Way back up there, I’m with kurilla: the show is rapidly losing interest for my wife and me. Too many plots, too little resolution, too many characters, and too many subplots that don’t go anywhere.
We’ve had three weeks now (and presumably a fourth) with Hiro and Ando being side-tracked by a completely irrelevant issue: one week being chased by goons, the next week learning the goons were hired by Hiro’s father, now this week being distracted by Hope, and then next week whatever Hope does… It’s just meaningless digressions. OK, sure, there’s a minor development issue between Hiro and his dad, but it’s pretty minor.
The way the characters weave in and out of each other’s lives but never actually get together was interesting in the first many episodes, but now is just annoying.
I think the way to watch (if we do continue to watch) is to let TiVo accumulate the whole season’s worth and then binge on 'em, including lots of fast-forwarding.
Wayehl, hyuk hyuk, Ah guess we ain’t as sophistuhmuhcayted as yew, with yore book larnin’ and yore citified ways…
Yes, I think we all know that having two halves of a split personality talk to each other is a well-trod literary technique. However, there has been sufficient information presented to call into question whether that is what is happening here or whether Niki/Jessica actually does have the power to manifest separately.
We have one person who can fly, two who borrow powers, one who regenerates, and so on. Is it so hard to believe that there are two truly separate entities?
Why the need to rolleyes at people who aren’t as convinced as you seemed to be? That is a very condescending attitude in CS for something that hasn’t yet been explained. Personally, I’m keeping an open mind - I figure it can go either way, and I just hope it is dealt with in an entertaining fashion. And if you are wrong, I hope I remember this thread and issue a very Nelson-like “Ha-ha”
I’m pretty deaf (metaphorically) to symbolism and artsy-fartsy stuff, so it’s entirely possible that I don’t get stuff like that, and I take no offense. But I do have to wonder how Jessica arranged to get Niki out of jail??
I don’t know how the scripting was supposed to go originally, but I get the same dis-joint impression. I think they’re stunned by the success of the show, and are re-writing the plot on the fly to make it branch out and be bigger. I suspect the original plot was tighter.
Sadly, I’ve heard that since the beginning there was no ‘set’ storyline. That the show was just going to be written from week to week. That’s the main reason I avoided it for some time, until forcably introduced to episode five. Non-bibled series with this many plotlines and people popping in and out tend to have continuity errors like crazy, and those drive me nuts. Even small things; look at the end of episode 4, when Hiro appears to Petrelli and gives him the great cliffhanger speech. Then watch the beginning of episode 5. They replay it, and they don’t even use the same dialogue. A minor nit-pick to be sure, but it grates on me.
Also, whilst I enjoy the concept of the show, and a lot of the acting*, put me in the camp of those who believe that some of these plotlines actually need to be solved / wrapped up, or we’ll quickly either lose track or lose interrest.
An oddly strong acting moment for me this episode was Claire throwing the rock at Petrelli’s car. For some reason, the feeling of, “I’m a teenager and life is unfair and I’m so frustrated, but all I can do is just lash out with a stupid rock.” Really seemed to shine through for me. Dunno why.
While I agree that the writing is sloppy sometimes, I do think they know where they’re going. It’s just that they’re not quite sure how to get there, so half the characters end up spinning their wheels any given week. They haven’t figured out the right pacing yet. Not to mention that writing a network TV serial drama with that many characters and involving time travel is surely really, really hard.
They’ve done this several times, and it makes me think that there’s a point to it. I get the sense that they’re trying to say something about how people, no matter how powerful, can’t really change anything: you can change small things, but the end result remains the same. I thought that was the point of Hiro’s relationship with Charley as well. But then maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there.
When people complain about what is basically a science fiction series like this, I usually remind myself that at least we have it to watch (as opposed to reality tv or pro wrestling or soap operas or other dreck like that), even if it isn’t Grade-A Primo television. For all its flaws, “Heroes” entertains me, and I’m not looking for much more than that in a tv series.
That’s pretty much the nature of the beast with these serialized shows. The producers troll the internets and observe our reactions, then adjust the show as necessary. Was character X supposed to die? Well, after seeing how the fans react to the on-screen chemistry between X and Y, we’ll just have to let X live.
I don’t think Jessica would’ve had to have gone out of the mental institute to arrange things with Linderman.
Linderman knows about supers (the paintings, the sword), and so when he had Niki owe a debt to him, he probably knew about Jessica too. She may have done jobs for him other than the Petrelli thing. So maybe he was expecting her to contact him, she didn’t, and then he found out where she was, and arranged to get her out.
The recap voice over in the beginning of the episode says “The mom with an alter-ego is released from prison but her evil side takes over”. She is one person with two personalities.
I saw the reference to Tom Cullen but I am surprised that no one mentioned that the big boyfriend in a towel was SpongeBob’s best friend Patrick.
The voiceover recaps at the beginning of each episode are spoken like they’re trying to explain the story in the simplest possible terms to a distracted child, or something. I hate them.
Of course, I also hate when it opens with a monologue by the geneticist who doesn’t know the first thing about genetics, evolution, or … any sort of science.