January 16 2007
TV Review: Heroes
posted by Steven Shaw at 11:37 am
Heroes
With a large ensemble cast and strange goings-on, it’s plain to see that the NBC drama Heroes (9.30pm Mondays, TV3) is picking up the baton dropped by Lost, which may have already jumped the shark. Speaking of sharks, those characters are still circling the island, unaware that they’re actually being watched by a team of scriptwriters, who are currently trying to figure out how to resolve the storylines.
Like Marvel’s X-Men comic, the Heroes premise is that some people are discovering they have special powers. There’s Hiro, a Japanese man-boy who can bend the space-time continuum “like in Star Trek”; a young man discovers that just like his big brother, he can fly; and a pudgy beat-cop can hear people’s thoughts. There’s also Niki, a web-cam stripper/solo mum who has an evil bizarro-twin capable of murder, which is probably more of an affliction than a special power. Evil Bizarro-Twin seems to reside in the reflected world of mirrors; it’s not clear whether she’s there all the time or just arrives every 28 days or so.
Claire: Accident-prone, but that’s okay
The most heroic act so far was from the cheerleader, Claire, who has been trying all afternoon to commit suicide. She can’t do it, her body won’t let her; so she walks through flames to save a life. Emerging, like, totally unscathed.
Claire’s adoptive father is a bit too squeaky clean and sinister, covert even. Either Pops is a red herring or he’s not the right chap to reveal your secret to. He’s pursuing Mohinder Suresh, a lecturer whose father was researching genetics and human evolution and is now missing presumed dead.
Like in Lost, the core characters’ lives are initially quite separate, although they do brush past each other. We hear phone messages from the other characters or they appear in a front page newspaper story.
That the characters bump into each other is more happenstance rather than the pattern-suggesting synchronicity of Lost. Unlike Lost, they’re not yet in this love together. They have no unified mission, although hints are appearing. Isaac the visionary pop-artist junkie paints visions of a future cataclysm and the cops are investigating a series of grisly murders. Brains have been scooped out of some victims, just like Ray Liotta in Hannibal.
Is Claire’s dad some kind of Magneto type? Maybe he’s just working for the CIA, and looking for the mysterious Sylar, who murdered that woman halfway up the stairs. He certainly has the right spectacles for the job.
So this is what we’re picking: the special ones, the ones with new-found powers, will be feared and misunderstood. They will be harassed by an evil mutant. They will be hounded by the authorities, possibly framed for the work of the bad guys. Evil twin/PMS-Girl will join forces with the baddest guy, returning for a Good Kirk/Evil Kirk showdown with her better half. The pop-artist junkie will keep doing drugs and rally the mutie-troops to avert New York being decimated by a large explosion.
In the meantime, we’ll have to ponder what new super-hero names these misfits would attract, were they to don a leotard, cape or cowl. Mind-Cop? Personal Injury-Girl? Emo-FlyBoy? Can’t wait to see more.
[UPDATE: Heroes Season 2 Confirmed]
January 16th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I like the idea of names. I don’t know about claire’s one – personal injury girl. lol but flyboy sounds tight for peter or nathan. im not sure which one flys, i thought it was peter, but didn’t we see nathan fly too. or else they both fly and have the same power. but then we just saw peter draw the future from the hospital, so can peter draw the future and fly too? still unsure, because i thought issac could draw the future. unless peter can do both their powers, wouldn’t that make him like a mimic? hard to say, we’ll have to wait for the next episode.
January 17th, 2007 at 9:07 am
I don’t really get the whole evil twin thing. Isn’t she just suffering from mulitple-personality disorder? And perhaps hallucinations – or maybe the director just totally loved that whole Gollum vs Smeagol thing.
January 18th, 2007 at 10:15 am
yeh i’ll say. has she got like a multiple personality or something? its something to do with the mirror anyway.
January 19th, 2007 at 7:12 am
I quite like that somewhere in the world, the geeks (comic book division) truly have inherited the earth, but at this point Heroes has hit all the superhero chliches a little too on the nose. Invulnerability as a metaphor for existential teen angst, super-sibling rivalry, unhappy families, the lawman whose abilities see him suspected of a horrible crime, the eerily smart kid, the woman with a nasty hidden personality, dark conspiracies, the naive but noble man-child who’s cruising for a crisis of faith, and some unspeakable fate that’s rushing up to hit everyone like a Mack truck.
Which is enormous fun, don’t get me wrong, but the challenge is going to be is how do put a spin on the formulas once the novelty value and hype has worn off. And to be fair it’s nowhere near as pretentious as the X-Men films or the dreadful Superman Returns, though I’d be very happy if they could stop giving the Professor Xavier stand-in those incredibly pompous voice-overs.
January 19th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
yeh there’s a good chance of that happening. but i doubt it’ll happen in the first season, or the 2nd one for that matter. the hype could fade out possibly in the 3rd (if they make a 3rd). but that’s way too early in the season to speculate. especially when the first season hasn’t eneded yet ranapia. you’re jumpin the gun i think. just enjoy the show while you can LOL