By Kent M. Beeson
It seems utterly absurd to say this now, especially to those who weren't there from the beginning, but at the time, the first season of
Heroes was pretty damn exciting. The show was new and unburdened by expectations, the characters unfamiliar and not completely defined, the mystery genuine. Not even
Lost (without which,
Heroes wouldn't have been possible) generated the kind of excitement I felt early on. Here was a live-action drama, inspired by the four-color superheroics that I love, with decent special effects and completely lacking the cheese of, say, Daredevil defending the Hulk in court. It looked like a solid attempt to do TV superheroes right.
Not that there was anything really original about the show, of course. They were stealing, brazenly in some cases, but they were stealing from the best --
Watchmen,
X-Men, Frank Miller's run on
Daredevil, to name a few off the top of my head. And it resulted in some great moments: Nathan launching into the air, a puff of contrail and then gone; Hiro going back in time to save Charlie, the doomed waitress; Claude the invisible man teaching Peter how to control his powers; and of course, the first appearance of Future Hiro, the initial suggestion that this show had a few tricks up its sleeve.
Heroes wasn't perfect, but it was obvious to anyone who watched it week after week that the problematic parts would be corrected in season two. The future looked bright, and in between seasons, I'd tell anyone who listened about the fantastic show they were missing.
Then the second season began, and I was slowly, minute by minute, forced to admit something painful.
I'd been duped. Suckered. Made the fool.
Heroes wasn't very good. At all.
The warning signs were all there, of course. The dialogue that was so on-the-nose, it was like a window pane smooshing it up into a pig snout. The solemn, at times dour, acting style that suggested that this was, y'know,
serious stuff, but also tended to step on any excitement generated by the fact that these characters had amazing powers (Masi Oka's Hiro being the major exception). The crazy grab-bag of superpowers -- everything from flying to precognition to time control to power duplication -- that hinted that the writers weren't quite in control of their fictional world, that they didn't really know what they were doing. (Or they were rolling up random powers from the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG
Ultimate Powers book, in which case, bravo.) And poor, useless Mohinder.
None of that seemed to matter at the time, because there was momentum that carried me along too fast to notice, embodied in six words: "Save the cheerleader, save the world." Season two completely lacked any such momentum, and you could see it in the writing, the constant inertial loops the characters were forced to endure: Maya kills a bunch of people, her brother resurrects them; Hiro makes googly eyes at the 17th century hottie, then he pushes her away; and I don't even remember how many teary farewells and reunions Claire and her father had, but it seemed like every other episode. All of this just brought its problems, previously hidden, into sharp relief, so that by the end, I was hoping Maya would just off me along with everyone else. I never bothered to watch the finale, in fact -- I really didn't care about the Shanti virus or the Incredible Teen Taskmaster or Immortal Paul Bettany-Lite.
But a funny thing happened before I started writing this column. I got the last episode from Netflix, just to catch up before the premiere, and while my opinion of the writing and acting didn't change, I realized, to my shock, that I still liked these characters. And watching the DVD extras, I was surprised to learn that the intended story arc -- a virus quarantine story -- was so dispiritingly bad that I half-suspect that
Heroes creator Tim Kring traveled to 2008 from the future to instigate the WGA strike himself and save his show.
So Kring gets a mulligan and promises to right the course, and like a zombie, I stay on board. And while the first two episodes, shown back to back, demonstrate a willingness to put momentum back into the story, the results -- Mohinder and Maya's summer stock version of Cronenberg's
The Fly, Peter trapped in the body of
Veronica Mars' Weevil, Matt's desert recreation of the "Owner of a Lonely Heart" video -- have left me less than enthused.
I'm getting the sense that the writers have thrown their hands up. "You want action? Here's Sylar stalking Claire in her house," they seem to say, not caring that the scenario doesn't make any sense. That said scenario ends with Claire's metaphorical rape and subsequent literal numbness leaves me to think that someone's trying to do something,
anything, to give this story arc some heft and meaning, but dollars to donuts says that nothing will come of it. Nothing
can come of it really, because, institutionally, the
Heroes machine is about soap opera dramatics and perpetual motion (or at least the sense of it), which precludes thinking and significance from the get-go.
But you know, that would be perfectly fine, actually, if there were some kind of real chutzpah on the screen -- if it were weirder. For a show that has time travelers, alternate realities, power-stealing madmen and world-destroying conspiracies, it's awfully earthbound, too determined to set itself in "the real world", that some essential joy of the premise is leaked away. Where's the fun?
Prison Break, in contrast, is a colossally idiotic show whose premise (a guy robs a bank in order to get caught and sent to the jail
he designed in order to free his brother) is merely the launching pad for further inanities. Yet with every episode full of reversals, double reversals, and triple-dog-dare reversals, it continually shows more narrative guts than
Heroes.
Prison Break is all pulp, and shamelessly so, which is just another way to say it wants nothing more than to please like an eager puppy.
Heroes seemed to lose that somewhere.
And yet, I will, in all likelihood, still watch it. The show has officially made me stupid. It has carved open my skull and stolen my good sense. I will be there every Monday night until the show is no longer profitable, which will probably be around the time the new
Star Trek movie prices Zachary Quinto right out of the cast. The one possibly good thing about this season is that we're about to meet an honest-to-God villain team, something so obvious for a show like this, but it took two years and a writers' strike to get it. This should be a slam dunk, but somehow, I suspect the show will snatch boredom from the jaws of excitement.
You know, all I want out of this season is a live-action recreation of the
X-Men #100 cover. Give me that and we'll call it good.
Kent M. Beeson is a former contributor to ScreenGrab and is a long-time cinephile and comic book lover. He maintains a film-related blog called This Can't End Well.
The Watchman is © Kent M. Beeson, 2008
