It’s a Japanese thing. You wouldn’t understand.
My read on cheerleader gal is that her home life is pretty crappy what with mom talking in doggy voices and to doggies and dad gone quite often. She doesn’t seem amazed or excited about her abilities, but rather morbidly obcessed. She wanted it recorded so someone (mom/dad) would finally notice her more than superficially.
Each character reacts differently upon discovery of his/her powers instead of the usual portrayal of “Holy Wow”. Also they seem to have been made aware by some form of dream or intuition, so it couldn’t be an evolution event or it would have been present since birth. All these manifestations are occurring all at once. What was the stimulus?
The eclipse? 
DP7 comes to mind specifically with the stripper chick. I’m seeing an Anti-Body (albeit, more sinister than simply inconvenient) here.
Other than the fact that it is quite literally impossible to create superpowers that aren’t entirely useless that DON’T have a comic book equivelant - quite probably several characters with the power? (And most of the completely useless superpowers also have one or more comic book characters with it.)
Which is a good thing.
It has its flaws, but I love it.
“Use your death grip! Use your death grip!”
Re Teleporting To New York
I’m unsure if the clock on the train was supposed to be moving rapidly or if it was meant to show a time lapse of (IIRC)50 minutes or so while Hiro concentrates. If the latter, then his teleportation is a lot less of a jump. He takes a minute to move a clock hand, half a minute to port to the ladies’ room, and nearly an hour to teleport to NYC.
Note that the linked map indicates paths of totality; a given eclipse could be seen as a partial over a much greater area.
It looked like there was totality in Tokyo. It would have to be morning in Japan (and it looked like Hiro’s office group was doing morning exercises together) and evening in New York. Let’s take a real example – the eclipse to come in 2035. It’ll be visible as a partial simultaneously (and for several hours) in Tokyo, Las Vegas and New York, and will be total in Japan at about 11:10 a.m. local time. (It will have set in New York by then, but if totality came earlier, we could have the scenario seen in the tv show.)
Often, movies and tv shows seem to have little regard for astronomical realities. I’ve seen more than one movie that showed a full moon several nights in a row.
Hit “Submit” a little too fast. Properly speaking, you won’t see a partial eclipse over that whole range – just the Moon being rather close to the Sun. Ah, screw it. What the Hell is it with eclipses anyway? Half-wit fantasists always seem to be pulling out eclipses when they want something amazing to happen.
Now that was funny!
Just saw part of the show and DVR’d the rest. Interesting comments. I hope the “no clever writing” thing changes as this is a big plus for me with these programs.
I feel the same way. I was not happy when they cliched the japanese guys to death. The dialogue between the two friends (“You’re japanese! You should be the same as everybody else”) sounded totally fake and stereotyped to me.
And why didn’t the painter throw the saw far away when it started enticing him? Is he a complete retard?
And why did the younger brother jump off a roof? What was the damn rush? No valid reason for that either.
I really like the premise of the show but it’s not looking good so far. I hope they do better next episode.
Lots of genetic things don’t manifest at birth. Puberty-related things, for instance. Some genetic diseases.
Well, this particular handful is manifesting all at once. That isn’t to say that there aren’t thousands or millions of others who’ve manifested their powers already or who will do so in future. And these are likely extreme examples of powers. For every invulnerable cheerleader there could be a hundred people who, say, hav toenails that are really tough to cut.
That’s an easy one. Little bro wants to be special. He’s always been second string to big bro, but this was supposed to be his ‘thing’. Momma’s speech accelerated his desire to become his own person.
As before, I feel it was explained. Doesn’t mean you have to like the explanation, but they tried.
Astro, I’ve thought about it, and you’re right. The idea of an ostensibly popular teenage girl being depressed, hating her body, and not knowing what she wants to do with her life is so ludicrous that it spoils the show for me. It’s a shame, because I was really buying into the superpowers thing.
Three if you count the evil reflection!
OMG I’m a superhero!!! :eek:
Forgive me if this is sarcasm, but I haven’t been on the receiving end of a woosh in a while, so I’ll assume you’re serious and respond.
First, we don’t know that Claire is suicidal (my 1.5 year old is named Claire btw, so that’s a fun sentence to type 
), just that she’s troubled. As I said above, regardless of popularity at school, if she feels isolated at home and thinks her parents are lying to her (which certainly appears to be the case), I can certainly buy that’d she’d be a little wacked.
And these are extreme circumstances. I teach high schoolers at my church, and I’ve known several who seemed to have everything, and still be depressed. Maybe Claire’s story is a bit of a stretch, but it’s not so wildly out of the bounds of reason that I can see it ruining the show for anyone. We all have different reads on these kind of things though I guess. 
Nice. I can’t beleive you actually whooshed somebody with this.
RE: The show. I’m in the “continue to watch it, but might lose interest camp”. It was an interesting start. I’m shocked at how boldly they are stealing ideas from Xmen. I figured they would use a different angle than basically having them all be “mutants” just without using the term “mutant”. I figured they would have the eclipse give them powers or something.
One thing nobody has mentioned yet that I found interesting is this: Who’s going to be a hero and who a villian? I think we’ll need some of both. Stripper girl will probably be a hero, but I can see her being a villian also. I think that flying Senator may end up being a bad guy, with his possibly flying/possibly psychic nurse brother being a good guy. Using sibling mutants and parent/child mutant relationships to add drama has long been used by Marvel comics, I have no doubt that this show will rip that concept off as well.
One thing this makes me long for is a really good – a la Deadwood–adaptation of Wild Cards.
Possibility for Clair’s reactions: Maybe she knows what her step-father does…
They aren’t, though.
In X-Men, mutants are random genetic/evolutionary events that serve the narrative function of being an allegory for racism/homophobia/teen angst.
In heroes, the main characters have powers of an unspecified and unknown origin. The easiest explanation is that they’re genetic freaks, especially if you’re already familar with X-Men. However, that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, it seems that these people and their abilities are anything but random, and are closely interconnected. I’d wager that they’ve been specifically created to prevent the future the painter predicted, and that we’ll someday learn why these people have powers and for what purpose. While some distress over their separation from humanity has and will continue to arise (even Superman goes into that territory, it’s inevitable with superheroes), that seems to be a secondary theme compared to the connections between the characters and how they react to their powers.
It’s much more “Unbreakable” than “X-Men”.
I was thinking of that series of books as I watched the show -
What I like about it is we meet the characters as they discover their powers, unlike many other science fiction series in which the characters have well established powers, and we are to just accept them as given.
(also I didn’t read the whole thread (I’m lazy) so forgive me if I repeat something already said)
Is evil glasses wearing guy (aka Clair’s dad) really evil? or just another scientist with screwy morals?