A review of NBC's "Heroes"
Some full-disclosure action is in order. I hated Heroes before I ever saw it because I had outlined a short story with a similar premise; random people around the world discovering super powers. When I heard about Heroes, and witnessed its smash success on NBC, I was more than a little frustrated that my idea had been gobbled up by another Network drama. I watched the show wanting to hate it.
As a result, my standards were low, so it’s no wonder that I find myself pleasantly surprised after a marathon week of 23 episodes on DVD. The show is well structured, intricately paced and plotted, and at times engrossing. The acting is generally average with Hiro and Bennet being the only notable performances. With an above average villain, solid special effects, competent directing, and enough hidden motivations and shadowy organizations to keep things suspenseful, the show has all of the addictiveness of Lost, 24, or any other decently written network drama. Particularly the cliff-hangers between episodes are well done.
The sharper readers should have picked up the lukewarm tone of my praise. There’s a reason Heroes is a two star in my book, and it is all about substance and character development. The show has very little of either. By the end of the first season, virtually none of the characters have grown as individuals, let alone learned anything new about themselves as a result of their powers. Claire is still whiny and aimless, Peter is still a naive useless sap, and Nikki, DL, and Micah are still Nikki, DL, and Micah.
In fact few of the characters are all that interesting. Because of the show’s scope and the size of the cast, most scenes are desperately short, with actors fighting to create a character in four or five lines, most of which have little to do with the main plot. What amazes me the most is how uninterested the majority of the characters are in their abilities. Nathan, Claire, Claire’s mother, Micah, DL, Nikki, and even minor characters like Charlie, Brian, and Zane – all of them are bored by their abilities, frightened, or see them as a nuisance. Peter makes a half-assed attempt to understand his, but is ultimately more driven by his gay “destiny” than in carving his own path. Hiro and Sylar are the only ones who are driven to use their abilities for some real purpose. As a result, they are two of the more interesting characters.
Hiro may seem like a simple-minded comic nerd, but he’s actually very brave and self-actualizing. Maybe I’m biased since living in Tokyo and mastering Japanese has given me some insight into his personality that may be lost in translation. From where I’m standing though, he’s the most heroic character in the series. As for Sylar, as black as his murderous heart may be, I have a speck of sympathy for the guy. What can I say? He’s right when he says that Brian Davis and several others are wasting their gifts. A man comes to him and says, “I can move things with my mind. Can you get rid of it?” and you expect a brilliant artisan, a man who appreciates the finest details of order in the universe, to be anything but disgusted? Flight is wasted on Nathan Petrelli, super strength is wasted on Nikki, and so on and so forth.
How many of us would kill to be able to create fire with a mere thought? Claire’s mom seems remarkably incurious. After fifteen years, she still reflexively swindles men out of their money and drifts through life. If you could memorize anything you read instantly, would you really waste your time being a waiter at a crappy diner? Yeah, she had a blood clot in her brain, but still. She could have researched a way to save herself. She could have taught herself or another doctor how to fix it. She could have DONE something rather than be swept up by a crappy prophecy painted by a heroine addict. Sylar is the only character who really perfects his powers. Peter, potentially the most powerful of all, is a pussy. Sylar kills him twice, and by the end, he still is so inept with his powers that he has to practically kill himself again to save the city.
And it isn’t just in terms of the powers that the characters are unbelievable. Ever notice how Peter and Isaac don’t seem that phased by the fact that they killed the woman they both love? Micah, DL, and Nikki never feel like a believable family, and Parkman’s wife is completely superfluous. The two interesting relationships are Hiro’s friendship with Ando, and Bennet’s struggle to protect Claire.
The show deserves credit for avoiding the obvious pratfalls of the genre. The stories do not revolve around contrived fight sequences, the villains are not megalomaniacal cardboard cutouts, and there is a sincere effort to get to the “human” element of a story about supernatural abilities. For all their lack of substance, the characters have real lives and drama, and by taking a scientific focus, there is a sense of realism, a sense of “this is our world they’re talking about” that makes the show distinct from say, X-Men. In spite of that, too often, the powers feel incidental or even unnecessary. DL could have gotten out of Prison and Nikki could have stolen the money without any powers. Love triangles, divided families, mafia troubles – these stories have been done before, and they could be much more interesting if you add super powers, yet Heroes does not do much to integrate the stories with the powers, and when they do, they rely heavily on coincidence and contrivances that border on absurdity.
