I’ve been watching Heroes as a marathon from the beginning of Season 1. I’ve just watched Season 3 Episode 3 and I get the feeling that Heroes has now jumped the shark.
There’s been a few character changes that have started to turn me off the show.
#1 Hiro is told by his father NOT to open a safe because there’s something that will destroy the world if he ever opens it. So what does he do? He immediately opens the safe because he’s bored with his hundreds of millions of dollars, massive companies and mountains of luxuries. Hiro wants ‘a quest’ and therefore opens the safe and sets in motion a dangerous course of events after it is immediately stolen. This act shows that Hiro’s journey of maturity, the death of his father, betrayal of/by Adam over the first 2 seasons counts for nothing. Hiro has returned to being an immature child who wants just adventures and the consequences be damned.
#2 When Sylar enters The Company holding facility, Noah shoots him a bunch of times in the chest but neglects to shoot him in the head. It seems that everyone in The Company knows that to guarantee a kill on any hero (even ubers like Peter & Adam) you have to shoot them in the head, clean through the brain. But for some reason Noah decides not to do that to Sylar, instead he waits for Sylar to get back up again and begin his shenanigans again.
#3 After a couple of seasons of being a homicidal sociopathic megalomaniac, Sylar gets captured and suddenly happily becomes an instrument of The Company after he learns that Angela Petrelli is his real mum and she says some nice things to him.
Adding insult to injury is that it seems the tone of the show has changed, Hiro and Ando now have a goofy/zany slapstic childish humour quality to them. Their interactions with The Speedster seems way too over-the-top tongue-in-cheek with double-takes and goofy expressions that left me half expecting them to start a Three Stooges routine.
Strangely, it seems that most of the other characters are left largely intact.
Am I the only one who noticed this? I’m only on episode 3, should I continue with the series or is it all downhill from here?
For me, it’s started with Adams appearing to Peter after Hiro supposedly killed him (in the past). Somehow this is the last straw for me. This is like one of the oldest villain cliche before and I always wanted Heroes to surprise me.
Yeah, that does bug me about Heroes. The writers are terrified of ever actually killing a character for real. Occassionally they do it, but the fake deaths outnumber real deaths by 10:1.
I thought it pretty much jumped the shark starting with season two when they no longer had the cool ‘save the cheerleader save the world’ thing and Brian Fuller left to write other things.
Things that especially bother me are that after this point, we still get implications of the future Peter and Hiro visited even though it’s already been averted in obvious ways. That people keep switching back and forth between good guy and bad guy for no apparent reason. That they set up things which should be arcs only to resolve them the next episode, but drag on things that would be better resolved quickly. Or set up things that are intriguing and then never address them. Things do start getting better towards the end of season three, so maybe season four will be better.
I did like that in season two they found some excuse in almost every episode to have Peter take off his shirt, finally resorting to setting it on fire!
And the tortoise. It’s always cool when there’s a tortoise.
I hate the term “jump the shark”. Why not just say “this is when I lost interest”? It’s always different for different people. I didn’t like a lot of the things mentioned that happened but it feels like it’s trying to get back on track and I’m hoping it does, I’m still waiting for another “Company Man”. Still there were things I liked about the last season, they dropped some stupid stuff and characters and Peter got less dumb.
The thing about jumping the shark is that most series that go down the tubes don’t have a single moment of transition like that episode of Happy Days.
If you look for the stupid moment in Heroes, you’ll find it in pretty much every episode. Often more than one per episode. It’s actually fairly rare when any change in the story or in a character does make narrative sense based on whatever led up to it. That causes me pain, it really does.
Everything after the first season episode “Company Man” was pretty dreadful. Company Man was a very good episode, though. Comparable to “The Walkabout” of LOST’s first season.
Every once in a while I tune in to Heroes to see if it’s still crap, and it always is.
It’s pretty much impossible to have a compelling serial drama in the American style of television, which is to try to get the show to last forever. There’s no stakes when you know every actor has a 19-year contract, and no climax when you have to keep the story moving for all 19 years.
One of the few things the Brits got right about TV is treating every season as a standalone series. If there’s a second season, it’s like a sequel.
I entered this thread, thinking, ‘Aww, c’mon, it’s not that bad!’, but then I read the offered complaints, and remembered… and yeah, it actually is pretty bad. And there is worse to come. Some good stuff, too. And some really, really bad stuff. But thanks to my own superpower, that of selectively suppressing facts and memories that don’t mesh with how I want to perceive something, it’ll all be groovy again come next series!
Any time the writers had the ability to kill off Niki (or any of her other confusing, uninteresting incarnations) and didn’t. Or did then brought her back. There are so many amazing powers to explore, so many talented actors I’d love to see on screen, so many characters they introduced oh so briefly (e.g. the quick-learning waitress) and they keep going back to her like she’s got a secret stash of Tim Kring Goes to the Furry Convention photos.
On the plus side, the electronic kid seems a lot less annoying now. I assume they stashed him somewhere for a bit to go through the worst of puberty (acne, screeching voice change), like all male child stars.
It sort of slowly lost me over the course of season 2. Too much Micah (IMO, any Micah was too much Micah. There’s no law that says you have to have a precocious kid in a show). Too much bad guys turning good, and vice versa.
I sorta wanted to watch season 3, it’s on Netflix watch it now, but never really got around to it.