Heroes is without a doubt the worst show I watch right now. I say that as a regular watcher of Smallville, a show that should have been thrown off the air a few years ago. This season started with some promise, but it quickly evapourated; characters returned to their most annoying of ways, plots twisted and turned aimlessly and lifelessly, and the desperation of the writers fouled every frame of the season.

NBC has yet to renew Heroes for the new year, and I hope it doesn’t. Some people are talking about giving the writers one more season to wrap up the show, but not only do I have no faith in the writers to actually accomplish that goal, I also think there’s really nothing left for the characters to do, they’ve spent four seasons repeating the same arcs over and over.

The general ineptitude of the writers makes me think they stumbled upon winning characters four years ago and don’t know how to make those characters grow and so they try to duplicate the characteristics that first made them popular with horrible results.

Heroes is a sickening festering wound on television, one that it beyond repair or recovery and it must be excised before it can do more damage.

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.

I’m not too sore about this, to be honest. Not only is most of my outrage over Kings’ poor ratings died away as it’s become clear that nobody was watching, but this week’s episode made me worry about the show’s direction. Michael Green, who was a writer on Heroes previously, has been heading up Kings and doing an admirable job of it, but as a former writer for Heroes I wonder if he’s picked up some of their bad habits.

Heroes focuses far too heavily on plot, to the detriment of its characters; in fact, at this point they’re all vapid caricatures imbued with so little substance it’s hard to care at all about how the story continues. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening on Kings, merely that it’s a distinct possibility and this week’s episode did seem more focused on plot progression than character development. I sincerely hope that my feelings about this week’s episode don’t carry forward and that the show concludes in a satisfying way. I’m just aware that the show could let me down. At least I have a couple months to cushion the blow.

In one of my first rants against Heroes, I pointed out a glaring flaw in the writing of the show: Angela Petrelli is introduced as a distraught widow stealing socks just to feel alive, and yet this year it was revealed that she had coldly assassinated her husband. It was one of the most scathing and unassailable criticisms of the show I had. Well tonight they retconned the hell out of that. Apparently, she stole (or bought, I really was barely paying attention) socks when she needed to see a small action make a big difference or some bullshit (again, barely paying attention). Well, I call shenanigans.

In general, I’m OK with retcons in comics. Not necessarily when Spider-man #220 retcons Spider-man #108, though and here’s why. The stories are far enough apart to know for certain that it wasn’t a planned reveal. Ten issues apart, I’d accept it. But that far apart, it’s just breaking continuity because you’re lazy. The instances I approve of retcons are when a new story is being told from the beginning. So the origin story of Iron Man in Incredible Iron Man can be different, even drastically so, than the one in Iron Man because they’re two separate instances of that character with new stories being told. To allow yourself to tell new stories and explore new ideas, sometimes the details of a character’s past must be adjusted. But in any other instance, I don’t like retcons.

The worst part about this is that I sympathize with the writers in this instance. Bryan Fuller came back to a plodding mess with a bunch of inconsistent continuity hacked together, and he had to at least attempt to reconcile it all. So he had Matt Parkman find out about his child and according to spoilers I’ve read, he’ll get back together with the wife he left for no reason at all but plot expediency. And now he’s tried to change Angela Petrelli’s origin to have a connection to this event at Coyote Hills. Of course, there’s still no reason for everybody going back.

She said it was crucial to fix their current problems to go to Coyote Hills and face the past. But what did it really accomplish? We got that one salient point out of it. Which, I’m still not sure makes any sense. We didn’t really get much else from the episode. Sure there was a bit of backstory filled in; we learned Charles Deveaux actually had a power, though how it connects to his post-mortem conversation with Peter is still unclear; we got a little bit more of Nathan and Peter’s brotherly bickering; we were also told that Claire is actually really awesome and brave, despite her continued idiocy and short-sightednesss. And when it all came down to it, none of those revelations led to their fractured relationships being healed. At least not in any rational way. Instead, it was Sylar posing as Nathan Petrelli that seemed to push them together and let them forget their troubled past.