DL and Hiro stumble upon a burning car on the highway at the same time, Claire is completely retarded and liable to get hit by meteorites, Parkman stumbles on a robbery and an assassination attempt, Nathan lands at the diner where Hiro is eating, then Hiro stumbles upon Charlie’s diner, then Peter shows up just before Mohinder is killed by Sylar, and after he fails massively, Sylar, who can stop bullets. and has super hearing, gets taken out by a weakened Mohinder, and on and on and on and on. Because of the time-traveling / dark prophecy framework, there isn’t much room for the story to be character driven. With so many disparate threads and a preset endpoint, it’s hard to do much but take stock personalities and shuffle them along until they hit the goal. Since they get to rename luck and chance as “fate,” the writers don’t have to worry about making coherent, deep characters who make choices and develop.
The writing really feels like it was driven by marketing. The first four episodes, written when there was a fear of being canceled, are the most promising and interesting. After that, the show starts to feel improvised, like the creators had no idea where to go with the show each week. It’s no surprise that the “save the cheerleader save the world,” meme fizzled out in the end. By the second half of the season, you got the feeling that the producers were fat and happy, secure in the show’s success and at least two more seasons. Thus the plot began to get even thinner and the pace slowed.
On top of that, the show seems to use its subject matter as a crutch for lacking any sort of internal logic or consistency. Anytime you say something doesn’t make sense or is unrealistic, fans can always counter with “Well, it’s a show about people who fly and walk through walls! Of course it isn’t realistic! LOLZ!” This is a deflection. There are two kinds of realism in fiction writing; physical realism, which is the dividing line between fantasy / sci-fi and realistic fiction and narrative consistency, which includes character consistency. The super hero genre dispenses with physical realism to tell its story, but that does not mean that things do not need to make sense within that universe.
Why is it that even though Sylar can stop bullets, he is easily stabbed by Hiro at the end? Why is it that when future Hiro stops time to talk to Peter and restarts time with Peter on the other side of the train, no one notices him moving? If Claire survived the fire at her home because of her powers, why is she only noticing her powers as a teenager, and why haven’t any of her doctors noticed her super-powerful tissues? Why is it that without the sword, Hiro can stop time long enough to fold a thousand paper cranes, but when he tries to kill Sylar he can’t?
The show leads us to believe that there are two distinct futures; one where Peter explodes and where Sylar becomes president, Nikki becomes a stripper, and Parkman becomes a federal agent. Yet at the end of the series, at the dramatic moment where the bad future seems inevitable, the characters’ placements and indeed, Peter’s own visions, all suggest a third future. If Peter actually exploded at the end, Nikki, Parkman, Sylar, Mohinder, and several others would all have died and created a new future. In fact even Claire wouldn’t survive since an atomic explosion at that range would completely disintegrate her, and since we know she can be indefinitely killed with a pipe stuck in her head, I would imagine complete incineration would be a bit difficult to recover from.
Does this sound too nerdy to you? If so, then congratulations on being the sort of “don’t sweat the details” viewer that NBC counts on. For a show that takes itself so seriously, I cannot excuse such sloppy plot work.
The second season was much worse too. Through an offensively implausible plot device, DL gets killed off, and through even more unbelievable circumstances, the same fate may happen to Nikki. Apparently California night clubs are filled with gangsters who will murder you in public over an insult, and New Orleans gangsters who willfully burn people to death are always two minutes away. Parkman’s father, introduced midway, is not merely stupid given the scope of his powers and how he uses them, but also without motivation or characterization of any kind.
Bennet, Hiro, and Sylar are the only returning characters worth watching, particularly the first two. Mohinder isn’t terrible either. Everyone else is even less likable this time around. Claire is still aimless and whiny. Just when she gets a speck of will at the end of the season and resolves to tell the world about her powers, a quick word from dad and she’s back to doing what she’s told.
