Heroes: Season Two Was Awful, What Do We Do Now?

Anyone going to argue that “Volume II” was horrendous? Anyone? Anyone? Didn’t think so. So many things were so bad, its like I don’t know where to start, or even if I should. Ok, I will.

The first thing that has to be said; waste of new talent! David Anders and Kristen Bell, two of the fraking best actors to grace the small screen and they were totally ridiculous. I was so happy to see David Anders as not a bad guy (I loved, loved, loved Sark, but I can watch Alias reruns for that), but it was like they had to make him a bad guy, like they couldn’t help themselves. They wanted to keep Hiro morally pure and Adam as the villain, but Hiro acted like a p.o.s and the whole locking the villain in a coffin thing was a total copout. Can you tell I’m angry? And then there is my Veronica. I still can’t really process that Veronica Mars was cancelled, and so I greatly anticipated Miss Bell’s arrival on Heroes. Aside from her amazing kiss with Peter, Elle was boring. (And that kiss showed just how boring the little bar hussy was.) There is enough Daddy-issue wining going on with Claire and HRG, so I couldn’t care less about what Bob did to Elle. They had a chance to have an amazing female character and instead they decided to have a crazy Claire.

Opposed to new characters that could have been great, there are the completely useless new characters. There was no reason for Maya and Alejandro, DL’s extended family, the Irish, and Bob. All these storylines were repetitive. What was the point of diverting attention from characters we actually know and love for the half-baked and redundant? Peter should be having a genuine crisis of conscience being locked up and befriending Adam, but Caitlin is the most important person in the human race?!? Matt’s dad takes Molly hostage, but he’s not really the dangerous one? There is no difference between reincarnation and regeneration? Killer eye sludge? Montreal?

This doesn’t scratch the surface of my displeasure. The logical loop created by Hiro’s Japanese vacation is so annoying it makes me see red. The complete disregard of the moral and philosophical issues that made “Volume I” interesting just makes me sad.

The real question for all of us viewers is; what do we do now? When the next volume starts, most likely in the fall, is there real hope that Heroes can pull itself together and be the show we all fell in love with. I think we can only answer this question if we know what we loved in the first place. For me, and I think for most people, it was the complicated relationships between the characters; Nathan and Peter, Matt and his wife, Hiro and Ando. The strengths and weakness of these interactions made Heroes more than an action show. For me, if Nathan is really dead then I will stop watching. I am not a fan of keeping characters that are useless, but Nathan’s moral ambivalence in tension with Peter’s empathy drove the show. If Nathan is really dead (but with the Claire’s blood thing, no one is really dead, AHHH!) then Heroes will have betrayed its premise of being a character based show, and when shows betray the audience, the audience should repay in kind.

The TV Girl