believe he isn’t at least partially in control of his powers.
-Sylar doesn’t get the idea to blow up New York until he sees a picture of himself blowing up New York. Seeing a pattern, here?
And yes, I’m fully aware that there’s a discussion on the Heroes wiki about this. Anyone who’s willing to bend over backwards to establish any sort of logic for Heroes is putting far more effort into it than the original writers did – besides, wiping everything away with “multiple universes which overlap in numerous, totally coincidental ways” is just a longer way of saying, “the writers didn’t know what they were doing.”
The first season finale was anticlimactic to the point of being hilarious
The appeal of the first season of Heroes was that it seemed to be constantly building to one huge, badass climax, in which many questions would be answered and all the plot threads would be tied together in a clever and efficient way.
That didn’t happen.
Not only did none of the disparate plot threads combine in any meaningful or badass way, but one of the most interesting supporting characters in the series – Claude Rains, aka The Invisible Man – didn’t reappear. This wouldn’t have been that irritating, had it not been for the fact that the audience was explicitly fucking told he’d show up again by way of Peter’s visions of the future, and his irritatingly abrupt disappearance three fourths of the way through the season. This may sound like a relatively minor thing, but Chris Eccleston’s absence in the finale is indicative of how Heroes, rather than being a show which brings together all its threads and answers most of its major questions in the end, is is instead content to throw roughly eighty different things at the screen at any given time, and totally and utterly forget them once their short-term purpose has been served.
Beyond that, the season finale taught us that each individual hero does not have a set, important purpose within the grand scheme of the plot. None of the heroes truly need to exist in order to fight Sylar, as, again, Peter’s future vision seemed to insinuate (additionally, the finale didn’t take place in Times Square, or during the day, or with all the characters in their original outfits). Ultimately, all the heroes do end up in New York, but 90% of them just sort of stand around while Peter and Hiro do all the fighting – proving that the writing staff envisioned the image of all the Heroes standing around in New York first, and then tried to shoehorn reasons for them to be there. The characters only exist to solve their own individual plots and occasionally affect the lives of the other heroes; most of them aren’t even remotely important when it comes to stopping the ultimate, world-threatening problem which drives the series. Considering how frequent and forced the character overlaps are during the first 90% of the series, one would assume that all the characters would interconnect in one final, climactic, exhilarating display of heroic might against a near-Godlike enemy. Instead, we got the Peter vs Sylar fight.
The Sylar fight could not have been more anticlimactic if the writers had tried. Peter punches Sylar, like, twice, Hiro stabs him, the end. Wow – they spent all that time building up Sylar as the ultimate evil badass, just so he could be defeated by two sucker-punches and a sword? Why not just have him slip on a banana peel and knock himself unconscious?
Anyway
Forget about Heroes. It was good for a while, but it fell apart in the end. Might I humbly suggest Doctor Who, instead? The last three seasons have been more emotional, more spectacular, and much, much more climactic than Heroes, and it should appeal to generally the same audience.
*”Your heart…what’s that sound?”
”MURDER.”
