December 18, 2008
If you're a fan, or at least a follower, of NBC's sci-fi drama "Heroes," you know that it wrapped its third major story arc, "Villains," on December 15. We get seven weeks of hiatus between now and the start of the next arc, "Fugitives," which is enough to time to debate over what happened to the series that used to be the most exciting thing on NBC. "Villains" ran for 13 weeks, and the most generous way to describe it would be as a mixed bag, with a lot of the items in the bag being little pellets of Awful Dialogue and Nonsensical Plot, with occasional chunks of Didn't Hayden Panettiere Use To Be a Much Better Actor?
Still, this bloc of episodes wasn't totally without redeeming qualities. The central theme of "Villains" (which the show took pains to make clear, doing everything short of having Sylar turn to the camera and say "Tonight's episode is about the duality of man") is that good and bad often go hand in hand, and separating them out is tricky, if not impossible.
I was going to craft a long, reasoned meditation on why this applies to "Heroes" as a series, and how you can't talk about the failings of "Villains" without also mentioning the actors, scenes and ideas that made this arc intermittently watchable. But then I thought, in the estimable words of my colleague Rich Stambolian, fuck it; it's the end of the year, and everyone else is doing top-ten lists instead of writing actual articles. So here are the 10 Best Things About "Villains," with the 10 Worst to follow sometime later this week.
This article obviously contains major spoilers about Season Three of "Heroes," although given the writers' regard for continuity lately, there's no reason to think all these plot points won't be nullified by the end of the first episode of "Fugitives."
10. Nathan's speech to Peter, "The Eclipse (Part Two)"
The Petrelli brothers' trip to Haiti didn't really need to happen, but it was kinda-justified with a monologue Nathan gives to Peter just before flying away (and leaving a powerless Peter stranded in the middle of a jungle, which is what I would do too). Having seen the brutality effected by the Haitian's autocratic, bulletproof brother, Nathan concludes that his father Arthur's plan to give powers to everybody is the right course of action. His speech, where he lays it out for Peter, is reasonably convincing -- it helps that Adrian Pasdar is one of the best actors in the cast -- and in a season where people's allegiances changed every scene for no discernible reason, the evidence of a character actually thinking about things in order to reach a decision was wholly atypical, and wholly welcome.
9. Andre Royo shows up, "Angels and Monsters"
One of the problems with "Villains" was that it didn't make much use of the allegedly terrifying Level 5 escapees, a group of superpowered criminals who staged a prison break early in the season and then got rounded up, one by one, usually really easily. Stephen Canfield, an unfortunate gentleman who got locked away after accidentally creating a gravity vortex and disappearing his neighbor into it, was one of these Monsters of the Week, dispatched in the same hour that we learned his name and what he could do. His power was pretty cool, but he makes this list because he was played by Andre Royo, whom viewers of "The Wire" know as the hapless junkie Bubbles. Go easy, Bubs. Walk the straight and narrow track.
8. Everyone looks like an idiot when they lose their powers, "The Eclipse (Part One)"
Man, I will never get tired of this. An eclipse shuts off everyone's powers, for reasons that will probably never be made clear, and what follows is a smattering of joyful little moments where dignity is undermined: Elle flings out her hand, Matt cocks his head and squints, Sylar flicks a finger. And nothing happens, except that everybody looks like a damn fool. "Why are you turning your head sideways?" asks the man whom Matt is trying to mindwarp. "What's your problem, son?"
7. Meredith hotboxes Claire, "One of Us, One of Them"
It was good to see Jessalyn Gilsig return as Claire's firestarter mother Meredith, and this scene, where Meredith seals the both of them in a shipping container and starts burning the oxygen out of the air, was dark enough to have been dreamed up by Alan Moore. Claire's regenerative ability means she's in no danger of dying, but, as Couch Baron over at Television Without Pity pointed out at the time, this actually makes the torture worse, since Meredith can prolong it indefinitely -- Claire will just keep feeling like she's about to suffocate until whenever Meredith decides to let up. It's an inventive use of power against power, the kind of thing superhero geeks have to appreciate.
