happydalek (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
happydalek) wrote2010-02-09 02:40 pm
happydalek) wrote2010-02-09 02:40 pm
The End of "Heroes" (not spoilery at all, actually, as if anyone cared)
Notice how I stopped posting reactions to the season after like, 5 episodes? That's because I lost interest. The show is badly written, nothing else to say about it, really. The season finale aired last night, and so far NBC has not picked it up for another series. You ask me, that's a good thing. "Heroes" is a premise wasted, and this past season was lackluster at best.
Samuel, supposedly a charismatic leader of specials i.e., Magneto, is completely inept at it. He's not charismatic at all, unless by "charismatic," the writers actually meant "creepy, dictatorial and just plain evil." People challenge him, he kills them. People try to reveal his murderous activity, he flips his shit and alienates everybody else. Hardly demonstrative of great leadership skills. From the start, it was very obvious that Samuel was evil. And not just evil. He was the creepy, X-Files brand of evil that, admittedly, I've kind of missed from TV. But for all that he didn't do anything. I think it would have helped if he'd been a bit more sympathetic and a bit less psychotic, because as it was it made for very boring television. At least back in Sylar's golden age he was doing questionable, gruesome things to people's brains. Samuel just stroked his evil mustache, laughed maniacally and threw dirt clods at people. Yawn. (Actually, that mental image is even more entertaining than he was.)
The carnival setting was bizarre, and while a somewhat neat idea, it only made the show feel even less tethered to reality. Consider, you make the entire season revolve around a carnival that can appear and disappear at random and is full of people with magical powers...and Samuel is the best they could do with it? An idea that fantastic deserves an equally fantastic story behind it. I wish it had been more like a pocket dimension outside of normal space and time (allowing Hiro's powers to actually matter again). Once the show established that people with powers existed long before the pilot episode's eclipse (and seriously, wtf happened with that, writers?), they could have done some really wild shit with it.
Populate the extradimensional carnival with Medieval X-men or Cavemen with powers.
Say that every few millenia the stars align correctly, there's a power-awakening eclipse, the proliferation of Specials causes havoc, so the carnival appears to trap them all inside and isolate them from society by order of.... Aliens. Or Teutonic Knights of Special Eclipse Power that decided to create and maintain the carnival to keep society from collapsing every time. Tomorrow People from the future. Space Jesus. I don't know. C'mon, writers! Embrace the possiblities!
OR....
Screw the fantastic stupidness of magical carnivals and government conspiracies and instead focus on real people drama, on the more mundane/fantastic possibilities of people in the real world having powers. The Petrelli family, for all it's messed-upness, could have served as a very rough draft/template for that kind of story. Think about it. Peter is the lame outcast in a family full of high-achievers. He finds out that part of the reason his family members have had so much success is because they have sekrit magical powers. Then he discovers he can borrow those powers for his own use to level the playing field for himself. Or be a hero. Which path will he choose? Couched in a typical family drama, the powers angle could be really interesting. The closest they ever got to this was the Bennett family, and notably, that was just about the only part of the show that didn't get completely effed up. The show derailed when it tried to come up with a big huge mythos that dominated the stories.
The sad thing here is that I know I'm not coming up with anything that other, louder fans and critics haven't been saying for a couple years. What astounds me is how uniform the criticisms have been, and yet how they all were completely disregarded by the creative team behind the show. It seems there was almost total dissonance between what the people behind "Heroes" thought they were giving their audience, and what their audience actually wanted. It's a real shame, because the format of "Heroes" was one that could more easily change cast and setting and story than others, and could probably have done so with minimal complaints from the audience. The "Heroes" audience was intelligent, and they wanted intelligence from their show. Why didn't they get it? What went wrong?
Samuel, supposedly a charismatic leader of specials i.e., Magneto, is completely inept at it. He's not charismatic at all, unless by "charismatic," the writers actually meant "creepy, dictatorial and just plain evil." People challenge him, he kills them. People try to reveal his murderous activity, he flips his shit and alienates everybody else. Hardly demonstrative of great leadership skills. From the start, it was very obvious that Samuel was evil. And not just evil. He was the creepy, X-Files brand of evil that, admittedly, I've kind of missed from TV. But for all that he didn't do anything. I think it would have helped if he'd been a bit more sympathetic and a bit less psychotic, because as it was it made for very boring television. At least back in Sylar's golden age he was doing questionable, gruesome things to people's brains. Samuel just stroked his evil mustache, laughed maniacally and threw dirt clods at people. Yawn. (Actually, that mental image is even more entertaining than he was.)
The carnival setting was bizarre, and while a somewhat neat idea, it only made the show feel even less tethered to reality. Consider, you make the entire season revolve around a carnival that can appear and disappear at random and is full of people with magical powers...and Samuel is the best they could do with it? An idea that fantastic deserves an equally fantastic story behind it. I wish it had been more like a pocket dimension outside of normal space and time (allowing Hiro's powers to actually matter again). Once the show established that people with powers existed long before the pilot episode's eclipse (and seriously, wtf happened with that, writers?), they could have done some really wild shit with it.
Populate the extradimensional carnival with Medieval X-men or Cavemen with powers.
Say that every few millenia the stars align correctly, there's a power-awakening eclipse, the proliferation of Specials causes havoc, so the carnival appears to trap them all inside and isolate them from society by order of.... Aliens. Or Teutonic Knights of Special Eclipse Power that decided to create and maintain the carnival to keep society from collapsing every time. Tomorrow People from the future. Space Jesus. I don't know. C'mon, writers! Embrace the possiblities!
OR....
Screw the fantastic stupidness of magical carnivals and government conspiracies and instead focus on real people drama, on the more mundane/fantastic possibilities of people in the real world having powers. The Petrelli family, for all it's messed-upness, could have served as a very rough draft/template for that kind of story. Think about it. Peter is the lame outcast in a family full of high-achievers. He finds out that part of the reason his family members have had so much success is because they have sekrit magical powers. Then he discovers he can borrow those powers for his own use to level the playing field for himself. Or be a hero. Which path will he choose? Couched in a typical family drama, the powers angle could be really interesting. The closest they ever got to this was the Bennett family, and notably, that was just about the only part of the show that didn't get completely effed up. The show derailed when it tried to come up with a big huge mythos that dominated the stories.
The sad thing here is that I know I'm not coming up with anything that other, louder fans and critics haven't been saying for a couple years. What astounds me is how uniform the criticisms have been, and yet how they all were completely disregarded by the creative team behind the show. It seems there was almost total dissonance between what the people behind "Heroes" thought they were giving their audience, and what their audience actually wanted. It's a real shame, because the format of "Heroes" was one that could more easily change cast and setting and story than others, and could probably have done so with minimal complaints from the audience. The "Heroes" audience was intelligent, and they wanted intelligence from their show. Why didn't they get it? What went wrong?