Heroes
So, I just watched the season finale of HEROES, and I confess I was pretty disappointed. I’ve really enjoyed this show, and have loved Hiro in particular, but I thought from the beginning there were too many characters, and I think that problem came to roost tonight. The big emotional finish just didn’t work for me because the number of characters meant that I didn’t really believe the emotional connection that led to the emotional turn on the part of Nathan. I’m sorry, I just don’t think one rather inarticulate speech by the cheerleader was going to change Nathan’s mind.
Then there was all of Hiro’s sword training that he never had to use. He just stabbed the guy.
I was anticipating a real box office ending with all the various heroes being drawn together to deal with Syler, and instead it was really easy and didn’t really utilize the various characters and their powers. I got whiplash because they didn’t pay off Peter’s journey. He begins the show as this insecure man, unable to act or trust his own decisions. At some points here toward the end of the season he was presented as the leader of these people. He had all these powers, and then suddenly he can’t control this one power when he could control all the others? I didn’t buy it.
And what was the whole Sphinx moment with Richard Roundtree? (For those of you who don’t get the Sphinx reference rent MYSTERY MEN. It’s great.) Which brings me to my final bitch. This is supposed to be so secret that these powers are developing, but _every single friggin person_ is involved with the supers. Mom, a patient Peter is caring for, the guy to whom the stripper owed money, Claire’s daddy. Sheesh!
I’ll keep watching because it’s something different on television, and I like superhero franchises (obviously), and I love Hiro, but this left me feeling letdown.
Oh, I cooked dinner while I watched the two hour finale of 24, or as I’ve dubbed it “The right wing torture fest”. Last season with the Nixonian president was pretty cool. This season was a mess, and now Jack has graduated from torturing strangers to torturing family. Where do you go from there? I’m afraid to find out.
Melinda
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:10 am
“Then there was all of Hiro’s sword training that he never had to use. He just stabbed the guy.”
This, of course, is exactly what should happen when a trained sword-fighter meets a relatively un-armed foe. But Hiro hadn’t shown us he’d internalized his training; that he had done more than come to understand its philosophy, so it’s a bit of a stretch to have him so effective.
As for everyone being involved, don’t forget the café waitress Hiro and Ando meet in Texas!
I also felt a tiny bit let down; I expected a bigger surprise ending and sort of saw this one coming. Overall, however, I think the show has merit and I’ll be interested to see how things develop next season. If nothing else, we have yet to see Hiro battling a dinosaur!
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:23 am
I admit that they maybe should have invested more money in effects and fight coordination, because the “Hero tries to do something to Sylar alone, and then fails/stops bothering” thing was a little old. It could work in a comic book, where you’re getting slices of a sequence of events and can fill in the gaps and suppose there’s more activity taking place than is readily apparent on the page. But it doesn’t work in live action. If anything, this makes me think that there are some places where the show is incredibly conservative in its cinematography and editing — this _could_ have been made very dynamic in any number of ways, just by cutting it together more tightly.
And yeah, there’s quite a lot of characters in this finale, and it does detract from the emotion they’re trying to build up. I was “wowed” by a lot of what happened, but I don’t think I was as emotionally invested as I could have been (especially in the final Nathan-Peter scene).
That said, two comments where I disagree:
1) I thought Hiro’s training was primarily to prime him for the idea of “cutting out [his] heart” and being able to act when he needed to act. As Sylar isn’t a swordsman or martial artist, “stick him with the pointy end” is all Hiro really needs to know as far as that goes. It’s having the _will_ to stab him that Mr. Nakamura gave to Hiro through the training.
2) The four people you mention as knowing things that were supposed to be secret, the first three are all part of the same group (and you can add one moret to the list, Hiro’s father, although he seems to no longer be in league with them) — they’re the founders of “the Company” and have been manipulating events for at least a couple of decades. As Linderman said, he actually saw to it that DL and Nikki became an item, presumably in a sort of secret program to create more heroes (it really does seem that if one evolved human has kids by another evolved human, they are certain to produce evolved offspring).
The last, Nathan, _didn’t_ know anything (beyond the fact that he himself could fly) until events started happening in the show — Peter, namely, but also Linderman, Hiro, and so on. I don’t think he knew about Claire’s biological mother’s powers, for example, but given what we’ve learned of Linderman’s doings I would not be surprised at all if he arranged that little liasion as well somehow. Though seemingly without Ma Pettrelli’s connivance, since she called it Nathan’s “folly”.
I do wonder how the second season is going to play out. I’m a bit concerned about the show collapsing under its own weight, especially if Sylar’s still on the loose and still hellbent on causing trouble. They’re going to have to thin the cast down somehow.
May 22nd, 2007 at 7:49 am
I completely agree that Hiro’s dad was teaching him how to develop the mind set to kill someone. (No easy as I can attest. I had a man trying to kick down my front door one night, and I was waiting for him with the Baretta in hand. I was wondering if I could actually follow my training, aim for the torso, and try to kill him. Thankfully the police arrived and chased him away before I had to find out.) That said I’m just not sure that one session would do the trick. Also, when HIro turned up to rescue Ando why didn’t he just stab Syler with the pointy end then? It felt contrived so everyone could come to the plaza with the cool red stairs.
Oh, God, I guess you guys concur with Carl that Syler isn’t really dead and gone. I was so hoping he was gone. Like Peter he’s so hugely powerful that they both overbalance the show. Losing them both would be a good thing dramatically for the show.
