Heroes

I gave this sci-fi series 3 chan­ces, I star­ted watching it back in Novem­ber, after three epi­so­des I deci­ded it wasn’t worth my time. Then it star­ted airing on BBC 2 this sum­mer, I watched a few more epi­so­des, mis­sed some and promptly stop­ped. Last week I deci­ded to give it one more try and promptly watched the entire series in three days, with epi­so­des 17 (Com­pany Man) and 20 (Five Years Gone, video above) being my favou­ri­tes. Watching it all at once made everything flow much bet­ter and I remem­be­red all the plot arcs. The story, although star­ting very slowly, does get much much bet­ter with a high qua­lity of story telling, ridd­led with twists and turns (albeit many being pre­dic­ta­ble, on most occa­sions I would guess the twist 5 or 10 minu­tes beforehand). 

(Spoi­lers below)

When a major disas­ter is meant to hap­pen whether in a film or TV show, you can usually be sure that it wont, with someone saving the day. Heroes puts up a very nice illu­sion that sug­gests the disas­ter will hap­pen, brea­king down the secu­rity that it wont; it mana­ges to keep you gues­sing until the end. Sadly though, the final epi­sode is quite a bit of a let down, the Sylar battle being slow, Peter for­get­ting he him­self can fly, little to no team­work, and lots of other quirks and gim­micks that in the end don’t live up to the pre­dic­ted end of sea­son show­down at Kirby place. It lea­ves me wishing the bomb did go off, it would have pro­ved the show had some balls; to daringly ques­tion the real role of a Hero. 

Ins­tead it didn’t, con­dem­ning itself to the realms of pre­dic­tive story­te­lling. My only hope now is that by dif­fu­sing the bomb, the New York situa­tion beco­mes inad­ver­tently worse than it would have been — perhaps through Sylar’s uni­ma­gi­na­tive survival.

To conc­lude, Heroes even­tually invi­go­ra­ted me enough to watch the entire sea­son, gra­dually buil­ding up my hopes as it deve­lo­ped, howe­ver catas­trophi­cally des­tro­ying the majo­rity of my posi­tive per­cep­tions through the final episode’s blow by blow. Let’s hope sea­son 2 doesn’t go wrong where this one did.