Dec 08 2008
Heroes Then and Now…and My Own Worst Enemy
I’ve been rewatching Season One of Heroes, hoping to shift the cobwebs of memory loose and get some more of the pieces to fall together. I think I’m ending up with more questions than answers, though. With so many characters, so many interconnecting parts, it might help to have Suresh’s map and all those colored threads–along with encyclopedia entries. It also leaves me wondering if there is, in fact, a method to the writers’ madness. There are some elements that remain shadowy in the first season that may eventually play a part in this season or later–or are they just mistakes that will end up in the trivia section on the Heroes IMDB listing?
One thing that struck me while watching the first Heroes season, and that was reinforced in tonight’s episode, is that we’ve all forgotten how bad Sylar really was. The writers and actors did a good job this year of making us empathize with him, looking for good in him and hoping to find it. But watching his cruelty in the first season, the way he turns the charm on so easily and then becomes ruthless the very next second–the way he uses both Mohinder and his father to get to the people he hopes to conquer… Sylar is a dangerous sociopathic serial killer, and after tonight, we’re left wondering if the future Peter saw with him leading a normal life was ever truly possible.
The other thing (and I’ve mentioned this befoe, but it really hits home now) is how much I enjoyed the characters in the first season. Lovable Hiro with his endless enthusiasm and goodness, trying to contact “Mr. Isaac”, a man embodying the true definition of a “tortured artist”. I miss Isaac greatly. He had a wonderful passionate quality that’s missing from the next two seasons…sometimes Peter comes close, but they’ve screwed with Peter so much that they’ve caused him to lose a lot of his charm. Angsty Peter with his Emo hair and crooked smile and overwhelming sensitivity to those around him, coupled with his erratic grasp on his ever-increasing arsenal of super-cool powers, made for the perfect hero…someone to feel for and cheer on each week. They seem to be trying to get that back, with Peter trying to find his place in the world without his powers backing him up. Coincidentally his hair is longer this season…maybe if we got the Emo hair back, we’d get back the Peter we love.
*SPOILER WARNING* Hiro’s scene with his mother was also extremely powerful…they hadn’t really addressed Hiro’s mother in the series before so it was nice to see another side of his family life and understand him more. I loved that he got a chance to be with his mother, and she got to see her son as a grown man and learn about the parts of his life that she thought she would never see. I truly hate, though, that they shattered the poignancy of the scene–and obliterated the trust that his mother had put in him–by having Hiro lose the catalyst almost instantaneously after receiving it. I see how the catalyst is going to provide necessary elements to drive the story forward, but when you can see the cogs of the script working, that’s not really successful writing, is it?
This was a strong episode for both Hiro and Claire, and I liked the tense, meaningful meeting Claire had with her father in the past. This is another way in which the first season strongly supports this episode–no matter what awful things Mr. Bennett has done, he truly does love Claire and has gone to incredible lengths to protect her.
As for My Own Worst Enemy, I’m just really disappointed this show isn’t going to continue. No, it’s not a perfect show, but it’s fun, the way the first season of Alias was–before it became more about the hooker outfits and melodrama than about the cool spy stuff. All the actors on My Own Worst Enemy are golden, and there are just nice little elements to it–like strong female characters and that they did nothing to hide the fact that Saffron Burrows is substantially taller than Christian Slater. Never mind the wonderful chemistry that Saffron and Christian have, and how good Alfre Woodard is as their boss. On top of all that, tonight’s episode seemed destined for the “Oh, here’s the guy they’re supposed to save and we get just enough dialogue to find out he’s a good guy before we kill him off” and guess what? They didn’t do it. He actually lived. They’ve done that to me on this show before–they set up the scene and you’re all ready to groan at the cliche and poof! They go in another direction. I’m going to miss being surprised like that.
After reading about NBC’s financial woes and how they’re probably going to be cutting hours of primetime programming, it’s not hard to see why they chose to ax an underperforming show that cost $4 million per episode. The trick to staying on NBC these days, apparently, is to make the cheapest show possible.
Watch Heroes and My Own Worst Enemy on NBC on Monday nights, starting at 9pm Eastern/8pm Central.
I guess it’s hard for any series like this to live up to the beginning–that excitement of seeing the characters for the first time, seeing their powers develop at the same time they do–that freshness is hard to recapture. I think maybe they need to go in a different direction–scale down from saving the world for the 5th time and show them helping individual people/communities in smaller ways, the way a lot of comic book heroes do.