6. Hiro gets bashed in the head with a shovel, "Dying of the Light"
For most of this season, the way you could tell a scene was annoying was if Hiro was in it, so this little interlude in Wherever, Africa was kind of like an apology for all that Hiro had done thus far. Tasked to bring in Usutu, the gnomic future-painter, and keep him from interfering in Pinehearst's plans, Hiro teleports to Usutu's hut and sees a painting of the shaman knocking him out with a shovel. Lo, it does come to pass. It was a nice moment, not just because an irritating character got injured but because we saw how Hiro, whose power is one of the most formidable in the series, could be brought low by a smarter character with a humbler ability. Bonus: later in the episode, Hiro goes back in time to one minute before he'd gotten knocked out, and we get to see the whole thing again. Twice!
5. Peter discovers Jesse Murphy's power, "One of Us, One of Them"
One of the best things about Season One of "Heroes" was watching Peter discover whatever new powers he'd recently picked up. (Check the scene in "Fallout" where he starts mimicking Matt's telepathy, confusing the hell out of both parties.) Once he learned how to master his 14,000 abilities, the character became less interesting, but we caught a glimpse of the old Peter when a Future Scarred Peter hides him in the body of Jesse Murphy, a Level 5 inmate with the power to create devastating sonic blasts. Peter stumbles onto this power quite by accident, flattening a whole room with a super-shout. Just then, his future self freezes time, pops him out of Jesse's body, and whisks him away. Neat.
4. Ando finally gets an ability, "Dual"
For most of the run of "Heroes," and especially Season Three, James Kyson Lee has arguably been the actor you felt worst for. Lee's character, the powerless Ando, has the thankless task of following Hiro the Idiot Man-Child around and never getting to contribute to the plot. Toward the end of "Villains," Ando injects himself with Pinehearst's superpower steroid and winds up with the power to amplify other characters' powers. It's kind of a second-tier ability, but the scene where Ando first discovers it is a nice payoff to a moment from earlier in the season, when a Future Ando is seen shooting red lightning from his fists. Here's hoping we get to see some powers supercharged in interesting ways -- if Ando gets near the Haitian, does everyone in the surrounding county lose their powers? -- and that Ando starts getting more to do besides stand there in exasperation as Hiro teleports away.
3. Adam meets Arthur, "Dying of the Light"
Let me be clear about one thing: Arthur Petrelli was kind of a crap villain, and I would much rather watch David Anders fop it up than listen to Robert Forster's leaden intonations. As Big Bads go, this was kind of a downgrade. Still, the scene where Arthur ganks Adam's regenerative powers, which had kept him alive 400 years past the normal human life span, was pretty cool. Before our eyes, Adam withers and crumbles to dust, and Arthur yanks the feeding tube out of his throat, having announced his arrival to the show in the best way possible -- by killing the immortal. Pity it didn't pan out, but then what does, really?
2. Future Sylar goes nuclear, "I Am Become Death"
In one of the show's most impressive CGI sequences (and the reason for the episode's J. Robert Oppenheimer-derived title), a future, domesticated, waffle-makin' version of Sylar sees his young son killed in front of him, and loses control of the radiation power he stole from Ted Sprague back in Season One. The fictional town of Costa Verde is wiped off the map, causing at least one viewer to hope that West was somewhere near the blast radius. It was a "holy shit" moment of the type we hadn't seen too much of in Season Two, made even more affecting by the way Sylar visibly tried to hold everything back at the last second -- it spoke to a theme the show has often made noises about but seldom explored, that of people caught up and carried away by great forces they can't even begin to control.
1. Hiro reunites with his mother, "Our Father"
Nothing else can touch this scene. After months of scampering around like a fifth-grader, including an interminable stretch when he had his memory wiped and actually believed he was a fifth-grader, Hiro went back 16 years in the past and got to say goodbye to his dying mother, Ishi (played with wonderful subtlety by Tamlyn Tomita). For the first time, the "boy trapped in man's body" idea was used for pathos instead of grating slapstick: Hiro's hesitant confession, "You're my mommy," was the most moving thing the show had done in ages. Then, seconds later, Ishi uses her healing ability to restore Hiro's memory; his face crumples, he tells her, "I remember how much I miss you," and the moment becomes legitimately tear-jerking. Masi Oka should be getting more scenes like this and fewer scenes where Hiro hops around holding his crotch because he has to pee.
