Honestly, I have trouble remembering what happened as they went along, I think because characters just started doing things for no reason and there was no continuity.
So I’ll go with this - watch the first season. Sometimes it’s goofy, but it’s fun and generally coherent. After that, don’t bother.
It jumped the shark for me when it kept going after season 1. The rumor, at least (dunno if it was ever true), was that it was intended as a 1 season, clear-cut beginning to end story. And that would’ve been awesome. But I could tell they were waffling on all sorts of plotlines towards the end of the season. I watched the first couple eps of season 2 and didn’t really know or care wtf was going on, so bye-bye.
It didn’t turn me off the series, I’ve watched it all, but it was the misstep that bothered me the earliest. There have been many more since.
Well it was always planned as more than one season, but they were going to make it more of an anthology and introduce a new cast of heroes every season. But the original cast and storyline were so popular that they just stuck with it.
The end of season 1 was badly paced…the slow build up took too long and too much had to be resolved in the season finale. Watching it on DVD made that really apparent, when you only have one hour left and at least 4 hours worth of story to finish well, there’s a problem.
Season 2 didn’t improve - but I kept watching.
Maya. Oh boy, Maya. There were stupid things before and after, but when I was actively routing for Sylar to kill them was my moment. I’ll still watch it because it still can be entertaining, but I’m not counting the minutes till the next episode any more. Hell, I delete the re-runs from my hulu queue before watching them now.
This is just about the exact time I gave up on this show.
Maya is one of the stupidest characters ever to appear on TV. So many of her actions and decisions are so insanely stupid as to be totally unbelievable.
One of the thing that turns me off is what I think the script-writers trying to shoehorn a back-story into all this thing. In fact, I like Season 1 because it is precisely ‘ordinary guys finding out that they have supernatural powers’, then from Season 2 it suddenly became ‘it’s because you are all genetically altered and if you are a ‘hero’ you are involve with one of the shady characters in the back-story’
It feels like a bad comic plot where everyone is related to everyone else.
I thought Maya was pretty one-dimensional although I don’t have too much of a problem with her actions and decisions considering her emotional state caused by her ability. I did develop a crush on the actress but it’s not a reason to keep her character alive.
For me, Company Man was the best episode and it’s a large part of why I stuck it out in Season 2. I didn’t mind Season 2 but I didn’t love it. I really like Noah but they should have left him dead after being shot in the face by Mohindar.
I just watched another episode of Season 3 and that’s it for me. I can’t believe they brought Nikki back as the 3rd identical triplet - FFS let people DIE! Plus future Peter is killed simply by being shot in the chest (no headshot required?!?). Then present Peter can’t take Sylar’s abilities by just being near him, Sylar tells him he must understand the intricacies of the Sylar watch but all Peter does is straighten a bent cog and voila! Then when evil Claire turns up, instead of stopping time and laying the smack down on the noob heroes, Peter waffles about trying to talk and then winds up getting beaten up by Speedster. That’s getting pretty stupid, Peter’s an uber and no one short of Sylar or Adam should cause him to break a sweat.
Having said that, I did enjoy seeing Sylar go nuclear and kill off everyone because by that stage I had begun to dislike all the characters and I couldn’t care less who was supposed to be good or evil. That’s ended the show for me now.
As far as great writing, solid storylines and believeable characters with consistent behaviour, Heroes was never going to stack up against my favourite HBO shows - but I took it as a live-action comic and I liked the premise. I thought there was great potential but I don’t see how they can recover now. They’re too scared to kill of characters and they don’t know how to write situations according to the massive power differences between them - they really need to take a leaf out of Steven Erikson’s books about varying degrees of power.
I don’t like the term either, it’s alien to me since I never watched Happy Days but I figured it was the common term for this type of thread. Isn’t it?
They changed Peter’s powers; He can only absorb one power at a time, and he has to touch them to do it. He can then keep using that one power until he touches another person, when he then takes their power, possibly involuntarily.