Peter and Adam are definitely the worst characters of season two. For a guy who is potentially so awesomely powerful, Peter is so boring that it defies reason. After seven meandering episodes of him not remembering his past (the Hatian erased his memory to give him a chance at a new life, but come on, he can’t have been so stupid as to not realize that a guy with Peter’s abilities could not possibly have a normal existence) and pretending that being an Irish mobster represents a carefree, peaceful lifestyle, he remembers naively teaming up with a genocidal serial killer and spends and the rest of the season as his lapdog. No word on what happened to Caitlin, of course (though that may be good for her considering what happened to Simone) and not too much reflection on the part of Peter.
Adam took the show to a new level of silly by becoming the impromptu villain in the later half. Never mind the historical impossibility of a Japanese-speaking Englishman in Kyoto at the dawn of the Edo period, never mind the fact that, since evolved humans have apparently been around for centuries and there are potentially thousands of them the decades old ‘Company’ has kept humanity ignorant of their existence – forget all of that and just consider Adam’s motivation and goal. After centuries of life, he determines that mankind must be wiped out because of cyclical war, famine, and environmental destruction. He sees not see a speck of progress, and decides that billions of deaths are the only solution. It’s cartoonish on its face, but what’s worse is that the show spends zero time actually explaining or rationalizing this motivation. What’s more, his personality and prior actions do not come close to matching the ambition and audacity he displays in the last part of the season. Why would a smarmy, petty, self-indulgent low-life come to such a conclusion? Being supernaturally old does not cut it as a reason, since his personality is virtually unchanged. You get the feeling, “A guy like this would never be so bold!”
I still follow the show because as a fiction writer, I feel obligated to know what is influencing the culture and how. I do not want to make the mistakes that Heroes made, even if the show remains extraordinarily successful. There are some impressive moments, but ultimately it's disappointing.
As a result, my standards were low, so it’s no wonder that I find myself pleasantly surprised after a marathon week of 23 episodes on DVD. The show is well structured, intricately paced and plotted, and at times engrossing. The acting is generally average with Hiro and Bennet being the only notable performances. With an above average villain, solid special effects, competent directing, and enough hidden motivations and shadowy organizations to keep things suspenseful, the show has all of the addictiveness of Lost, 24, or any other decently written network drama. Particularly the cliff-hangers between episodes are well done.
The sharper readers should have picked up the lukewarm tone of my praise. There’s a reason Heroes is a two star in my book, and it is all about substance and character development. The show has very little of either. By the end of the first season, virtually none of the characters have grown as individuals, let alone learned anything new about themselves as a result of their powers. Claire is still whiny and aimless, Peter is still a naive useless sap, and Nikki, DL, and Micah are still Nikki, DL, and Micah.
In fact few of the characters are all that interesting. Because of the show’s scope and the size of the cast, most scenes are desperately short, with actors fighting to create a character in four or five lines, most of which have little to do with the main plot. What amazes me the most is how uninterested the majority of the characters are in their abilities. Nathan, Claire, Claire’s mother, Micah, DL, Nikki, and even minor characters like Charlie, Brian, and Zane – all of them are bored by their abilities, frightened, or see them as a nuisance. Peter makes a half-assed attempt to understand his, but is ultimately more driven by his gay “destiny” than in carving his own path. Hiro and Sylar are the only ones who are driven to use their abilities for some real purpose. As a result, they are two of the more interesting characters.
Hiro may seem like a simple-minded comic nerd, but he’s actually very brave and self-actualizing. Maybe I’m biased since living in Tokyo and mastering Japanese has given me some insight into his personality that may be lost in translation. From where I’m standing though, he’s the most heroic character in the series. As for Sylar, as black as his murderous heart may be, I have a speck of sympathy for the guy. What can I say? He’s right when he says that Brian Davis and several others are wasting their gifts. A man comes to him and says, “I can move things with my mind. Can you get rid of it?” and you expect a brilliant artisan, a man who appreciates the finest details of order in the universe, to be anything but disgusted? Flight is wasted on Nathan Petrelli, super strength is wasted on Nikki, and so on and so forth.
How many of us would kill to be able to create fire with a mere thought? Claire’s mom seems remarkably incurious. After fifteen years, she still reflexively swindles men out of their money and drifts through life. If you could memorize anything you read instantly, would you really waste your time being a waiter at a crappy diner? Yeah, she had a blood clot in her brain, but still. She could have researched a way to save herself. She could have taught herself or another doctor how to fix it. She could have DONE something rather than be swept up by a crappy prophecy painted by a heroine addict. Sylar is the only character who really perfects his powers. Peter, potentially the most powerful of all, is a pussy. Sylar kills him twice, and by the end, he still is so inept with his powers that he has to practically kill himself again to save the city.
