Heroes: One of Us, One of Them

October 01 2008 22:08 Filed in: Television
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Sorry folks, I’m still not sold on this show making a come back. However, I’m still sticking with it on the outside chance that they can fix some of the plot and character issues and return it somewhat close to what it was in season one. I will at least give credit where credit is due, and episode 3 of the new season, One of Us, One of Them is a vast improvement over last week’s premier as well as what most of season 2 had to offer.
There are still tons of problems.

One of the promising story lines this week was that of Claire (inset photo). Now faced with the reality that she is seemingly immortal and can no longer feel pain. Last week she wanted to accompany her adoptive father Noah out to help hunt down the escaped “villains” from the PrimaTech paper facility under the guise of wanting to use her power to do some good. Noah (aka HRG for the Heroes faithful) firmly refuses and we come to find out that Claire’s motives are really revenged-based.

Going back to the previous week, we had one really good scene with Claire where Sylar opens her skull and begins picking at her brain literally while she remains fuzzily conscious and aware of what’s going on. That was one of the few sufficiently icky and uneasy scenes from the first week. Now Claire wants to go out and take down Sylar, but maybe it was just for the suspect make-up effects of the aforementioned scene.

She turns to her real mother to help teach her how to “fight.” We end up with a nice little scenario with her mother (her power being the ability to generate fire from nothing) locking them into a storage unit and sucking the oxygen from the air teaching Claire that in spite of her immortality that she still has vulnerabilities. This works for me. I’d like to see them take Claire to some darker places.

One huge misstep of the new season though is this completely mundane and meaningless story line with Hiro and Ando hunting down his father’s mysterious formula. Again, we take the two most entertaining characters in the show and isolate them. We don’t even have enough information to make their pieces of the story engaging. I love these characters, but their storyline is becoming cheap, campy and meaningless. I was happy to see that by the end of the episode that they had both been captured and imprisoned by “The Company.” Maybe they can actually get these characters re-engaged with the story.

Meanwhile, back in the African desert we have Matt Parkman wandering around with another “future” painter like Issac Mendez who unceremoniously had his brain “eaten” by Sylar at the end of the season one. Ultimately, I’m not sure what to the think about this whole piece of the puzzle. The tone of Parkman’s scenes is okay, but by the end of the episode we see the startling revelation in one of the clairvoyant paintings that at some point in the future he (foreboding music now) ENDS UP CARRYING A WOMAN IN HIS ARMS! OMFG! NO! This can’t be! How fucking silly is this? The painting without context means nothing and he treats it like a grave development, asking if the future can be changed.
Certainly it can’t be his destiny to end up at some nameless point in the future to actually have to CARRY A WOMAN IN HIS ARMS. Whatever.
Lastly, more mixed feelings on what they are doing with Noah and Saylar. While there were objections, Noah pretty much just accepts the fact that Mrs. Petrelli releases Sylar from his cell to become his partner. I don’t know, the fact that guy is a serial killer who has murdered dozens of people over the past year or so is seemingly somehow “okay” because there are couple of level 5 baddies on the loose that have to be caught. Of course, no surprise, but by the end of the episode Sylar ends up munching on a brain while trying to apprehend the escaped villains. They might be able to play this out and make it work, but it’s tough.

Lastly, I have no idea where they are going with Tracy Strauss (played by Ali Larter). We were unsure last week if she was supposed to actually be Niki Jenkins, who apparently died in the season 2 finale. However, this week we seem to confirm that Niki did indeed die in the explosion since not only did we get to see Tracy viewing the body, but Niki’s son, Micah almost instantly knows that it’s not his mother.
By the end, we seem to be moving toward her being some sort of clone project. Apparently a story line that’s going to get some more play this season.

One last beef for me since last season is this tendency for them to keep introducing new characters with the same or similar powers to those that we have already met. Okay, stands to reason that if these mutations are widespread that multiple people are going to have the same abilities, but as a viewer it really starts to become rather ho-hum. Okay, great, another guy that can fly. Okay fine, another guy that can paint the future…etc. If they’re going to litter the Heroes universe with characters, give us something original. In addition to that, if one of the main issues in season 3 is going to be some mysterious serum that can activate abilities in any normal person, it would help if they would actually introduce a fair amount of characters that don’t have any powers to begin with. As is it stands, Noah Bennett is about the only major character that doesn’t seem to have anything special going on.

I’m happy to see that this week’s episode was at least watchable, but ultimately we’re still stuck with a show that has gone from one of the strongest dramas on TV to becoming a campy, sloppy shadow if its former self.

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