The show “Heroes” started out as a fun but deriv­a­tive con­cept — the hero ori­gin story. More point­edly, “Heroes” is a take on the X-Men. You’ve got your mind reader (Pro­fes­sor X), the guy who can fly (Angel), the girl who can regen­er­ate (Wolver­ine), the girl who can look like any­thing (Mys­tique) and a bunch of oth­ers, but it was fun at the begin­ning since every­body loves the “ori­gin” story. It’s fun to watch peo­ple get new pow­ers and then learn how to use them as well as their lim­i­ta­tions. It’s plain ol’ good vs. evil.

The evil on the show is Gabriel Gray, a nerdy watch repair­man who took the lame moniker of Sylar from one of the brands of watches he fixed. He is able to acquire other pow­ers by (he thinks, but I’m not so sure) eat­ing other hero-type people’s brains. Lovely.

The first sea­son was fun and I stuck around to see if New York would indeed be destroyed by the man who can’t con­trol his pow­ers, Peter Petrelli. Peter had acquired nuclear capa­bil­i­ties from Ted Sprague. Peter, unlike Sylar, gets pow­ers by being around peo­ple who already have the power he will develop. I think Sylar oper­ates the same way but he just doesn’t know it.

Half the joy of sea­son one was watch­ing Hiro, the time-traveling Japan­ese office worker, dis­cover his abil­ity and then real­ize that it can be fun as well as pow­er­ful. His jour­ney, of all of them, has been the most enjoy­able to watch as he grows.

Any­way, there was this “mas­ter­mind” named Daniel Lin­der­man (he has pow­ers too — regen­er­a­tion) who was going to bring about a new age by hav­ing Peter Petrelli destroy New York with his nuclear capa­bil­i­ties and then get Peter’s brother Nathan elected pres­i­dent. Nathan helped Peter get out of the city by fly­ing up into the stratos­phere before explod­ing. In the “destroy NY” show Lin­der­man is shot to death, right through the head, and can’t regen­er­ate. He’s dead. Really dead.

Which brings me around to now. Ain’t It Cool News is link­ing to a story where some­one from the BBC is giv­ing away what’s in a sea­son 3 ‘Heroes’ promo. I’m talk­ing spoil­ers, so if you care and watch the show, skip the next paragraph.

LINDERMAN IS BACK?

What?! Why can’t they kill any­one on this show and not have them stay dead?! Why can’t some­one just die and be really dead?! The freak­ing guy was SHOT IN THE HEAD. Kill him! Kill him! Have him be dead, really dead! Bad guys, even SUPER BAD GUYS, die! Come on, man, just kill some­one off of this show and have him be gone! He wasn’t that cool or any­thing. Even his name is lame. He was even lamer than the guy that could paint the future.[1. Don’t even get me started on how cool it would have been to have Hiro fight­ing a Tyran­nosaurus. That would have rökked.] Jeez.

And man, I’ve hung on even through the lame new char­ac­ters they tried to intro­duce last sea­son where all I wanted was for the girl who’s eyes turn black to die. The sweet release of her death would have been a high point of last sea­son, but no, they had to have her “fall in love” with Sylar. She’s as lame as Nikki and Paulo on “Lost” were and the cre­ators of “Lost” were smart enough to kill them off! Kill Black Eyed Girl! Kill her as soon as possible!

The list of peo­ple on the show with pow­ers just keeps grow­ing. Nikki, who sup­pos­edly died in an explo­sion, I’m sure will turn up alive. Nathan, who was shot at the end of last sea­son right before he “came out” about his fly­ing power, I’m sure will be back too. Claire’s dad, who’s death was very pow­er­ful on the show, was res­ur­rected. Sylar him­self prob­a­bly was dead but they’ve brought him back to annoy us with his “my-head-is-down-but-I’m-looking-at-you” eyes and stu­pid way of talk­ing again. And Hiro can’t even kill a bad guy; he has to bury him in a cof­fin alive. The guy he buried is immor­tal so I’m sure he’ll turn up again, as usual.

The only one that I really am glad is back is Hiro’s friend Ando. Ando is one of the few peo­ple on the ros­ter with­out pow­ers which is prob­a­bly why I like him so much. Can’t we have fewer peo­ple with pow­ers? To see their per­spec­tive on those with pow­ers? And can’t this freak­ing show thin the ranks a lit­tle bit before the whole planet is on the show because, you know, they ALL have powers?

§ One Response to “I’m (Probably) Done Watching “Heroes””

• John Selzer says:

  July 18, 2008 at 9:02 am

  We were late to the Heroes party given the time delay between the show air­ing in the U.S. and its even­tual release in Europe (they need time to dub the lan­guage and sort out the sub­ti­tles). Although the Swiss Romande sta­tion broad­cast the show in dual audio (mean­ing the Eng­lish track is avail­able), the sub­ti­tles are only in French. That meant that any time Hiro and his Japan­ese cohorts had a con­ver­sa­tion, we were read­ing it in French. Despite the com­plex­i­ties of lan­guage, we were hooked on the show pretty quickly. We fol­lowed the first sea­son closely with (mostly) unwa­ver­ing inter­est. The sec­ond sea­son just plain lost us, though. The first episode was pretty much a steam­ing pile of crap. But that is just one episode, right? We slogged through two more and then declared our­selves done for the show. We quit Heroes cold turkey.

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