the hypercube of happydalek

Last night's dream was, in fact, a Fringe/X-Files cross over.  I was a Scully-type doctor character, investigating the existence of extraterrestrials, and I was contacted by Olivia after Peter, who had gone mysteriously missing, turned up seriously injured.  He was bleeding internally, really banged up.  The dream shifted from my POV as the doctor trying to figure out how to stabilize Peter, to Peter's.  He was semi-conscious, and began having flashbacks to what had happened to him.  Turns out he'd been subjected to a classic abduction-and-probing by mysterious grey aliens.  Through a porthole on the alien spaceship, he saw the planet Jupiter.  Now, how that information got to me I have no idea, but the next thing that happened was that Olivia, Walter (who looked like the Cigarette Smoking Man!) and I had figured out the Jupiter connection, and started rigging a hospital bed to vibrate "at the same frequency of the planet Jupiter."  As soon as we turned it on, Peter's vitals began to improve, and he regained consciousness sufficiently to sigh, "Oh man, that feels so much better!"  All this was taking place in a motel room, and I oversaw his transportation to an ambulance gurney for his trip to the hospital.  While the EMTs were loading him into the ambulance, I confided in Olivia that Peter was still in danger.  He was getting septic.  "If only the aliens had properly sanitized their probes first!" I lamented. 

Then I woke up. 

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?  

Spoilers.

( Reactions. )

This one concerns Volume 4, "Fugitives."  If I was feeling more organized, I would have listed everything by episode, but I'm not, so I didn't.  After expressing all this, I went hunting to see what the general fan reaction to "Fugitives" was, and it seems my impressions are pretty much in line with everyone else's.  Kinda surprising.  All the same, I will most definitely be tuning in to Volume 5 when it airs.  Like I mentioned in my last Heroes reaction post, I will be watching for probably all the wrong reasons.  It's really like train wreck, this show.  Horrible, and even more horrible when you investigate it and discover all those little mistakes that added up to the crashing and burning, but you're just too fascinated to not gawk.  I seem to be drawn to flawed things.  Perhaps out of boredom, I seek out the imperfect so I can engage my brain in analyzing and "fixing" all the stoopid.  (Muse, I will NOT write Heroes fanfiction.  I WILL NOT.  No matter how shiny and alluring the plot bunny may be.)

( Long post is long. )

After watching the Star Trek movie for the fourth time, I thought about how, of all the main cast, the only ones I was at all familiar with were Simon Pegg and Zachary Quinto.  But then, when I thought about it some more, I realized that I didn't really know much of Zachary Quinto's work at all.  Specifically, I pretty much knew him as Sylar from "Heroes," but up til now, I'd only seen maybe two or three whole episodes of the show, and had been actively avoiding it of late due to bad word-of-mouth.  However, I still felt it was important enough to keep abreast of all the major plot developments...of a show I didn't watch.   Pretty dumb, eh?

So, I have now corrected that error.  Thanks to nbc.com, I have now watched all 13 episodes of the third season volume, "Villians."  Below are my scattershot impressions from the volume, taken from notes I took while watching.  I went in without too many preconceptions, just a basic idea of who everybody was and what the major plot points from the first two seasons were.  I think I may be able to become a fan of the show...but probably not for the right reasons!   

( Cut for oldish spoilers and lots of bullet points. ) 

It's the 1870's.  President Grant is in office, the American flag only has 37 stars on it, and United States secret service agents James West and Artemus Gordon are dispatched from Washington, DC to maintain law and order in the Old West.  Such was the premise of CBS' The Wild, Wild West, a fantastic program that ran for four seasons starting in 1965.  The first season was (unfortunately) shot in black and white, and the other three were in full color.  But this was no ordinary western, and West and Gordon were no ordinary agents.  The Wild, Wild West is, almost literally, "James Bond on horseback," and beneath its cowboys and Indians exterior you'll find a most wacky, steampunk-y, glamorous and fun bit of television.


( Cue MASSIVE picspam )

 

Well, damn.  That's all I gotta say.  Now I'll never know how Black Sheep ends!