And it isn’t just in terms of the powers that the characters are unbelievable. Ever notice how Peter and Isaac don’t seem that phased by the fact that they killed the woman they both love? Micah, DL, and Nikki never feel like a believable family, and Parkman’s wife is completely superfluous. The two interesting relationships are Hiro’s friendship with Ando, and Bennet’s struggle to protect Claire.
The show deserves credit for avoiding the obvious pratfalls of the genre. The stories do not revolve around contrived fight sequences, the villains are not megalomaniacal cardboard cutouts, and there is a sincere effort to get to the “human” element of a story about supernatural abilities. For all their lack of substance, the characters have real lives and drama, and by taking a scientific focus, there is a sense of realism, a sense of “this is our world they’re talking about” that makes the show distinct from say, X-Men. In spite of that, too often, the powers feel incidental or even unnecessary. DL could have gotten out of Prison and Nikki could have stolen the money without any powers. Love triangles, divided families, mafia troubles – these stories have been done before, and they could be much more interesting if you add super powers, yet Heroes does not do much to integrate the stories with the powers, and when they do, they rely heavily on coincidence and contrivances that border on absurdity.
DL and Hiro stumble upon a burning car on the highway at the same time, Claire is completely retarded and liable to get hit by meteorites, Parkman stumbles on a robbery and an assassination attempt, Nathan lands at the diner where Hiro is eating, then Hiro stumbles upon Charlie’s diner, then Peter shows up just before Mohinder is killed by Sylar, and after he fails massively, Sylar, who can stop bullets. and has super hearing, gets taken out by a weakened Mohinder, and on and on and on and on. Because of the time-traveling / dark prophecy framework, there isn’t much room for the story to be character driven. With so many disparate threads and a preset endpoint, it’s hard to do much but take stock personalities and shuffle them along until they hit the goal. Since they get to rename luck and chance as “fate,” the writers don’t have to worry about making coherent, deep characters who make choices and develop.
The writing really feels like it was driven by marketing. The first four episodes, written when there was a fear of being canceled, are the most promising and interesting. After that, the show starts to feel improvised, like the creators had no idea where to go with the show each week. It’s no surprise that the “save the cheerleader save the world,” meme fizzled out in the end. By the second half of the season, you got the feeling that the producers were fat and happy, secure in the show’s success and at least two more seasons. Thus the plot began to get even thinner and the pace slowed.
On top of that, the show seems to use its subject matter as a crutch for lacking any sort of internal logic or consistency. Anytime you say something doesn’t make sense or is unrealistic, fans can always counter with “Well, it’s a show about people who fly and walk through walls! Of course it isn’t realistic! LOLZ!” This is a deflection. There are two kinds of realism in fiction writing; physical realism, which is the dividing line between fantasy / sci-fi and realistic fiction and narrative consistency, which includes character consistency. The super hero genre dispenses with physical realism to tell its story, but that does not mean that things do not need to make sense within that universe.
Why is it that even though Sylar can stop bullets, he is easily stabbed by Hiro at the end? Why is it that when future Hiro stops time to talk to Peter and restarts time with Peter on the other side of the train, no one notices him moving? If Claire survived the fire at her home because of her powers, why is she only noticing her powers as a teenager, and why haven’t any of her doctors noticed her super-powerful tissues? Why is it that without the sword, Hiro can stop time long enough to fold a thousand paper cranes, but when he tries to kill Sylar he can’t?
The show leads us to believe that there are two distinct futures; one where Peter explodes and where Sylar becomes president, Nikki becomes a stripper, and Parkman becomes a federal agent. Yet at the end of the series, at the dramatic moment where the bad future seems inevitable, the characters’ placements and indeed, Peter’s own visions, all suggest a third future. If Peter actually exploded at the end, Nikki, Parkman, Sylar, Mohinder, and several others would all have died and created a new future. In fact even Claire wouldn’t survive since an atomic explosion at that range would completely disintegrate her, and since we know she can be indefinitely killed with a pipe stuck in her head, I would imagine complete incineration would be a bit difficult to recover from.