I guess what I was really looking for was teamwork as a way to defeat Syler. Not that everybody puts on long johns and forms the justice league, but that they learn to use their powers in concert.
Yes, I know that mom and Linderman, and Claire’s dad, etc. were all part of the group, but it just seemed damn convenient. If this is a genetic mutation why isn’t it appearing all over the globe, and without some kind of concerted guidance from this The Company. If it’s genetic manipulation than Mohindar’s (sp?) dad ought to have realized that or been part of the company.
When I worked with Manny Coto on Odyssey 5 he had a rule that no story could grow out of coincidence. I think he carried it a little too far, but overall it’s a position I think has a lot of merit. I guess I was more interested in watching the dynamics of a kid or a family as these strange powers start to manifest, no one knows what is happening, and you get some emotional juice out of that.
I’ll keep watching the show. It’s nicely different from the usual run of cop, lawyer, doctor shows, and I have to remember how much every episode is costing. They can only do so much.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:27 am
[…] second half, but any sense of urgency or excitement had pretty much fled. This morning I found that Melida Snodgrass had nicely summed up my feelings about the episode. Too many characters, not enough emotional […]
May 24th, 2007 at 12:43 am
You know, I didn’t have a problem with Peter not being able to control this particular power. Most of the heroes have decent control, if not outright control, over their power. Ted was different, he couldn’t control his own power. So, for me, it didn’t count as a ding against Peter for not being able to control it either.
But Sylar could. I guess perhaps because the nut had no emotions to lose control of - so he was safe? Eh, what ever. I was tragically disappointed with Sylar being frozen in place, I guess in shock at the guy running at him from a country-mile away brandishing several feet of malicious intent… Was he that stunned? Bummer.
Parkman - the man with so much to live for - his wife, his unborn child and, then, but, yeah, um he goes insane and is going to gun down Sylar? Where…why…how’d he come up with the notion he could accomplish such a thing? Me cop, him bad, me win? When did his rational so utterly abandon him? He’s been shown to impulsive, sure but that felt a touch much.
And where was my favorite character, the Haitian? Notably absent because how you stop Peter is sorta, kinda too simple: have the Haitian walk up and shake Peter’s hand, hand him a coffee and they walk away laughing at what almost was. I would have liked to see a reason for the Haitian’s absence.
Regarding Nathan - I felt he was ready for a turn about and was walking numbly toward what was presented as a forgone conclusion but the right stimulus would jar him back to a sensible path. I trust Hiro, I just do, and when he tells Nathan that “you care too much” but that Nathan hides it, well, that’s the moment I was prepared to see Nathan make “the right choice” when the time came.
This was a *very* fascinating episode for me to watch for one reason in particular. I was working on spec beats for episode 23. When I made a list of all the payoffs that had to happen (and to avoid a Lost-like conundrum) I was dubious that it could be done well. I almost felt like taking a GRRM route and breaking it into halvesies. The very last thing I wanted was a big group hug….but how to do the finale without that…how would the writers tie up all of these and make it pay off? Kinda got the group hug I was struggling to avoid. I guess it was simply too much material to tie into a knot and not leave us Lost until next season.
I’ll most assuredly be back. I love the characters. I’m afraid for the story. Who *isn’t* a hero? Eh, anyhoo. I want to know who/what is worse than Sylar… thanks, Molly!
-Rhae
May 24th, 2007 at 4:22 am
I agree it didn’t completely work. If anything, the previous episode was stronger. However, I loved the interaction between Charles and Peter. OK, so maybe Mrs. Petrelli had set-up Peter and Charles. Still, potentially interesting.
Also, we heard the rumor that next season would focus a little more on the backstory. It’s interesting that the first place the story seems to be going is the “way back” story, and not just what went on in the lives of the Heroes parents.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
I found the episode unsatisfactory because it didn’t have the proper payoff for a story about superheroes: a big, dramatic clash of opposing forces. I started wondering what was going on when I noticed the clock was at ten minutes before the end, and the fight hadn’t started. It was resolved much too quickly to suit me. If you build someone up as having evil motives, being a threat to the heroes, and being willing to engage in violence, your audience is set up for a big, difficult fight. See, for example, the final confrontations in seasons three, four, five, and seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The pacing of Hiro’s coming in didn’t work for me, either. We see him teleport in a few paces away from Syler, and then they both seem to pause—and then Hiro runs in and impales him. Didn’t we see Syler stop that kind of attack an episode or two before? Getting through that particular sequence faster—and perhaps with Hiro appearing on the periphery of the fight, and then teleporting right next to Syler, and perhaps even behind him—would have made the teleportation part more dramatically effective.
May 25th, 2007 at 6:50 am
As I’ve read over the comments I’ve tried to be fair to the producers. I’ve been there. I know how much it costs to stage a fight sequence, and this is a very expensive show. Still, you’ve got to plot smarter since you know you can’t match a big action climax of a superhero movie. William’s comment about Buffy was spot on. That show did so much with a lot lower budger than Heroes.
Part of the reason for that was the close connections between the Scoobies. The staff of Heroes waited so long before they brought people together that there was never that sense of cohesion. Claire finds her father, but they never seem to form a connection. She’s going to France, she’s not going to France. She’s going to leave NY, no, wait, she’s not.
I’m not advocating that they form a charm bracelet, but the less potent (or interesting) characters should have found ways to assist Hiro, Nathan and Peter, and Claire to fight Syler.
July 20th, 2007 at 10:30 am
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title Heroes. Thanks for informative article