I’ve been known to complain about Heroes’ lack of consistency, lazy storytelling, poor use of quality character actors, and all-around suckery, but I’m more than willing to admit that this new season isn’t terrible.

Some of the storylines are terrible, of course. Hiro and his kin continue to squander in the arrested development of the comedic subplot limited by the writers’ inability and/or unwillingness to grow them beyond mere punchlines. Tracy continues to be a complete waste of a character and of airtime. The only saving grace of Claire’s storyline is the inevitable lesbianic adventures. Nathan Petrelli still sucks as much as ever. HRG continues to… do whatever it is he does when he’s not on screen, because he does nothing of consequence when he’s visible.

I know what you’re thinking. There aren’t really any characters left. Well, you’re either thinking that or you’re thinking the only remaining substantial characters are Matt Parkman and Peter Petrelli, both of whom are shitty shitty characters. Well you’re mostly right.

Matt Parkman is in many ways the epitome of Heroes. He is the barometer for the rest of the show. He started off as one of the most appealing characters, but has degraded apace with the show. He’s easily the most disappointing character right now. And I’m certainly not saying he’s a good character, but he’s no longer a bad character; there are moments now when Parkman is almost a realistic character.

And Peter Petrelli, though I’ve found his story for the past two seasons to be terrible, had a pretty good first season. In fact, rethinking the ending of the first season, it makes sense that Peter’s emotional empathy, not his supernatural empathy, would be the final factor in who would win between him and Sylar. Of course, that’s a minor adjustment, because the tone of the build-up of the season was counter to that, and in the end it wasn’t Peter’s empathy that beat Sylar but his punch. So, really, all my complaints about season one of Heroes remain valid, but in retrospect I think I was overly hard on the emotional empathy angle the writers attempted for unrelated reasons.

So while Peter has been middling at best as of late, he was pretty good this most recent episode. Unlike Parkman’s idiotic aversion to his powers, he’s using his to actually help people. Almost as if he were a hero or something. And the plot this week with him being sued for his overzealous rescuing of people in danger was a great shout out to the comic world and the reason superheroes maintain a secret identity: so they can’t get sued.

And finally, the reason I decided to write this post in the first place, the influx of new characters managed to work this time. The carnival folk, led by Robert Knepper, are interesting in a way no villain has since early-first season Sylar, and what’s more they manage to make these characters interesting and mysterious without the crutch of anonymity. I attribute much of this to Robert Knepper, who as far as I can tell can do no wrong.

In addition, the deaf woman introduced in this episode reminded me of early Heroes, when the characters first experienced their powers. Seeing sound isn’t a particularly awesome power, but the moments we spent with that character were interesting to me. It makes we wonder how much better the show might have been at this point had the writers stuck with their initial plan to rotate out the cast every season, introducing new characters, new conflicts while retaining the same basic structure.

All that said, Heroes is still not a very good show. The last couple episodes were more watchable than last year but the show remains subpar with miles of room for improvement. But, at this point, if you’re like me and still watching Heroes despite the slow crawl towards increasing inadequacy and certainty of cancellation, me telling you the show has improved marginally isn’t really shifting your view. And anybody who gave up watching long ago shouldn’t take this post as an endorsement that you pick up the habit again. It’s not. I just thought I should acknowledge that it improved, if only for a little while, if only by a little bit.