What I’m trying to say here is, it didn’t work for me. It all seems hamfisted. Admittedly, it almost has to be hamfisted because of what came before it, but that doesn’t make the experience any less distasteful.

I started watching Kyle XY for a lot reasons. The first reason I had was the music: there’s an ongoing thread in the original scores for Kyle XY that, to this day, reminds me of Explosions in the Sky. And we all know that Explosions in the Sky’s music makes even the most mundane moments seem epic so the early moments of the show were greatly enhanced by the minimalist bombast of the score. I mean, there’s a scene where Kyle eats a freaking muffin in the first episode that makes it seem like he’s climbing Mount Everest.

So the music made me stay for a little while, but the thing that really made me stick around was the novelty and realism with which they handled a character with complete and utter amnesia, though it’s not really amnesia per se. The scene I linked to earlier is Kyle’s first meal. He didn’t know what food was or how to eat before that scene and his discovery of it is handled very well. In a scene shortly after this he pees his pants because he didn’t know what that strange sensation he was having meant. There are lots of little interesting trains of thought brought up through the narration in those early episodes that offer a fantastic look at what it might be like to be born fully grown. This sort of storytelling is already very much in the realm of science fiction, but the show goes beyond that by introducing Kyle’s superhuman abilities and the mystery of where he came from, why he isn’t there anymore, and why he has no bellybutton. And while those sci-fi elements are interesting, the thing that really truly makes me excited to see each new episode is the characters.

When I wrote about Kyle XY getting canceled I mostly brought up its sci-fi aspects, but the real world relationships are why the show is so good. That science fiction is a part of the tapestry of the show is surely a reason I enjoy it, but I get as much pleasure from Kyle using his super genius brain to hack into a mainframe as when he’s super nervous about his first date with Amanda.

Last night’s episode had some of the sci-fi stories to tell, but the real beauty of them was that they were there to facilitate telling stories about the characters. Kyle used his ability to visually explore memories to help Jessi, his female bellybutton-free counterpart, get some closure on the disappearance of her mother. Those scenes also brought some much needed empathy and humanity to Jessi and managed to convert me from a Jessi pseudo-hater into a full-on Jessi/Kyle shipper. And all of that happened in just one of the plots of the episode. In another thread, Josh and Andy, one of the best teenager relationships — one of the best relationships in general to be honest — on television, are forced to deal with their impending separation. And he makes all the stupid mistakes you know you shouldn’t make when you’re desperate not to lose the most important person in your life. Josh began the series as the slacker joker who never takes a moment seriously and if you started watching this show with this episode you would have been amazed at his evolution and growth.

I wish this show was continuing on. Mondays at 9, two shows come on that I watch: Heroes and Kyle XY. I think you all know my stance on Heroes by now, but I haven’t done my due diligence in expressing my love of this sweet little show. Don’t let the fact that it airs on ABC Family dissuade you: this show is worth your time. Enjoy it while it’s still here.

Of course, I wouldn’t title this post “The Death Spiral Continues” if I were extolling the wonders of a show. I merely take the time to discuss Chuck to contrast it with the increasingly dreaful show that follows it Monday nights on NBC. This week’s episode of Heroes continued to disappoint and downright offend as Parkman’s inexplicable prophetic painting continues to repeat a story that was overplayed and poorly executed when they did it the first five times. And when Rebel gives them useful intel, Matt and Peter finally start thinking and they double up on the mind powers to help them get past security. A smart idea and they got a couple good scenes out of it. Of course, why they wouldn’t at least cover the security camera in the room — leaving the others wondering who it could be — is one of many questions that are aroused by the idiotic behaviour in this episode.

Indeed, while in “Building 26″, Matt and Peter get ahold of video surveillance and Matt’s first plan is to leverage that information to get Daphne back. “One life at a time” he says, as though that makes sense. If your plan is to chip away at the problem until it’s been fixed and then suddenly you’re given material capable of destroying the very foundation of the bricks you’re chipping at, a change in stratagem might be in order. And then, when Peter escapes with that information, instead of bringing the information immediately to all the news outlets and uploading it to Youtube and posting to dailykos under the username LoveIsTheAnswer about the abuses of the Executive Branch and how horrifying the rounding up of these superpowered-Americans is for the freedoms of all Americans, he calls up his totally trustworthy brother who’s never betrayed him before and makes a deal to exchange all the incriminating evidence he has for Matt and Daphne. Even Nathan is astounded! It’s the stupidest deal ever. If you release the information to the public, Matt and Daphne would be ultimately freed, along with everyone else they’d illegally imprisoned. That’s what TNC would call “stepping over dollars to snatch up nickels.”

