Eulogizing Heroes

“I come to bury Heroes, not to praise it. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

With the news that Heroes has been canceled, its auspicious start in 2006 seems so far away. I got into the NBC television drama Heroes on the ground floor, starting the series on the third episode of the first season. I dove into its quirky superhero world head-first, as it was a world filled with plausible people – Nathan the politician reluctant to use his powers, Matt the insecure policeman, Hiro the hopeful comic book geek, Isaac the artist battling heroin addiction – and cool, unanswered questions. Who is the mysterious man with the horn-rimmed glasses, and what is the mysterious company he works for? Where do their powers come from? Who is Sylar, and why is he killing people with powers?

Once upon a time, this man was the breakout star of the show.

Was the first season slow at times? Yes. Occasionally clunky? Yes. Was “Save the cheerleader, save the world” an eye-rollingly silly slogan? Oh heavens, yes. Was the first season finale not all it could be? Well, yes. But it was still a fun ride, filled with fun characters, and while it would never reach the storytelling peaks of its dramatic betters, it was good fun.

Where did the show go wrong? How did Heroes go from must-see TV for me to an afterthought? Though it became a show I enjoyed mocking more than watching on its own merit, I feel sad now that it’s been canceled, because it had great potential and brought me hours of enjoyment, but squandered it after it lost sight of why it was good in the first place. I’m disappointed, but I’m sad because something I liked became terrible.

For me, the reason I watch a drama – any drama – is because it’s got heart. You can show me action, pulse-pounding standoffs, you can yell at me as much as you want “You should pay attention to this scene, it’s important,” but if I don’t care about any of the characters there, I don’t see a reason to watch. I will fully admit I am not the typical TV viewer – I always wear my English Degree hat when I watch TV – but for me, action without meaning is hollow, especially when the purpose of a show is to be dramatic. The point of drama is to make me care. To quote the film Idiocracy, “People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting.”

Hey, I liked Ted Sprague.

In the first season of Heroes, it did a good job of making you care. Like I said, this show was no “Sopranos,” but the characters clearly had lives and day jobs and friends and family outside of the plot. Nathan had a wife and kids, in addition to his brother Peter and mother Angela. Claire the cheerleader had friends at school, as well as her family. Peter and Isaac both had their on-again, off-again relationship with Simone. These characters were not tabula rasas, and the “big important quest” was the exception, not the rule (that being Hiro, who’d gone to the future and seen the nuclear blast that was going to level the city). Moreover, they had things going on in their lives besides having powers. Matt was worried his wife was cheating on him, and he was struggling with dyslexia. Niki was in trouble with a crime boss because she was trying to keep her gifted son Micah going to the best schools. Mohinder was looking for the man who killed his father.

Moreover, the show had a wide range of characters, and people were vulnerable. Most of the secondary characters were interesting in their own right. Ted Sprague, the nuclear man, was tortured by the fact that he’d killed his wife. Linderman was a cold, hard crime boss, but also oddly affectionate. Claude brought a sly sense of humor to having powers. Even long-forgotten first-season characters (Aubrey Hanson, Janice Parkman, Bennet’s boss Thompson) didn’t get the short end of the stick. The first season also had a large body count of major characters when all was said and done (Isaac, Simone, Eden, Ted Sprague, Thompson, Linderman), and there was the feeling that anyone could die, because they had no problem killing off interesting characters. Heck, this was one of the things Tim Kring promised us in the first season: constant turnover.

The show lost track of itself in the second season, when it became more concerned with big, complex plots and adding more population to the super-powered world than making the viewer care about why these things were happening. So Takiro Kensei is really Adam Monroe, and he hates Hiro, and he’s going to destroy the world with a plague created from the cells of Mohinder’s sister, who died in childhood? Meanwhile, Sylar is powerless (for reasons never actually explained) and gaining the confidence of two Dominican runaways because… why, exactly? While the second season did introduce some interesting characters… eventually… (such as Elle, Adam Monroe, and Maury Parkman) it spent way too much time putzing around. Claire’s dating some guy, Peter has amnesia and is running around Ireland, and we’re all supposed to be worried about who’s got what version of this plague? The second season was a boring mess because it was more concerned with extrapolating from the first than trying to tell its own interesting story.

He does it ALL to PROTECT his DAUGHTER.

This leads me into a critique of the show in general: The show’s greatest episodes are the ones where it pares down the subplots and only focuses on a few characters. “Company Man” is the first-season standout for a good reason — it’s narrowly focused (the only main characters are HRG, Claire, Ted Sprague, and Matt), it tells an interesting story, and the plot moves forward by leaps and bounds. Ditto Season 2′s “Cautionary Tales” and Season 3′s “Cold Snap.” When the show focused on telling a story, not keeping all of its juggling balls in the air, it was really something worth watching. But too many of the episodes are about moving every single one of the subplots forward by inches. The weakness of an ensemble show is when all parts are spread thin.

If you thought the second season was uninteresting, like me, you might’ve forgiven it because of the Writer’s Guild strike. Surely it might’ve been better if they’d had time to do a full season, but at least (as they said) they’re taking the lessons of Season 2 to heart and Season 3 will be a return to form. You might’ve even been excited about the prospect of “Level 5,” the prison holding 12 terrifyingly powerful criminal. Hooray, a return to form! Good guys and bad guys! Action!

