December 24, 2008
A few days ago, I published an overview of what "Heroes," NBC's flagship sc-fi drama, got right in the first half of its third season. That run (or "volume") of episodes, called "Villains," was mostly terrible, but there were a few bright spots; I surprised myself by not having enough room on a top-ten list for everything I appreciated. My apologies to Kristen Bell, whose portrayal of the unhinged lightning-smith Elle Bishop was much better than it needed to be, and to whoever wrote the scene where Sylar exclaims "Cake!" as he's in the middle of murdering a paralegal.
Still, there's no use pretending like "Villains" wasn't painful to watch. Every week brought some fresh indignity, whether in the form of glaring continuity mistakes, abrupt and absurd shifts in character motivation, or dialogue that was literally incredibly bad -- you actually couldn't believe that any screenwriter thought it would be acceptable to have actors say these lines. Who was "Villains" written for, anyway? It was chockablock with nods to Season One, presumably to please long-term fans, but then why did the show snarl up its own continuity so badly? Whose idea was it to combine simplistic dialogue with convoluted storylines? What exactly did Tim Kring think we wanted to see?
"Heroes" has always been silly, with farfetched plots and fairly broad characterization, but the show used to know how to jolt the sympathetic nervous system. Peter and Hiro and Claire were all likable at some point, even relatable, and there was a time when you watched the show with your full attention, rather than just half an eye because whatever, it's all going to get tersely recapped in unnatural dialogue in the next scene, or retconned or outright forgotten by the following week.
Well, the hell with it. If there's anything not worth getting upset over, it's Volume Three of "Heroes," surely 13 of the most inconsequential hours of television ever to squeeze through a cathode ray. Here's a list of some things we'd better not see again, though, in any form, in "Fugitives" or any volume that may follow. There's a point at which bad TV stops being fun to complain about and starts being a drain down which you no longer want to pour your free time.
If anyone is still planning to watch "Villains" who hasn't yet done so, be advised that spoiler warnings are in effect.
10. Space-time does not work that way ("The Butterfly Effect")
Given various characters' constant dicking around with time travel, it's probably too much to ask for the causality of "Heroes" to add up in any coherent way, and anyone who can't learn to roll with a few kinks in the space-time continuum really has no business consuming science fiction. Still, when the errors are egregious, they make it impossible to concentrate on what's happening onscreen. No better example of this can be found than in "The Butterfly Effect," when Angela Petrelli icily informs Future Peter that because he told Claire not to rush to Nathan's side when he was shot, Claire was at home when she wasn't supposed to be, and thus it's Future Peter's fault that she was attacked by Sylar. But Claire wouldn't have been packing to leave in the first place if not for Future Peter, right? So actually she would have gotten attacked either way? This seems like the show's mistake, not Angela's, and unfortunately it sets the tone for several months of grim, utterly illogical speechifying.
9. The treatment of black characters (throughout)
"Heroes" has never been all that great with its minority characters, but Volume Three took it to cartoonish extremes. After unceremoniously writing out muscle-mimic Monica, one of the few bright spots of Season Two, "Heroes" introduced Usutu, a placid Batswana painter who lives only to depict the adventures of bumbling white guy Matt Parkman; Stephen Canfield, a sympathetic prisoner and family man who was sucked into a gravity vortex in the same episode we made his acquaintance; and Benjamin "Knox" Washington, a violent criminal with the power to convert other people's fear into super-strength. All of these characters were dead by the end of "Villains." Also? The Haitian still doesn't have a name, and his brother is a barbarous dictator. But hey, it looks like the president is black (and played by Michael Dorn, "Star Trek"'s Worf), so I guess regressive racial attitudes are just as dead on "Heroes" as they are in real life.
8. Future Claire confronts Peter ("I Am Become Death")
What the hell happened to Hayden Panettiere? In Season One, she was one of the strongest actors in the cast. Her portrayal of Claire was subtle and supple, invested with a welcome sense of play and a teenager's natural command of duplicity. Lately, though, she's been using every scene as an opportunity to over-emote. (See also Milo Ventimiglia, whose Peter Petrelli used to be a much more interesting character before his features locked in permaglower.) Panettiere is especially out of her depth as a jaded future version of herself; in this scene, where Future Claire gouges a restrained Peter repeatedly with a scalpel, Panettiere delivers each line through gritted teeth in a manner seen pretty much nowhere outside of "Metal Gear Solid" games.