Oh but the stupid is strong with this episode. That’s just one of three equally stupid and repetitive stories. Claire is protecting Aquaman and, while he’s less annoying than West from last year, the story comes across virtually identical. They’re on the run and the guy saves her with his power somehow. Meanwhile, they discover that they’re not alone, that they have someone to share this part of themselves with. It’s just boring and Claire’s ongoing self-assuredness in the face of her obvious inadequacies is exasperating. And Sylar rediscovers his dad. Turns out his dad sold him to his uncle. Who knew?! The scene where Sylar relives that memory was played as though it were new astonishing information when it’s been known for at least a couple episodes now. The closest thing the scene has to a twist is when Sylar’s dad kills Sylar’s mom via some good old fashioned head-slicing telekenesis. Which, much like last week’s reveal of Mohinder’s pseudo-complicity, doesn’t make sense. Sylar obtained his telekinesis through his real power, the ability to understand complex systems intuitively and “fix” them, so to give telekinetic powers to his dad makes negative sense.

I’m feeling more and more angry with Heroes each new episode. I truly want the show to be good. I don’t like abandoning shows, especially not shows with sci-fi and comic book trappings, but Heroes is not entertaining for me anymore. Other shows are much better. Chuck, for example. Watch them instead.

Fuck off, Heroes.

On the TWOP forums, some people will come out proclaiming that a certain episode of Lost was patently obvious and they saw it all coming. Most of the time, I’m astounded by that. “Nobody could’ve seen all the little details that came out during that episode coming!” But the bookends of this Heroes episode were obviously supposed to come as a shock and failed utterly to do so. And the only reason the little details that came out during the episode weren’t obvious was because I was still under the assumption the writers would try to make the characters actions make sense.

Instead we get an utterly pointless “reveal” that Mohinder received oblique references to the Guantanomutant Brigade’s plan via HRG a few weeks before all this happened (which doesn’t even make sense because Suresh got into HRG’s car to try to escape the commandos earlier this season); and Parkman decided to become really stupid, or at least further express his innate stupidity. I admit, I enjoyed the scene last week where Suresh, Parkman, and Peter took HRG away for nefariously good purposes, but when they continued with that story all we got were a couple lame references to torture and Parkman realising that if Daphne is alive he doesn’t need to be a dick. He still barely knows Daphne. And the life that he initially saw of them living in NYC raising Molly isn’t going to happen since Molly seemed to have disappeared at some point during this season. They still haven’t really given a reason for the appeal of that relationship. I think they wanted to imply that they’d become a long-lived relationship earlier this season with the household squabbles they had before the squad of mutant-ready commandos took them away, but we never saw any of the connective moments before that so it feels hollow to me.

And the torture stuff was even worse, because in the real world torture doesn’t even get accurate results. So Heroes attacks the technique of torturing people for information not because it’s useless and doesn’t even get you useful information, but because it hurts people. And obviously the intense staring that Parkman gave HRG is nothing compared to the psychological warfare that took place inside the torture chambers of the Bush administration. So they fail in two ways.

And for some reason they’re trying to redeem Nathan now, but here’s the thing: this volume started off with him giving the information on the heroes to President Worf. If he’d kept his mouth shut, he wouldn’t have needed to rein in the more extreme hardline members of his anti-hero task force. His intentions are bafflingly stupid.

Heroes failed to redeem itself. After last week’s episode, and the Heroes screed I wrote shortly afterward, I was close to quitting Heroes entirely — which is a pretty big deal given how long I’ve been watching Smallville, a show that peaked a long long time ago and was offensively bad for a few years there — and this episode has done nothing to shift me away from that stance. Naturally, I have to stick it out until at least the end of the season — i.e. Bryan Fuller’s return — but unless the show improves drastically in those last few episodes don’t expect me to still be watching when season four rolls around.