Instead, Season 3 took everything that was wrong with the show and magnified it 100%.

Did you like the characters in previous seasons? Well, now they’re all unlikable, one-dimensional, and shallowly morally ambiguous to play up that “Villains” theme.
Did you like the first season episode “Five Years Gone,” where the show jumps five years into the future to see what a mess the world has become and how the characters have all grown? Go ahead and watch “I Am Become Death,” another jump into the future where nothing in the future seems even remotely related to the current characters.
You can run, but you can't hide from Matt Parkman's love.

Conversely, did you like it when the show went into the past to peer closer into their origins, like in “Six Months Ago”? Then prepare to roll your eyes at “Villains,” a flashback episode that labored to make Sylar “not bad, just misunderstood” and spent a third of its running time showing that third-tier characters Meredith and Flint were related – only for them to never interact on the show outside of that episode.
Do you like Sylar, do you think he’s a badass? Here’s 12 guys who are supposed to be just as tough as Sylar, even though their powers are stupid and they’re picked off pretty easily. Heck, we’ll even make Sylar think he’s Peter and Nathan’s brother so he can be all morally conflicted in a way that doesn’t ring true.
Do you like HRG, do you dig his moral ambiguity? Now he’s a one-dimensional character whose only trait is being morally grey.
Did you like how the characters were fleshed out in Season 1 and seemed to have lives of their own beyond the plot? Too bad, now they’re just caricatures of themselves.
Did you like the big bad guys in previous seasons? Here’s Arthur Petrelli, a villain with pretty much godlike power who doesn’t do anything but sit around and talk about the plot and with no motivation but “be evil.”
Did you like the gimmicky future stuff in Season 1, like “Save the cheerleader, save the world”? Now there’s “the formula” and “the catalyst” which will all have some indeterminate dire consequences in the future, even if it doesn’t make any sense.
Do you like dramatic twists that affect the characters on a deep level? Too bad, they can’t plan any further ahead than 3 episodes. In Season 3, Peter was trapped in a villain’s body, then gained Sylar’s powers and became a murderous psycho, then lost his powers, then got them back only to fight with his brother. No consistency, no reason to believe that any change would be permanent.
Perhaps the new characters are interesting, at least? Well, there’s Daphne, who’s super-fast, and Matt Parkman is in love with her because… ummm… because he saw a future where they were married? (Tell me how THAT didn’t lead to pepper spray.) And Knox, who Gains Strength From Your Fear, and may as well have been contractually obligated to state what his power does in every line.
How about some of the interesting secondary characters, like from Season 2? Nope, not happening. Adam Monroe? Arthur Petrelli kills him. Maury Parkman? Arthur Petrelli kills him. Elle? Sylar sleeps with her, then kills her. Monica? Written off the show.
Surely there’s some unanswered questions, some mystery to keep the viewer watching every week, right? Well… there’s the eclipse again, which takes away all their powers for some reason. And let’s not forget… how DID Peter survive that fall?

Look, I could go on about this all day. Season 3 is a huge statement of “how not to keep viewers interested and how to bastardize everything you’ve done before.” It was about this time that it occurred to me that I should really stop watching the show, but I did stick around for Volume 4. What can I say, I’m a Star Wars fan, so I’m a pretty forgiving guy.

Sweet catharsis.

Volume 4 had some good ideas but ultimately fell apart from bad execution. The volume begins strong, with the heroes all being rounded up and captured by Nathan (probably the most interesting character on the show, the way I keep singing his praises) and the U.S. government, then being shipped off Guantanamo-style. Call it cathartic after the last season. Then the plane goes down, the heroes escape, and the whole volume all goes down the tubes. The heroes are alternately captured and rescued again, they get aid from a mysterious ally called “REBEL” (who turns out to be Micah, in one of the good reveals of the season), while Nathan fights with his allies (HRG and an unstable guy named Danko, who hates all superpowered people everywhere for some unspecified reason) and Sylar goes on a roadtrip with a random teenager to find his father because… well, just because, okay? By the end, I was ready to start a drinking game for every time a character points a gun at another character when you know they won’t shoot.

This image makes no sense to me.

I won’t say this volume was completely bad, because it did inject some drama into the series for a little bit, and it did tone down Hiro and Peter, who the writers were going out of their way to keep from using their godlike powers. But ultimately it’s a muddle, with the finale involving Sylar wanting to become the president and Angela revealing “dark secrets” that had no bearing on anything at all except adding even more irrelevant backstory. And it was enough to get me to stop watching the show, so I have no comment on Volume 5 and its super-powered carnival, because I have no interest in it.

I feel sorry for Heroes, because it’s a show that tapped into mainstream nerdiness at the right time and had a real flair for its characters and its setting, but quickly ran out of ideas and set about spinning its wheels hoping to regain the magic. Ultimately, it was a waste, and while I do miss the show in its early incarnation, I know the creators squandered their potential and earned every bit of vitriol they got. Good riddance, Heroes.

Further reading (which confirms that the show was written by committee, that the writers had no master plan and no intention of ever killing off the main characters after Season 1, and that they changed characters just for the heck of it)