7. Hiro opens his father's safe ("The Second Coming")
This was not, sadly, the most conspicuous example of lazy writing this season, or the most maddening thing Hiro did, but that doesn't mean I can let it pass without comment. Having been made CEO of his deceased father's company, with a commercial empire and millions of dollars at his disposal -- not to mention the power to travel through time and space -- Hiro finds himself bored. For that reason, and for no other, he opens a safe that his father recorded a message specifically instructing him not to tamper with. Whoops! The super-secret formula contained therein is immediately stolen, kicking off the events of Volume Three. I understand that it had to happen somehow, but the writers really couldn't have thought of any other way to get that safe open?
6. Mohinder discovers that powers are linked to adrenaline ("The Second Coming")
No disrespect to Sendhil Ramamurthy, who does the best he can with what he's given, but it's pretty clear that Mohinder has edged out Professor John Frink for the title of Most Hapless Scientist on TV. Because "Villains" is all about adults acting like children -- in this case, jealous, impetuous children -- Mohinder devises a formula early in the season with which he can give himself superpowers. (In a subplot that ultimately has no bearing on anything else, he accidentally almost turns himself into a bug, because he is just awesome at his job.) He's able to synthesize this wonder drug because of a breakthrough where he realizes that the powers are triggered by adrenaline, though that doesn't really square with the genes-based explanation he'd been championing until then, and neither one seems to have much to do with solar eclipses, which also switch the powers on and off. "Heroes" can't even get its own fake science right.
5. Peter tells Sylar "I'm the most special" ("Dying of the Light")
Grown-ups wrote this episode.
4. Elle and Sylar's character inconsistencies (throughout)
Zach Quinto and Kristen Bell got a lot of scenes together this season, which you'd think would be nice, since they're both nimble, hardworking actors. Yet not even Quinto and Bell could sell their characters as written. Elle, a brittle sociopath in Season Two, not only discovers a conscience but turns out to have had one all along, as indicated in a flashback episode that scribbles all over series continuity. For the rest of Volume Three, she flips back and forth between her usual gleeful danger-lust and a left-field desire to reform her ways. Her arbitrary character shifts infect Sylar, who supposedly traveled some kind of arc through redemption and back to evil this season, not that you'd know it from watching the show: Sylar moves in fits and starts between heroism and villainy, lurching in whatever direction the writers felt like throwing him that week. Quinto and Bell deserve better. So do we.
3. Claire dies ("The Eclipse, Part Two")
It's hard to think of a character who didn't die a graphic, totally fake onscreen death this season -- Nathan, Peter, Hiro, Matt, Daphne and Sylar were all "killed" in some way, whether in the future, as part of a telepathic illusion, or under some other "it doesn't count" circumstance -- but Claire's death, after she gets shot during a global superpower blackout, is especially offensive. Did anybody think for a second that the show was going to kill off its most iconic character? The death scene featured some impressive acting from Panettiere and Ashley Crow, as Claire's longsuffering mother Sandra, but it's insulting that we were expected to believe that Claire was ever in any real danger.
2. Matt, Hiro and Ando visit a comics shop ("The Eclipse, Part 2")
In a mall in Kansas, Matt, Hiro and Ando discover that Isaac Mendez, the tortured precog artist who died in Season One, is apparently still publishing "9th Wonders!" comic books somehow. And hey! The last couple of issues show the future that's just about to happen, which means our characters can read up on it and get to where they're supposed to be! There may be no lazier way to move a plot along; this is barely removed from having Matt and Hiro drop in on Greg Beeman and check out the storyboards for that week's episode. One has to wonder, too, whether Isaac ever got tired of drawing panels where people stand around with comic books in their hands and argue about whether or not this can possibly be happening. Bonus terrible points: Seth Green and Breckin Meyer guest-star as the owners of the comics shop, and have to pretend like they think it's awesome that Matt Parkman and Hiro Nakamura, whom they know from Isaac's comics, are standing there in the flesh, when in real life anyone who recognized Hiro and Matt would head for the nearest exit, or just start firing rubber bullets.
1. Hiro gets his memory erased ("It's Coming")
No one would have thought, while Hiro was farting around in feudal Japan last year, that in Volume Three the writers would come up with an even more annoying storyline for the character. Yet it happened: Arthur Petrelli reset Hiro's memory to that of a 10-year-old, rather than stealing his powers or killing him, either of which would have made more sense. In a roundabout way, this development led us to Hiro's heartbreaking reunion with his mother, the best scene of the season thus far, but that doesn't excuse what we had to go through in order to get there: endless scenes of Hiro giggling, making faces, squirting ketchup on people's chairs and clapping his hands with glee whenever someone demonstrates a superpower. Presumably, this is what Tim Kring would do to all of us if he could, since at this point only a 10-year-old would consider "Heroes" anything other than an embarrassing parody of its former self.