Most recently the hate has been pushed onto Hiro, and here’s why. The show sucks. It has nothing to do with Hiro, or his current journey. At least not in particular. What’s wrong with Hiro, is what’s wrong with Heroes.

Abuse of Awesomeness

During season one, one of the recurring characters was played by Richard Roundtree. AKA Motherfucking Shaft. So obviously he was playing a badass with awesome powers. Wait, what?

Shit. Well, he’s in a coma but he can wake up and reveal his awesome superpowers and kick all sorts of ass. Wait, what?

Fuck. Well, he’s dead — and it appears the only thing his death accomplished was to get Peter laid — but Hiro is all about the time travel, so Shaft can still show up in the past and be even more awesome because we didn’t see it coming!! Wait, what?

Oh, come on! You bring the guy back so that he can tell Peter that Love Is The Answer?! And what was his power anyways? Talking to the future? That’s a retarded power, and I don’t even think it was him doing it so it’s especially crappy.

And then, following their atrocious treatment of Shaft — not to mention the purposeless character Charles Deveaux’s very existence — they pump up the awesomeness by casting Bruce Boxleitner for a recurring role during season three. Except that he’s in two fucking scenes in total and they were pretty close to useless in the long run. My point is they’ve got a huge problem with follow-through. And not just with their stunt casting. Everybody remembers that most unheinous moment early on in season one of Heroes where time stops for Peter Petrelli and Ninja Hiro From The Future shows up to deliver him a message.

Future Hiro was fucking sweet! He spoke English without the accent; he carried around a katana; and the slimming lines on that leather trench coat really worked for him. He came from five years in the future but now three years later — possibly four given the sporadic time jumps the show does — he’s still a dweeb who talks in broken English and wears the office clothes for the job he hasn’t been to in years at this point. When Lost showed Jack depressed, addicted, and bearded up three years in the future, they followed the fuck through.

Discontinuity

Retcons are a staple of the comic-book world from which Heroes steals its ideas draws inspiration, but in the comic world, retcons typically come about because of universe altering events or because the story is being reimagined for a new generation. But changing the dynamics of the foundations of your characters doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In the series premiere, Angela Petrelli is arrested for shoplifting socks because she “wants to feel alive.” Presumably because the six months she’s lived without the love of her life, Arthur Petrelli, have left her feeling alone and empty; without her better half. No wait, she poisoned him and was planning on killing him even further just to make sure he was dead before her son walked in mid-homicide. It’s these emotional discontinuities that really kill Heroes.

Does Peter ever think about Simone Deveaux? Or the Irish chick he erased from existence? Does Hiro think about Charlie? Do any of these characters think about the consequences of their actions, or the pains in their past? I don’t see any of that in the performances or in the writing.

The characters perform as the plot requires. Their emotions exist to serve the plot. Their powers shift to drive the plot. Everything about the show is hollow and meaningless. You can change the pronouns of the last four sentences to refer to Hiro and the statements would stand, but the show, and how it treats its characters is the real problem.

The lines they chose for that commercial were cliched, hackneyed, and emotionless. And I do mean emotionless. I was amazed at the utter lack of conviction from the characters speaking. I was convinced that no matter what I had heard of this new show ‘Medium’ these commercials had to be a joke. Either a parody making fun of the show or the show itself was an elabourate hoax design to get a few laughs from the horrible commercials.

So since then, Medium has managed to become a reliable not-quite-hit-but-still-fairly-popular-in-the-ratings show for NBC, a network with little to no real successes in the last five years. I’m not quite sure why, but there it is, chugging along.

Anyways, recently I noticed some of the writers on Aint It Cool News offering support for Medium, not the kind of support they would give for something like Battlestar Galactica or Lost, but support nonetheless. Tonight since I was watching President Obama’s Press Conference and then Heroes after that, and Medium was coming on after Heroes and this episode of Medium had Sam Trammell (from True Blood) guest starring I figured I’d watch a bit of the show. See what I was missing.

Not. Freaking. Much.

