Doldrums
A few notes on the latest episode of Heroes, "Building 26."
1) The show is spinning its wheels. I hope with a new producer it starts moving again. Capturing HRG was a good start.
2) Ando and Hiro went to India for no good reason and had a mild adventure. At least they're coming right back to the action, and aren't stuck in feudal Japan.
3) I find Luke (the heating pad kid) pretty annoying. I was thrilled when Sylar left him behind. Less thrilled when Sylar picked him up again. (Speaking of Sylar, I'm still bothered he has the Cheerleader's healing ability. Didn't they spend a whole season trying to prevent that?)
4) Luke says Sylar is a serial killer, and to prove it, the first thing he notes is Sylar has a pattern. Believe it or not, I once had a big argument over this. I don't believe a serial killer is required to have a pattern--he just has to kill a series of people. (That a person might have a pattern wouldn't be surprising.) So I'm saddened to see Heroes come down on the wrong side of this debate.
5) Claire, on the outs with her dad again, has been tiresome for a while. She's a spoiled girl who thinks she can help people, though she never goes in with a plan. She's met a new young guy. The last one (a character no one liked) could fly. Not an original ability, but kind of interesting. This new one can breathe underwater. Pretty lame.
6) Claire's Aqualad is on the run so he has to hide. Claire has him living in her closet. I have a better place for him: the bottom of the lake.
7) As I've noted before, this show is not realistic. So whenever they have the urge to mention something from the real world to "deepen" the story, they should resist it. It made me cringe when Zeljko Ivanek (playing the guy in charge of rounding up people with powers) brought up the Patriot Act.
8) Nathan gets some pushback from Moira Kelly, who's playing head of Homeland Security (another real thing that shouldn't be mentioned). On behalf of the President, she's ready to shut down the operation because she doesn't believe these people exist. Pardon me? Shouldn't the Prez have looked into this before he okayed the project in the first place? We've had Zeljko and his men spend quite a while working on this, and they successfully rounded up a whole planeload of such people already. How can they not have evidence?
9) Tracy, their only prisoner, is chained up in a heated room. Seems unnecessarily rough, but fine, I'll accept it. Moira sees her, recognizes her from her former life as a political operative, and is outraged. The next time they meet, Tracy has escaped and is in a hallway, surrounded by guys with guns. What does she do? You figure she'd call to Moira for help, the one person who may have the power to get her out. (In fact, that's what Moira was there for--to shut the place down.) Instead, Tracy kills her hostage--the one thing that guarantees she'll be taken down immediately--and in doing so, convinces Moira the operation is necessary. Good to see the Heroes are thinking ahead as always.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:20 AM
4 Comments:
They've stolen from everything else. With aqualad, they're now stealing from Invasion.
Yeah, a weaker episode. I still like what they are doing with Sylar. i think he should escape capture at least once every show - its the best part of the hour. I wish he would sometimes use any one of his other multitude of abilities to escape. How about melting the agents' guns? Or how about hearing the agents arriving in advance? Or I believe he has a freeze ability too? Oh well, arguably he doesn't want to let his enemy know the full extent of his abilities, so that when they try and adapt to what they should know he can do by now, he can pull a new ability out of his bag of tricks.
Aqualad is a lot better than Flyboy (West, I think was his name), so far at least.
# 9 was the one that made me the maddest. I think the writers can only think one character at a time. That sequence was designed to be seen from Nathan's point of view. So the one-dimensional Moira and the inconceivably self-defeating Tracy were just iagos, put there to give Nathan an interesting scene.
I'm tempted to replace Heroes with Smallville in my viewing schedule. They both suck now, but Smallville has the advantage that it was never good, so there isn't that element of disappointment.
Smallville was good in the first season for the same reason Heroes was - we enjoy seeing someone discover their superpowers. I stopped watching Smallville when it became super-soap opera. So far, Heroes has not fallen into that trap (except with Claire story lines from time to time). Not that it doesn't have lots of other problems all its own.
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