Still, there's no use pretending like "Villains" wasn't painful to watch. Every week brought some fresh indignity, whether in the form of glaring continuity mistakes, abrupt and absurd shifts in character motivation, or dialogue that was literally incredibly bad -- you actually couldn't believe that any screenwriter thought it would be acceptable to have actors say these lines. Who was "Villains" written for, anyway? It was chockablock with nods to Season One, presumably to please long-term fans, but then why did the show snarl up its own continuity so badly? Whose idea was it to combine simplistic dialogue with convoluted storylines? What exactly did Tim Kring think we wanted to see?
"Heroes" has always been silly, with farfetched plots and fairly broad characterization, but the show used to know how to jolt the sympathetic nervous system. Peter and Hiro and Claire were all likable at some point, even relatable, and there was a time when you watched the show with your full attention, rather than just half an eye because whatever, it's all going to get tersely recapped in unnatural dialogue in the next scene, or retconned or outright forgotten by the following week.
Well, the hell with it. If there's anything not worth getting upset over, it's Volume Three of "Heroes," surely 13 of the most inconsequential hours of television ever to squeeze through a cathode ray. Here's a list of some things we'd better not see again, though, in any form, in "Fugitives" or any volume that may follow. There's a point at which bad TV stops being fun to complain about and starts being a drain down which you no longer want to pour your free time.
If anyone is still planning to watch "Villains" who hasn't yet done so, be advised that spoiler warnings are in effect.
10. Space-time does not work that way ("The Butterfly Effect")
Given various characters' constant dicking around with time travel, it's probably too much to ask for the causality of "Heroes" to add up in any coherent way, and anyone who can't learn to roll with a few kinks in the space-time continuum really has no business consuming science fiction. Still, when the errors are egregious, they make it impossible to concentrate on what's happening onscreen. No better example of this can be found than in "The Butterfly Effect," when Angela Petrelli icily informs Future Peter that because he told Claire not to rush to Nathan's side when he was shot, Claire was at home when she wasn't supposed to be, and thus it's Future Peter's fault that she was attacked by Sylar. But Claire wouldn't have been packing to leave in the first place if not for Future Peter, right? So actually she would have gotten attacked either way? This seems like the show's mistake, not Angela's, and unfortunately it sets the tone for several months of grim, utterly illogical speechifying.
9. The treatment of black characters (throughout)
"Heroes" has never been all that great with its minority characters, but Volume Three took it to cartoonish extremes. After unceremoniously writing out muscle-mimic Monica, one of the few bright spots of Season Two, "Heroes" introduced Usutu, a placid Batswana painter who lives only to depict the adventures of bumbling white guy Matt Parkman; Stephen Canfield, a sympathetic prisoner and family man who was sucked into a gravity vortex in the same episode we made his acquaintance; and Benjamin "Knox" Washington, a violent criminal with the power to convert other people's fear into super-strength. All of these characters were dead by the end of "Villains." Also? The Haitian still doesn't have a name, and his brother is a barbarous dictator. But hey, it looks like the president is black (and played by Michael Dorn, "Star Trek"'s Worf), so I guess regressive racial attitudes are just as dead on "Heroes" as they are in real life.
8. Future Claire confronts Peter ("I Am Become Death")
What the hell happened to Hayden Panettiere? In Season One, she was one of the strongest actors in the cast. Her portrayal of Claire was subtle and supple, invested with a welcome sense of play and a teenager's natural command of duplicity. Lately, though, she's been using every scene as an opportunity to over-emote. (See also Milo Ventimiglia, whose Peter Petrelli used to be a much more interesting character before his features locked in permaglower.) Panettiere is especially out of her depth as a jaded future version of herself; in this scene, where Future Claire gouges a restrained Peter repeatedly with a scalpel, Panettiere delivers each line through gritted teeth in a manner seen pretty much nowhere outside of "Metal Gear Solid" games.
7. Hiro opens his father's safe ("The Second Coming")
This was not, sadly, the most conspicuous example of lazy writing this season, or the most maddening thing Hiro did, but that doesn't mean I can let it pass without comment. Having been made CEO of his deceased father's company, with a commercial empire and millions of dollars at his disposal -- not to mention the power to travel through time and space -- Hiro finds himself bored. For that reason, and for no other, he opens a safe that his father recorded a message specifically instructing him not to tamper with. Whoops! The super-secret formula contained therein is immediately stolen, kicking off the events of Volume Three. I understand that it had to happen somehow, but the writers really couldn't have thought of any other way to get that safe open?
