Well, another season of Heroes is over, and everybody is talking about it. As I said last night, that would mean everybody that I work with. The reaction to it, as has been the general reaction to the season as a whole, is resoundingly negative. This made me quite sad, because as a whole, I thought season 3 was quite the rebound from the obnoxiously disappointing season 2. Was it as epic and badass as season 1? No. Did that stop it from being good? Hell no. I love season 3 and have defended it on multiple occasions.
Season 3 has done a lot right by me. The focus has kind of shifted from the use of superpowers to this "where do they fit in" premise, and more importantly, to character development. This season, not only did we get to go back and see the buildup of many of the pre-season 1 things (the formation of The Company, Angela murdering her husband, the reason Arthur lived, how Noah ended up with Claire, who Claire's real dad was... these back stories are really interesting for me. Plus, the end of the season featured an entire episode devoted to Sylar vs. Noah Bennett in what is one of the coolest rivalries in TV. I wish they'd made more out of it though.
The focus to more of a character-driven story rather than a power-driven story seems to have pushed a lot of people away form the show, which is really disappointing. As I start to find it more interesting, others start to find it less so. It's a shame, because Heroes has a cast of very interesting characters.
So, what about the end? What about Sylar becoming Nathan (sort of) and Nikki coming back? Most people who I've talked to... scratch that - everybody I've talked to thinks it was lame and they don't like the direction the writers are taking the show. I beg to differ... at least partially.
First of all, I liked the season finale. It had part of the epic, race against the clock feel of the first season, and the end was completely outside predictability. Come on now, who saw Sylar as Nathan? Really? And Nikki coming back was the highlight of my hour. Unexpected and fun.
Yet we run into the issue of where we go from here. Obviously, Nikki will be a factor next season, as (likely) will Sylar coming back out of Nathan. But what of the rest of the story? Certainly they can't write an entire season with just those story points. Nikki is cool, but she's not a very hardcore bad guy, and she also doesn't meet the necessary requirement of being stonger than the good guys. Though turning herself into water bit is pretty cool, but far from the godly power required to be a great villain. Sylar can't really be the big bad guy anymore either. There's kind of a been there, done that stigma about him now.
This touches on the one issue I have with the show, and that's the fact that the story has been slipping. Sure we get this great character development, but it's coming at the cost of making the story truly amazing. I have enjoyed what story there was in this season, but there definitely needs to be more.
If I were to offer up a suggestion for where the show should go from here, I'd say this: Season one was popular, at least in part, because of the race against the clock mentality. There were the heroes finding each other and their powers and learning how to work together to fend of a powerful and mysterious foe who was going to destroy New York City. The heroes have already found their powers, but the heroes finding their place in the world can easily take the place of that part.
The next season needs to start off with a bang, with somebody new and scary and powerful. The writers need to find that sense of urgency we all felt watching season 1, and they need to inject it back into the show. People are falling off this show, in part, like I said before, because they have started to find the story to be stagnate. I understand this. The second part of season 3 started off with a grand plan to capture all the heroes and lock them up and experiment on/kill them, then it kind of dwindled away into Sylar attempting to become the president. Yet, we didn't even know that Sylar was going to do this until the very last episode, so there was very little buildup to it. In the end, it didn't feel terribly climactic. So while I like the shift towards character development, there really does need to be a refocusing on a story thread that continues throughout the season. Good guys vs really strong bad guy is a great setup for creating a lot of drama and suspense.
Perhaps they should take a page out of Supernatural's book. There's always a grander evil behind things, always lurking in the shadows and making appearances here and there to remind audiences that he or she is still out there. Each episode, though, is a self-contained mini-story that relates back to the bigger events several times during each episode. This is a great formula (hell, it worked for Buffy for many years) and one that the writers of Heroes may want to look at approaching.
One of my big gripes with the second half of this season was the episode entitled "1961" in which Angela takes her family along with Noah Bennet to Coyote Sands to uncover the roots of The Company. It is also in this episode that we are introduced to her sister. This episode has some great back story for both The Company and Angela, but it accomplishes nothing as far as pushing the story forward. I heard much the same thing about the episode "I Am Sylar" which explores Sylar's complications with his newly stolen shapeshifting ability, but that pushes Sylar's character into new territory, so I have fewer issues with that.
Anyway, going back to "1961" for a moment, the end of that episode was a classic example of what I call Heroes' "reset button". Many times during this series (throughout, not just this season) the story starts to go somewhere interesting, then something happens to "reset" it back to square one. Arther Patrelli's death was one such incident. It eliminated the bad guy of the moment (leaving Sylar, once again) and destroyed Claire's real mother, leaving her once again with the Bennets. "1961" is another example of the reset button in action, because the story could have gone any number of directions with this new character or this new knowledge we had about The Company, but it didn't. Angela's sister disappeared and we find ourselves right back in same place the episode started. Reset button.
Going back to my original point, the writers of Heroes really need to pick up the pace of the story a bit if they expect to get their viewership back. Episodes like "1961", while fascinating from a perspective that I enjoy, do not allow that to happen. We could have covered the same backstory about Coyote Sands in a 10 minute flashback and still used the episode for furthering the story, rather than the entire episode feeling like an hour-long intermission.
I really enjoy Heroes. I think it's a great show, and I think they left the door wide open to do some exciting things with the next season. I just hope they are able to walk through that door rather than just timidly peek in.
No comments:
Post a Comment