Let me lay out the opening scene for you. A guy and a girl are having network TV sex, that is they’re fully clothed but they’re moaning suggestively, and the guy decided he wants to choke a bitch. She indicates numerous times that he should let up on the choking, because as awesome as oxygen-deprived orgasms are they’re only awesome when you’re not dead. And I should reiterate that this was not awesome cable TV sex where it’s rough and wild. This was slow-thrusting, gentle-and-intimate network TV sex. And yet in the “throes of passion,” he managed to not hear her numerous calls for help until she was dead and he had come.

When he was done, he shook her a little telling her that the game was over, except in a broken phrasing that seemed like it would’ve come from a five year old, and then realized that (gasp!) she was dead. What an unfortunate accident! Oh well, time to dispose of the corpse…

So he drags her off to the nearby ditch and tosses her in. Well, what man hasn’t accidentally killed his date during erotic asphyxiation? He heads back to his car but then — Hark! — he hears her breathing in the ditch. She’s alive! Oh this unfortunate accident will no longer haunt him! Years later, they’ll regale their family with the hilarious-in-hindsight anecdote. Oh wait, no. He picks up a rock and finishes her off… WTF?!?!

That was just the opening scene. I was already amazed at how stupid this show was but it had so much more stupid to offer.

Here’s the thing about procedurals. They all have a basic schema. The crime/medical mystery/whatever occurs in the teaser, and then through intelligence, investigation, and ingenuity the mystery is solved and the story is wrapped up in 44 minutes or so. What Medium does is slightly different¹. The main character, Allison Dubois, get psychic visions of crimes while she sleeps and she can also talk to ghosts that are just hanging around waiting for their murders to be solved or whatever it is that ghosts do. So on Medium, she sees the crime — who did it, who died, where it happened — at the very beginning of the episode. What happens after that has nothing to do with the solving of a murder. She doesn’t have any particular investigative genius, she just gets the answers delivered to her without any effort. (Also, what little I saw of her family’s really stupid B-storyline was really stupid. I hardly paid attention to it because it was really fucking stupid so I’m not going to put any more words to it.)

So, I gave it a shot. I watched almost a full episode. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But it was still much much worse than anything else I watch. It sucked then. It sucks now. Avoid it if you can.

Footnotes

1. I am, admittedly, basing this off of a single episode but if any episode is this terribly plotted then they fucking deserve it.

Sylar

That was the most anticlimactic battle ever. They’ve shown Peter get progressively more in control of his powers over the season and employing the various powers he’s retrieved and then when the final battle against “The Face of Evil” comes around he completely pusses out. He had to be saved by two doofi who took a full season to gain any semblance of control over their power. In general, I haven’t enjoyed Sylar as an enemy for half a season and the fact that he survived pisses me off to no end.

Peter

When he was nuking out in the final scene, couldn’t he have flown away? He really had to be flown away by his brother? The only reason they didn’t have him just fly away was because they’ve shown his brother being an evil villainous douche for the last half dozen episodes and they couldn’t allow him to survive without making up for it and the only way to make up for his nefariousness was self-sacrifice. Plus, they’ve already shown Peter nuking out a couple times and getting it under control. What exactly was so different about that situation besides plot expediency? Plus shouldn’t the nuclear explosion above the city have EMPed the city?

Hiro

Why was his Dad admonishing him for going after Ando when he should have been stopping Sylar? Going after Ando was going after Sylar. Why are they counter to each other? That really pissed me off. Also, when Hiro first vanished Sylar simply didn’t have the time to slice Ando’s head off? It’s not like his saving Ando was instantaneous.

The Eclipse

I thought it was cool that they had the eclipse show up at the beginning of “Volume 2″ to parallel the pilot but it’s little more than that: a superficial little thing that seemingly bookends the season with forethought but, in my opinion, is a little throw-on they thought would be cool but had no real meaning. It’s possible the second season will show that eclipses have some significance to the rising of Heroes but I doubt it since Tim Kring said in some early interviews that they weren’t really going to discuss how people got powers.

I’m pretty sure there were other things but that’s enough to make my point that, while the show is fun and entertaining, it’s not without its faults.