Danny ChaiPiggybacking off of Dave’s entry and this EW story, some of it redundant with them, but whatever. Heroes is an above-average show. We watch it. But there are things about it that suck.
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- It’s too violent. I’m not a prude. In the words of Cher Horowitz, “Until mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news, there’s no point in taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value.” We recently rewatched Total Recall and I was reminded how brilliant a movie it is, gratuitous violence and all. But something about the violence in Heroes really bothers me, so much so that I couldn’t fully connect with it in Season 1. It’s just especially gruesome and feels out of place on network TV. Like, the scene where Claire’s brain is exposed. That’s disgusting. It was disgusting in Hannibal, an R-rated movie. And it’s OK for network TV? I’m really bothered by the violence.
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- It has no thematic center. Every show, but especially an ensemble show, needs some thematic center, a common force that’s driving everyone. Lost has it, in the form of the Island, and what it means to the people. Season 1 of Heroes had it, in the form of Isaac’s paintings. There were a bunch of disparate characters, but through the paintings, you knew that they were connected in some way and would somehow come together. It was the driving force that made the show interesting and held it together – seeing how the heroes discovered themselves and each other.The last episode of the first season tore the whole conceit that held the show together apart. First they killed off the painting guy. Then, his final painting… didn’t happen. Huh??? So you lose the element that held everything together, than undercut the assumption on which that same element was based. His paintings don’t have to come true? Then his power is just to see events that may or may not occur. That’s not a power at all. You know what? I have that power. You have that power. It’s called imagination. Utterly lame.
Last season sucked because there were no paintings. Nothing held it together, the characters were all spread apart, new characters were added also in different places, each with their own goals and motivations, with nothing to hold them all together. Boring. (SN. The Uncanny X-Men in the late 80s was boring for the same reason, when they were all spread out across the globe. Stuff happened each issue, but it all felt pointless because there was no unifying reason tying them together or driving them anywhere.)
- It has no thematic center. Every show, but especially an ensemble show, needs some thematic center, a common force that’s driving everyone. Lost has it, in the form of the Island, and what it means to the people. Season 1 of Heroes had it, in the form of Isaac’s paintings. There were a bunch of disparate characters, but through the paintings, you knew that they were connected in some way and would somehow come together. It was the driving force that made the show interesting and held it together – seeing how the heroes discovered themselves and each other.The last episode of the first season tore the whole conceit that held the show together apart. First they killed off the painting guy. Then, his final painting… didn’t happen. Huh??? So you lose the element that held everything together, than undercut the assumption on which that same element was based. His paintings don’t have to come true? Then his power is just to see events that may or may not occur. That’s not a power at all. You know what? I have that power. You have that power. It’s called imagination. Utterly lame.
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- It has no good emotional center. Ensemble shows need a character to be the emotional center. Jack is the emotional center on Lost. On Heroes? There is none. It can’t be Mohinder because he’s (until now) an outsider. He can observe, but can’t really participate, nor bring people together, nor lead them anywhere. No one is really driving the other characters or bringing them together, except for the evil shadowy figures, and when the emotional center is evil, it’s repulsive.
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- Time travel is lame. For a couple reasons. One, it’s too powerful. The ironic thing about hero stories in general is that it’s not a hero’s powers that make them interesting, it’s their limitations. The struggle between the hero’s use of powers and their limitations and conflicts is what makes them compelling. The Frank Miller Wolverine series was awesome because it involved the conflict between his power and his inability to control his animal nature. The most interesting Batman stories involve him deciding how much he can and cannot do, how far he is willing to go. Superman is boring because he’s too powerful; the only thing that makes him interesting is Kryptonite and human emotional tanglements.If you can travel through time (and space), you can essentially do anything. It’s completely arbitrary (and illogical) why a character with that power wouldn’t use time travel in a situation. So there’s no real conflict with that power – just always use it. That makes it lame.
Furthermore, time travel is inherently illogical. The only story that has ever treated time travel logically is 12 Monkeys, which has the principle that it is impossible to change the past, no matter how hard you try. Which makes sense – it’s the past. Back To The Future, like every other time travel story, is illogical, but I was willing to go with it, because at least you had Doc Brown raving about how messing with the past could destroy the space-time continuum. In the Marvel comics world, it has some semblance of logic via the notion of infinite alternate universes.
In the Heroes world, there’s no logic to time travel whatsoever. Where did future Hiro come from? Where did he go? What future does current Hiro go to? Makes no sense. At all.
- Time travel is lame. For a couple reasons. One, it’s too powerful. The ironic thing about hero stories in general is that it’s not a hero’s powers that make them interesting, it’s their limitations. The struggle between the hero’s use of powers and their limitations and conflicts is what makes them compelling. The Frank Miller Wolverine series was awesome because it involved the conflict between his power and his inability to control his animal nature. The most interesting Batman stories involve him deciding how much he can and cannot do, how far he is willing to go. Superman is boring because he’s too powerful; the only thing that makes him interesting is Kryptonite and human emotional tanglements.If you can travel through time (and space), you can essentially do anything. It’s completely arbitrary (and illogical) why a character with that power wouldn’t use time travel in a situation. So there’s no real conflict with that power – just always use it. That makes it lame.
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- In fact, in general the show defies logic. There’s too much about it that just defies reason. Heroes have existed for millenia, and have openly used their powers, and the general populace doesn’t know? Zero sense. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
- I may be alone on this, but I also find the writing and acting bad on Heroes also – they don’t talk or act like real people. Lost and Friday Night Lights (two shows I love) also suffer from the illogical characters phenomenon: in Lost, when characters don’t see each other for a long time, the natural thing to do when they’re reunited is have a long talk about what happened. In Lost, they inexplicably leave everything unsaid. In Friday Night Lights, they go through such wild swings in their character, personality, and decision-making that they all virtually suffer from multiple personality disorder.But on those two shows, even with those illogical flaws, the characters still ring true and feel like real people. That’s not true in Heroes where they all talk and act bizarrely.
I still like the show (although now that I think about it, I’m not sure why) and will probably keep watching out of stubbornness. But I find myself infuriated while watching it.