Next time: They got the formula wrong. So wrong.
Still, this bloc of episodes wasn't totally without redeeming qualities. The central theme of "Villains" (which the show took pains to make clear, doing everything short of having Sylar turn to the camera and say "Tonight's episode is about the duality of man") is that good and bad often go hand in hand, and separating them out is tricky, if not impossible.
I was going to craft a long, reasoned meditation on why this applies to "Heroes" as a series, and how you can't talk about the failings of "Villains" without also mentioning the actors, scenes and ideas that made this arc intermittently watchable. But then I thought, in the estimable words of my colleague Rich Stambolian, fuck it; it's the end of the year, and everyone else is doing top-ten lists instead of writing actual articles. So here are the 10 Best Things About "Villains," with the 10 Worst to follow sometime later this week.
This article obviously contains major spoilers about Season Three of "Heroes," although given the writers' regard for continuity lately, there's no reason to think all these plot points won't be nullified by the end of the first episode of "Fugitives."
10. Nathan's speech to Peter, "The Eclipse (Part Two)"
The Petrelli brothers' trip to Haiti didn't really need to happen, but it was kinda-justified with a monologue Nathan gives to Peter just before flying away (and leaving a powerless Peter stranded in the middle of a jungle, which is what I would do too). Having seen the brutality effected by the Haitian's autocratic, bulletproof brother, Nathan concludes that his father Arthur's plan to give powers to everybody is the right course of action. His speech, where he lays it out for Peter, is reasonably convincing -- it helps that Adrian Pasdar is one of the best actors in the cast -- and in a season where people's allegiances changed every scene for no discernible reason, the evidence of a character actually thinking about things in order to reach a decision was wholly atypical, and wholly welcome.
9. Andre Royo shows up, "Angels and Monsters"
One of the problems with "Villains" was that it didn't make much use of the allegedly terrifying Level 5 escapees, a group of superpowered criminals who staged a prison break early in the season and then got rounded up, one by one, usually really easily. Stephen Canfield, an unfortunate gentleman who got locked away after accidentally creating a gravity vortex and disappearing his neighbor into it, was one of these Monsters of the Week, dispatched in the same hour that we learned his name and what he could do. His power was pretty cool, but he makes this list because he was played by Andre Royo, whom viewers of "The Wire" know as the hapless junkie Bubbles. Go easy, Bubs. Walk the straight and narrow track.
8. Everyone looks like an idiot when they lose their powers, "The Eclipse (Part One)"
Man, I will never get tired of this. An eclipse shuts off everyone's powers, for reasons that will probably never be made clear, and what follows is a smattering of joyful little moments where dignity is undermined: Elle flings out her hand, Matt cocks his head and squints, Sylar flicks a finger. And nothing happens, except that everybody looks like a damn fool. "Why are you turning your head sideways?" asks the man whom Matt is trying to mindwarp. "What's your problem, son?"
7. Meredith hotboxes Claire, "One of Us, One of Them"
It was good to see Jessalyn Gilsig return as Claire's firestarter mother Meredith, and this scene, where Meredith seals the both of them in a shipping container and starts burning the oxygen out of the air, was dark enough to have been dreamed up by Alan Moore. Claire's regenerative ability means she's in no danger of dying, but, as Couch Baron over at Television Without Pity pointed out at the time, this actually makes the torture worse, since Meredith can prolong it indefinitely -- Claire will just keep feeling like she's about to suffocate until whenever Meredith decides to let up. It's an inventive use of power against power, the kind of thing superhero geeks have to appreciate.