I think.
Yes, it’s a common use but I think it’s overused or used wrongly. This thread for example, many people are saying different things were their shark jumping moment. To me it should be something huge and obvious and pretty implausible like the actual shark jump or Dallas’ “it was all a dream”. I think it’s particularly hard to find an implausible moment in a show that’s all about implausible stuff.
Anyway someone else in this thread described it better and I think we’ve had other threads discussing the term so I don’t want to hijack.
I don’t think a show’s ‘shark jump’ has to necessarily be related to something implausible happening in an episode. I think it can be anything that marks a definite low point in the story telling.
Agreed. I kept watching, waiting for something interesting to happen. Never did.
I haven’t read the rest of the thread yet so I don’t get exposed to spoilers, but I wanted to know if it ever became worth watching again.
I really liked about the first 20 episodes of season 1. I thought the resolution of season 1 was poor and underwhelming. I struggled my way through season 2 hoping it’d get better, and it had a few good moments but wasn’t really worth it. I started watching the first episode of season 3, and in the middle just completely lost interest and turned it off and haven’t looked back since. Should I give the show another chance?
It’s up to you but I always answer that question by asking myself if there isn’t something better that I could watch. Life is short.
I think Heroes had a chance for greatness at the end of season one. We had the flash-forward episode where we saw the beginning of a massive superpowered fight between Sylar and Peter, and it was super-badass looking, and we were all excited to go back into real time and see a super-fight between Peter+Hero and Sylar.
Instead, Hero randomly stabs Sylar with a sword, and that’s it. Yippee. Downhill from there.
Keeping in mind, of course, that I love this show the way a mom loves her stupidest kid the best…
Heroes has always had stuff in it with great potential that just went pffft. Niki could have been awesome- crazy strong lady gets her shit together, becomes beautiful, sane and strong? Oops, can’t have that-she stabs herself with a virus,croaks somewhat nobly? And it looked like they were going to have her and Mohinder as quite possibly the best looking one of us/one of them team Primatech had ever seen- that went splat(not just Mohinder’s nose either). They kill off DL, instead of seeing what they could do with a real working class character who’s trying to use his ability responsibly and be a good example to his kid. Bob’s jolly malevolence, wish he could have stuck around.Maya had potential- what does a good woman do when she has the ability to basically kill people with her mind? Learn to control it? Do nefarious organizations then try to make her into an assassin? Don’t learn to control it and hide in the basement away from people?
Mohinder suddenly wanting abilities, they could have done that better just by him saying to someone “I’m sick of Sylar coming over every other week to kick my ass and threaten Molly, I need to be able to fight back and if I have to drink the untested bug juice, so be it”. Perfectly consistent with how the previous season ended (kidnapped, ass kicked, kid threatened, the usual). They could have also had him lose his ability, or given him a colossally stupid ability as a wee reminder of his folly, that would have learn’d him. He finally had a moment of clarity out there in the desert when he realized that he’s just way too willing to be manipulated by anyone who can get him a grant and a lab.
Villains, yeah, that was a big ole train slamming into the brick wall. I admit I liked seeing Sylar try to nice up ('cause just watching a three year murder spree gets old, quick.) But I watch *Heroes *because I like the characters and even when they fuck up, they usually fuck up in their own special way (like that time Matt picked a fight with Mohinder-hulk; and Mohinder was lying to Matt the mind reader? Bloody brilliant, the bathroom-smashing both of them. But those behaviours were consistent for the characters)
And Hiro, grow the hell up. Peter, thank you for growing up.
This summarizing my experience almost exactly, although I wasn’t as bothered by the end of the first season. I stayed loyal through the second season because of how gripping the first had been, but not even halfway through the third I was bored and moved on to other things. What I’ve heard since (something about Nathan dying, but now Sylar is Nathan, or whatever) has not invited me to return. Sounds like more laaaaaaaaaaaame.
Real shame, since that first season really was fantastic.