Does this sound too nerdy to you? If so, then congratulations on being the sort of “don’t sweat the details” viewer that NBC counts on. For a show that takes itself so seriously, I cannot excuse such sloppy plot work.
The second season was much worse too. Through an offensively implausible plot device, DL gets killed off, and through even more unbelievable circumstances, the same fate may happen to Nikki. Apparently California night clubs are filled with gangsters who will murder you in public over an insult, and New Orleans gangsters who willfully burn people to death are always two minutes away. Parkman’s father, introduced midway, is not merely stupid given the scope of his powers and how he uses them, but also without motivation or characterization of any kind.
Bennet, Hiro, and Sylar are the only returning characters worth watching, particularly the first two. Mohinder isn’t terrible either. Everyone else is even less likable this time around. Claire is still aimless and whiny. Just when she gets a speck of will at the end of the season and resolves to tell the world about her powers, a quick word from dad and she’s back to doing what she’s told.
Peter and Adam are definitely the worst characters of season two. For a guy who is potentially so awesomely powerful, Peter is so boring that it defies reason. After seven meandering episodes of him not remembering his past (the Hatian erased his memory to give him a chance at a new life, but come on, he can’t have been so stupid as to not realize that a guy with Peter’s abilities could not possibly have a normal existence) and pretending that being an Irish mobster represents a carefree, peaceful lifestyle, he remembers naively teaming up with a genocidal serial killer and spends and the rest of the season as his lapdog. No word on what happened to Caitlin, of course (though that may be good for her considering what happened to Simone) and not too much reflection on the part of Peter.
Adam took the show to a new level of silly by becoming the impromptu villain in the later half. Never mind the historical impossibility of a Japanese-speaking Englishman in Kyoto at the dawn of the Edo period, never mind the fact that, since evolved humans have apparently been around for centuries and there are potentially thousands of them the decades old ‘Company’ has kept humanity ignorant of their existence – forget all of that and just consider Adam’s motivation and goal. After centuries of life, he determines that mankind must be wiped out because of cyclical war, famine, and environmental destruction. He sees not see a speck of progress, and decides that billions of deaths are the only solution. It’s cartoonish on its face, but what’s worse is that the show spends zero time actually explaining or rationalizing this motivation. What’s more, his personality and prior actions do not come close to matching the ambition and audacity he displays in the last part of the season. Why would a smarmy, petty, self-indulgent low-life come to such a conclusion? Being supernaturally old does not cut it as a reason, since his personality is virtually unchanged. You get the feeling, “A guy like this would never be so bold!”
I still follow the show because as a fiction writer, I feel obligated to know what is influencing the culture and how. I do not want to make the mistakes that Heroes made, even if the show remains extraordinarily successful. There are some impressive moments, but ultimately it's disappointing.
2 Comments:
Some full-disclosure action is in order. I hated Heroes before I ever saw it because I had outlined a short story with a similar premise; random people around the world discovering super powers. When I heard about Heroes, and witnessed its smash success on NBC, I was more than a little frustrated that my idea had been gobbled up by another Network drama. I watched the show wanting to hate it...
And thus your opinion on the show, for good or ill, is instantly rendered completely and utterly irrelevant. Full disclosure notwithstanding, preconceived notions do not a trustworthy opinion make.
By that reasoning, 99% of opinions are irrelevant. How often do people read a book, watch a TV show, or see a movie with no knowledge of its premise, or author, or director? If you happen to really dislike super hero movies and Hugh Jackman, does that mean your opinion of X-Men is worthless? Of course not if you can back up your opinions, as I did, with several specific examples from the show.
I have never seen an episode of Lost, yet I have a preconceived notion about it from what I have seen in previews, the actors involved, the director, the premise, and what I have heard about it. That preconception is largely why I do not watch it, yet if I sit and watch the series I may come to a totally different conclusion, as I did with Heroes, which turned out to be completely different from the story I wanted to write. (Same general idea, but totally different execution). A reviewer can have whatever assumptions they wish about a show. Being a blank slate is not a requirement. Having the ability to justify your thoughts is.
I state my preconception here because it was an amusing coincidence and it influenced my initial opinion, but as with anything I review, my final judgement comes from the total effect of the work after having experienced it, not any prior assumption.
Thanks for the comment though, it reminded me to do something.
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