I was pretty excited by the Heroes Season 3 premiere and have been watching the show progress over the last few episodes. Saying that the pace has sped up compared to last season would be a wild understatement - things are happening at a rapid-fire pace.
But is it all light and no heat?
(BTW, there will be spoilers below.)
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There have been so many revelations so far this season that it’ll make your head spin - it certainly keeps the “woah factor” up there (as in “woah, can you believe [insert crazy connection/item] just happened?!?!”), but has the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction?
Last season the story moved very slowly, and due to the writers’ strike cutting the season short this ended up being a bad thing. Fans complained, the producers listened, and this season the opener was jam-packed with action and plot elements unfolding.
Since then, we’ve met yet more super-powered characters (despite creator Tim Kring stating there would be no new characters this season) including a female version of The Flash, a guy who gains super-strength from people’s fear, Nikki’s (Ali Larter) twin who has a freeze power. And of course we have Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy) turning into the TV version of David Cronenberg’s The Fly.
We also have two versions of Peter (well, we’re back down to one), Sylar (ok, Gabriel) partnered with HRG as well as discovering our skull-slicing pal is the brother of Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) and Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar). Then we have future Claire “saving me didn’t save the world” Bennet (Hayden Panettiere) all decked out in black leather and acting like a bad-ass assassin. Oh, and now Peter has Sylar’s power and slices skulls, too!
I’m actually not clear on what exact power Peter needed from Sylar since he (Peter) absorbs the super power of others just by being nearby.
Then there’s our friendly police officer Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg) out in the African desert on a walkabout running into yet another guy who can paint the future. Of course Hiro and Ando are still flailing about like a couple of Keystone Cops.
Geez, have I missed anything? Oh, yeah - another nuclear explosion, this time in Costa Verde, California. And everyone in the future that can afford it has super-powers.
And this is in just 4 episodes so far this season.
So my question to you is this: Is Heroes just throwing everything it can into the mix in the hope it will engage viewers, or does this seem coherent and like it’s actually moving towards a destination to you?
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172 Comments
Then you shouldn’t have checked “Screen Rant” BEFORE watching the episode. I learned that lesson a long time ago.
@Angry Anon
Um, I’m sorry, but this post is FIVE MONTHS OLD. How could it have possibly have spoiled anything for you?
When we write something up about a TV series, generally we talk about what has happened up until that point.
Vic
Season 1 was a good season, season two wasn’t bad.. but last night i just started watching season 3 and it seems completely different, as if there is a different director also. It seems like they took a wrong turn with the story writing. It had a lot of potential and now everything just seems so corny. One of my biggest disappointments in season 3 is Dr. Syresh. Why does he take up having powers? That was when I decided that “heroes” is going a little too far.
My girl and I just started watching the series a few weeks ago. We really dug into it, although I was very hesitant after all the hate season 2 received. Season 1 had great character development, with fairly realistic people. It did what I expected the show to do, what it was intended; it presented normal people dealing with powers.
Peter is a genuinely nice guy and a dreamer who feels compelled to do something about the enigmatic signs of a terrible future set before him. An idealistic, child-like Hiro wants to go off and be a hero and save the day from a disaster he is confronted with before it happens. Niki is thrown into a stressful spiral, dealing with a second personality that is capable of harnessing her superhuman strength, a personality borne from a mental disorder caused by traumatic abuse as a child (a realistic and common mental response to abuse, I might add). Parkman struggles with a waning marriage while slowly learning of his own gift, one that might lead him to make a real difference when compared to his everyday police-work. Nathan is struggling with a brother who is excited about their powers and his own life, which has no place for flying and heroics. Mohinder carries on his father’s work, exploring the possibilities of these amazing powers people may have, all the while wondering if he’s just chasing a dream that’s not even his. Sylar, a sociopath with a desire to be more than average, goes on a murderous streak, using his innate ability to take the powers of others like him, following his twisted belief in evolution; that he and the other posthumans must be strong to survive, strong to even deserve their gifts.
Then we moved on to season 2. I braced myself for bad, but was pleasantly surprised. Rather than trying to keep up the adrenaline they had tried to pump at the ending of the first, they explored the characters more, and I enjoyed that a lot. The show was never about the powers and heroics; it was a slow-paced show about realistic characters dealing with those plot elements. I noticed people saying that the climactic showdown at the end of season 1 wasn’t action-packed enough. Ever watching a great movie where the climactic showdown had NO action whatsoever, and was instead more about the tense situation? Probably, considering there are a lot of great movies like that. If you were looking for fast-paced action, why did you watch a slow-paced drama through over twenty episodes? Go read a comic, or watch and action movie if that’s what your after. This show is just about the characters. The powers and heroics are a bonus for people who like that kind of thing, which I do.
