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HEROES Season 3
September 23 2008 00:37 Filed in:
Television
After a dazzling first season of the show, season 2 was somewhat of muddled mess. My hopes for season 3 are cautious. I think the amount of promotion for this year is a direct result of NBC’s understanding season 2 didn’t inspire a whole lot of people to come back.
Season 3 opened with two episodes back to back: The Second Coming and The Butterfly Effect.
Before I pass judgment, I have to admit I came to the Heroes party late. I caught the entire first season on DVD.
While the show had some flaws, the first season succeeded with an intriguing storyline and characters, unexpected plot twists and outstanding cliffhangers. The show didn’t just borrow heavily from X-Men, it basically grabbed the concept and re-invented it from scratch. The first season pivoted around the theme of moral gray areas and it really drove to a pretty outstanding finale.
Crippled by the writer’s strike, season 2 was scaled back to 11 episodes to tell its story, but rather than feeling it was too short it felt like they milked a short concept out way too long. Dreadfully slow and unsatisfying, by the end of the first handful of episodes we felt like we had accomplished nothing. There was a painful lack of honest character development, less action, a thoroughly disjointed storyline and shoddy plot development. Most disappointing of all, it wasn’t just “not as good” as season 1, it was poor. By the time it started to pick up toward the end, the interest was mostly gone and it began to be a chore to pound through each episode.
Compounding the story problems, the continued introduction of new but half-realized characters muddled the entire process spreading the viewer’s attention and ability to care very thin. It actually got to the point about mid season where you started to ask yourself if there was actually anyone on the planet that DIDN’T have super powers.
It was in season 2 that they began to create a serious problem for the show. As we met more and more of these “heroes” with powers, they began to grow the powers of the characters that we already knew to dangerous proportions. Probably most disappointing is the handling of our cuddly, Japanese hero, Hiro Nakamura with his ability to bend space and time. Hiro, played outstandingly by Masi Oka, was really one of the two pivot points of the show early on. However, as he learned to take control of his power, it really became an overwhelming drag on the whole concept.
By season 2, Hiro’s ability was so profound that he should have been able to accomplish just about anything, and rather than limiting it in some respects, he just inexplicably doesn’t use it when it would clearly get him out of danger time and time again. I see this as really one of the real failures of where they are taking the show. Drama, danger and suspense start to become almost impossible to generate when your main characters have become so powerful that they can defy almost any danger, destroy the world in a flash, or come back from the dead seemingly at will. This, in my opinion, is the corner the show was painted into come the season 3 opener.
I was interested to see what they hell they were going to do to attempt generate any sense of urgency in the plot.
Well, I have to say that my first impressions for the new season aren’t too hopeful. Rather than trying to work out of this corner, they just keep slapping more paint around them as the writers jam their asses farther back. Let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with here:
Hiro Nakamura: Can bend space and time, travel any where in the past or future, or simply stop time. His only limitation at this point is that he “refuses” to go back to the past for fear of damaging the time line further.
Claire Bennett “The Cheerleader”: easily one of the most interesting characters from the first season became pretty much a whiny bore in season 2. Now (CAUTION SPOILERS) has been revealed to be pretty much immortal. She apparenty can’t be hurt or killed.
Peter Petrelli and Saylor: I lump these two together because they are extremely similar, just on two sides of the equation. By introducing characters that can absorb or steal other’s powers, we compound the problem of having characters so powerful that they in a sense become almost meaningless.
Nathan Petrelli “FLYING MAN!”: Nathan actually remains an interesting character. His surprising redemption at the end of season 1 is now swinging back into question after he is revived from the dead and has turned into a religious whack job.
Mohinder Suresh: What the hell are they doing with him? I have no problem with changing the character over time, but to go from a straight arrow, to conflicted about the right course of action, to a hungry-for-powers ego-maniac inexplicably in the series opener is just perplexing and inconsistent. If a character is going to change drastically, it’s something that needs to make sense. When you make him completely unpredictable to extreme, it’s almost an insult to the audience.
Matt Parkman: Simply a mind reader at first, he suddenly has the ability to force people to think whatever he wishes. At this phase, the only thing the writers could do with him to prevent his power from hindering the plot was drop him in the middle of an African desert to keep him out of the fray.
There’s more to the laundry list, but I’m not going to wash it all.
I’m confused by what direction and tone this show is trying to establish with this new season. It’s becoming really far out, which is okay, but it still feels disjointed as hell. It’s a completely different style and tone than the first season, but it just all feels wrong at this point and I don’t feel like the show is connecting with me as a viewer anymore. I have a disappointing feeling that this will be the final season if there isn’t some major shift in tone and direction sometime early this year.
I will stick this thing out unless it just becomes unwatchable. I would say at least that it shows somewhat more promise than the season 2 opener did, but not a whole lot more.
Overall, I’m still just scratching my head over this whole series right now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a drastic drop off in quality in a program happen so fast. I want to love this show again, but they aren’t making it easy.