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We Don't Need Another Heroes

Posted on Thursday October 2, 2008, 11:59 by Emily Phillips in Small Screen

OK, this isn’t film, but it’s film-esque, and has us all talking, so we wanted to share. Heroes kicked off its third series last night, and is now officially more lost than Lost. Following a second season stunted by the writers' strike, we hoped to get back to the grasp of some gripping “Save the Cheerleader” action. But if the cheerleader doesn’t need saving, and if Sylar can be stopped by a mere louver door, then where can it go from here?

We are now in plot blurring territory, where the writers rip up all the character notes (if they had any), and rewrite them, a week at a time, losing track of what has gone before with every passing episode. But our discussion of this is going to get spoilerific, so if you are saving this quality drama for the weekend or didn’t watch the second episode on BBC3 later, then look away now!

Opening on a flash-forward to the future, we see that Future Peter has a major gash across his face and Claire Bear has evolved into a leather-legging-clad brunette. But given that Peter has Claire’s ability to heal, then is he maintaining his scar purely to look sinister? And isn’t her decision to hold her uncle/real-life boyfriend (ewwwwh!) at gunpoint slightly ineffective, when he quite clearly won’t be injured by the shot? Have the writers ever watched the show?

Flashing between this and the present day, it is revealed that Mr Nasty Future Peter is the shooter at Nathan’s press conference where we left off last season. Mind-reading cuddly cop Matt is in hot pursuit, but forgets to engage brain until Nasty Peter has done away with his nicer early self. Do none of the characters have their powers switched on? Has there been a Hero power cut? Does anyone else find Matt’s mind reading scenes uncontrollably irksome?

But it gets worse. Sylar engages in some amateur brain surgery on Claire, and it emerges that he doesn’t eat the brains after all but takes something else out. Which she can totally survive without, as it transpires; in fact, she may be entirely unable to die. So that whole season one plot arc about save the cheerleader, save the world; that painting by Isaac of a clearly dead Claire with her brain missing, that was all rubbish?

Now I may be putting the first series up on a pedestal here, but I have noticed that the whole cast appear to have attended the Joey Tribiani School of acting during the break between seasons. Milo Ventimiglia was always guilty of some dramatically pensive staring, and Chicago born Sendhil Ramamurthy has adopted his “Indian” accent from the Victorian colonies, but he’s now reached a new low, screaming, “He’s behind you!” during the face-off between Sylar and Claire. Even Nathan’s serious politician has “found God”.

Masi Oka’s Hiro remains the best of the bunch, but even loveable Ando is set to go off on a tangent and get a set of bad powers for himself. With dad Sulu checking in from beyond the grave via video message, Hiro is left the task of guarding half of a formula, which he promptly loses in ten seconds flat. This is the Hiro we know and love, blinking his way through madcap adventures, on a quest to save the world (and lets hope the series at the same time) – but isn’t it also something of a step back from the development of the last season-and-a-half?

The second part was even more irksome. Mohinder turned into The Fly; poor pathetic present-day Peter fell in with a bad crowd again, but these ones have superpowers rather than bad Irish accents, and Peter’s turned into a completely different guy so no one knows who he is; Matt ended up in Africa with yet another wilfully mystic guy; baddies conspired but to little effect; Malcolm McDowell may have popped up again but is either invisible or Nathan Petrelli’s gone mad; and Ali Larter turned up as a new character with new powers for reasons best known to…well, we’re not convinced anyone knows.

At this point, we might keep watching, but only in the same way that it’s hard to look away from a car-crash. But really, Must Do Better, Heroes. This is not going to save the cheerleader, let alone the world.