6. Mohinder discovers that powers are linked to adrenaline ("The Second Coming")
No disrespect to Sendhil Ramamurthy, who does the best he can with what he's given, but it's pretty clear that Mohinder has edged out Professor John Frink for the title of Most Hapless Scientist on TV. Because "Villains" is all about adults acting like children -- in this case, jealous, impetuous children -- Mohinder devises a formula early in the season with which he can give himself superpowers. (In a subplot that ultimately has no bearing on anything else, he accidentally almost turns himself into a bug, because he is just awesome at his job.) He's able to synthesize this wonder drug because of a breakthrough where he realizes that the powers are triggered by adrenaline, though that doesn't really square with the genes-based explanation he'd been championing until then, and neither one seems to have much to do with solar eclipses, which also switch the powers on and off. "Heroes" can't even get its own fake science right.
5. Peter tells Sylar "I'm the most special" ("Dying of the Light")
Grown-ups wrote this episode.
4. Elle and Sylar's character inconsistencies (throughout)
Zach Quinto and Kristen Bell got a lot of scenes together this season, which you'd think would be nice, since they're both nimble, hardworking actors. Yet not even Quinto and Bell could sell their characters as written. Elle, a brittle sociopath in Season Two, not only discovers a conscience but turns out to have had one all along, as indicated in a flashback episode that scribbles all over series continuity. For the rest of Volume Three, she flips back and forth between her usual gleeful danger-lust and a left-field desire to reform her ways. Her arbitrary character shifts infect Sylar, who supposedly traveled some kind of arc through redemption and back to evil this season, not that you'd know it from watching the show: Sylar moves in fits and starts between heroism and villainy, lurching in whatever direction the writers felt like throwing him that week. Quinto and Bell deserve better. So do we.
3. Claire dies ("The Eclipse, Part Two")
It's hard to think of a character who didn't die a graphic, totally fake onscreen death this season -- Nathan, Peter, Hiro, Matt, Daphne and Sylar were all "killed" in some way, whether in the future, as part of a telepathic illusion, or under some other "it doesn't count" circumstance -- but Claire's death, after she gets shot during a global superpower blackout, is especially offensive. Did anybody think for a second that the show was going to kill off its most iconic character? The death scene featured some impressive acting from Panettiere and Ashley Crow, as Claire's longsuffering mother Sandra, but it's insulting that we were expected to believe that Claire was ever in any real danger.
2. Matt, Hiro and Ando visit a comics shop ("The Eclipse, Part 2")
In a mall in Kansas, Matt, Hiro and Ando discover that Isaac Mendez, the tortured precog artist who died in Season One, is apparently still publishing "9th Wonders!" comic books somehow. And hey! The last couple of issues show the future that's just about to happen, which means our characters can read up on it and get to where they're supposed to be! There may be no lazier way to move a plot along; this is barely removed from having Matt and Hiro drop in on Greg Beeman and check out the storyboards for that week's episode. One has to wonder, too, whether Isaac ever got tired of drawing panels where people stand around with comic books in their hands and argue about whether or not this can possibly be happening. Bonus terrible points: Seth Green and Breckin Meyer guest-star as the owners of the comics shop, and have to pretend like they think it's awesome that Matt Parkman and Hiro Nakamura, whom they know from Isaac's comics, are standing there in the flesh, when in real life anyone who recognized Hiro and Matt would head for the nearest exit, or just start firing rubber bullets.
1. Hiro gets his memory erased ("It's Coming")
No one would have thought, while Hiro was farting around in feudal Japan last year, that in Volume Three the writers would come up with an even more annoying storyline for the character. Yet it happened: Arthur Petrelli reset Hiro's memory to that of a 10-year-old, rather than stealing his powers or killing him, either of which would have made more sense. In a roundabout way, this development led us to Hiro's heartbreaking reunion with his mother, the best scene of the season thus far, but that doesn't excuse what we had to go through in order to get there: endless scenes of Hiro giggling, making faces, squirting ketchup on people's chairs and clapping his hands with glee whenever someone demonstrates a superpower. Presumably, this is what Tim Kring would do to all of us if he could, since at this point only a 10-year-old would consider "Heroes" anything other than an embarrassing parody of its former self.