And then I saw the first episode of season 3. Now, the build up at the end of season 2, the revelation of who shot Nathan at the press conference… I was taken aback. In a good way. Interesting twist, I thought. Let’s see where this goes. However, seeing the episode that went with it… I wanted to stop watching right there. A lot of what has happened has been spoiled for me, of course, having read every comment on here, but I didn’t even care about spoilers after the catastrophe that was that first episode (this is purely my opinion, of course). Drop Parkman off in the desert? Completely destroy Suresh’s character with the power-injection ordeal? Almost every other scene (with the exception of Sylar and Claire, which I did enjoy) wasn’t on long enough for the characters to… well, to have character. Stuff just kept happening, and a lot of it made little-to-no sense. At the beginning of the series, not understanding almost everything going on is a no-brainer; you haven’t seen any of the show yet. However, to throw a bunch of random, unforeshadowed craziness into an ongoing series is NOT the way to keep current viewership.
I understand why many people enjoyed it. It was fast-paced, with lot’s of stuff happening all over the place. However, that’s why it failed me. And I agree with everyone who says that the “stop a terrible future” plot device is tired, but it’s hard to avoid with Hiro as a driving character.
Here’s a twist; how about Hiro sees a good, glorious utopia of a future? It maintains the time-travel plot concept without rehashing too much. The race would be on to not screw up a good thing. He’d have to make sure he didn’t mess up what could be a wonderful future… and maybe another time traveller (hell, even evil future Peter) wants it to be different, like the current set-up. Yes, more time-travel nonsense, but it would be DIFFERENT time-travel nonsense… and if we were really so bothered by the time-travelling plots, would we have watched the show this long?
Episode 1 of season 3 may have just killed the series for me. I plan to watch more, as I still hold onto hope and enjoyed what I have watched. I read here that the second volume starts to get things back on track, but the radical, terrible changes to core elements of the plot that have occurred… they’ve warped a world I enjoyed, and I don’t think I would enjoy the world that was left over, even if it were a fresh start without having seen the prior seasons.
But if the season brought new viewership to a dying show, and made the creators and producers money, then my opinion really doesn’t matter much. Hell, it doesn’t matter at all, because I’m not Hiro and can’t go back and change it. To quote a webcomic I read yesterday; “Why make something great when good sells better?”
I love Heroes, and I liked Season 3, but I gotta admit that there are plot holes that bug me. First, who saved Nathan when he got shot at the beginning of Season 3? Also, what’s up with the African guy appearing to Matt and giving him the power to see the future?
More importantly, and this is something that was introduced in Season 2 which I never really loved, but why don’t they just use Claire’s blood to cure anyone who gets sick or gets killed, right?
I like that the show tends to tie lose ends, but then it always creates more lose ends in the process. We’ll see what happens…
claire saved nathan when he got shot and it only works if they aren’t already dead.
Claire saved Nathan? She was in California getting attacked by Sylar.
If they aren’t already dead? What about HRG, when he got shot in the eye and died? Then he was injected with the blood and was resurrected.
claire used her blood to bring nathan back to life after he was shot. also who’s to say they can’t bring anyone back? they probably didn’t bring nathan back recently cuz they needed sylar to take his place where he could be controlled and watched.
When did Claire go to the hospital and used her blood to save Nathan? As I remember, Peter was there with Nathan and even he was surprised when Nathan came back to life for no apparent reason. They made it look like Linderman had saved him, but we know that was not Linderman over at the hospital. So, was it Arthur who saved Nathan somehow, or someone else?
I agree that Sylar needed to be controlled. But I don’t think Angela would have given up her real son just to control Sylar. They knew (at least HRG knew) that using Clarie’s blood could have saved Nathan. Are they planning on doing this eventually? Because I imagine that his body (just like the fake Sylar’s body was) is probably in deep freeze somewhere.
I actually got two different scenes mixed up. I think it was implied that arthur saved him. and as for not saving nathan who knows Angela and Noah are schemers so who knows what they are actually planning. sometimes it’s just best to wait it out to see if plot issues are resolved because heroes tends to take a while to do that.
That’s what I do like about the episodes when they go to the past and explained the things that happened. My favorite so far has been the one where the explained Arthur’s apparent death. More recently, it was a nice touch to know that Angela’s shop lifting was not just random, but had to do with her sister. I hope in the next season we get to see how this whole thing with Nathan is resolved (I hope he will eventually be resurrected, otherwise, if and when Sylar comes back Nathan would be gone forever), but I hope we also get to see more of Angela’s sister.
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