6. Hiro gets bashed in the head with a shovel, "Dying of the Light"
For most of this season, the way you could tell a scene was annoying was if Hiro was in it, so this little interlude in Wherever, Africa was kind of like an apology for all that Hiro had done thus far. Tasked to bring in Usutu, the gnomic future-painter, and keep him from interfering in Pinehearst's plans, Hiro teleports to Usutu's hut and sees a painting of the shaman knocking him out with a shovel. Lo, it does come to pass. It was a nice moment, not just because an irritating character got injured but because we saw how Hiro, whose power is one of the most formidable in the series, could be brought low by a smarter character with a humbler ability. Bonus: later in the episode, Hiro goes back in time to one minute before he'd gotten knocked out, and we get to see the whole thing again. Twice!
5. Peter discovers Jesse Murphy's power, "One of Us, One of Them"
One of the best things about Season One of "Heroes" was watching Peter discover whatever new powers he'd recently picked up. (Check the scene in "Fallout" where he starts mimicking Matt's telepathy, confusing the hell out of both parties.) Once he learned how to master his 14,000 abilities, the character became less interesting, but we caught a glimpse of the old Peter when a Future Scarred Peter hides him in the body of Jesse Murphy, a Level 5 inmate with the power to create devastating sonic blasts. Peter stumbles onto this power quite by accident, flattening a whole room with a super-shout. Just then, his future self freezes time, pops him out of Jesse's body, and whisks him away. Neat.
4. Ando finally gets an ability, "Dual"
For most of the run of "Heroes," and especially Season Three, James Kyson Lee has arguably been the actor you felt worst for. Lee's character, the powerless Ando, has the thankless task of following Hiro the Idiot Man-Child around and never getting to contribute to the plot. Toward the end of "Villains," Ando injects himself with Pinehearst's superpower steroid and winds up with the power to amplify other characters' powers. It's kind of a second-tier ability, but the scene where Ando first discovers it is a nice payoff to a moment from earlier in the season, when a Future Ando is seen shooting red lightning from his fists. Here's hoping we get to see some powers supercharged in interesting ways -- if Ando gets near the Haitian, does everyone in the surrounding county lose their powers? -- and that Ando starts getting more to do besides stand there in exasperation as Hiro teleports away.
3. Adam meets Arthur, "Dying of the Light"
Let me be clear about one thing: Arthur Petrelli was kind of a crap villain, and I would much rather watch David Anders fop it up than listen to Robert Forster's leaden intonations. As Big Bads go, this was kind of a downgrade. Still, the scene where Arthur ganks Adam's regenerative powers, which had kept him alive 400 years past the normal human life span, was pretty cool. Before our eyes, Adam withers and crumbles to dust, and Arthur yanks the feeding tube out of his throat, having announced his arrival to the show in the best way possible -- by killing the immortal. Pity it didn't pan out, but then what does, really?
2. Future Sylar goes nuclear, "I Am Become Death"
In one of the show's most impressive CGI sequences (and the reason for the episode's J. Robert Oppenheimer-derived title), a future, domesticated, waffle-makin' version of Sylar sees his young son killed in front of him, and loses control of the radiation power he stole from Ted Sprague back in Season One. The fictional town of Costa Verde is wiped off the map, causing at least one viewer to hope that West was somewhere near the blast radius. It was a "holy shit" moment of the type we hadn't seen too much of in Season Two, made even more affecting by the way Sylar visibly tried to hold everything back at the last second -- it spoke to a theme the show has often made noises about but seldom explored, that of people caught up and carried away by great forces they can't even begin to control.
1. Hiro reunites with his mother, "Our Father"
Nothing else can touch this scene. After months of scampering around like a fifth-grader, including an interminable stretch when he had his memory wiped and actually believed he was a fifth-grader, Hiro went back 16 years in the past and got to say goodbye to his dying mother, Ishi (played with wonderful subtlety by Tamlyn Tomita). For the first time, the "boy trapped in man's body" idea was used for pathos instead of grating slapstick: Hiro's hesitant confession, "You're my mommy," was the most moving thing the show had done in ages. Then, seconds later, Ishi uses her healing ability to restore Hiro's memory; his face crumples, he tells her, "I remember how much I miss you," and the moment becomes legitimately tear-jerking. Masi Oka should be getting more scenes like this and fewer scenes where Hiro hops around holding his crotch because he has to pee.
Next time: They got the formula wrong. So wrong.
