f13.net

I'm an irredeemable fanboi of this show.  It is probably the only regular TV I watch that isn't football.

Last season got torpedoed pretty well by the strike, but was still decent.  Here's hoping season 3 gets everything back on track.

Is the 22nd a double bill season starter?

IMDB is listing two episodes for that day.

Either way I'm  :drill: for this, I'll probably go back and rewatch S2 now to get myself back up to speed.

Dang, I hope so.

I'm nearly done with an S1 and S2 marathon (on Blu Ray and a projector on about a 110" screen, which is patently fucking awesome I must tell you).  There is just way too much entertainment packed into the month of September. 

meh, now you've got me looking at Blu-ray box sets

Shame Blu-ray is so expensive compared to DVD.

I am fanboi, here me mush. Still love this show, despite the annoying characters that were added last season. Seeing the Villains tag for the new season got me happy in the pants.

Season 2 wasn't that good for me. Probably a cause of the silly strike. I hear this season is only supposed to get worse though from all the advanced screenings they've done of the premiere.

Season 2 was dreadful. I'm going to watch it again, but I really think we're at the point of no return.

Dreadful is a strong word.  It certainly wasn't as good as Season 1, but the bar was set pretty fucking high, IMO.  Weaker characters in S2, but I still thought the writing was pretty clever so I have high hopes.

Season 2 suffered from misinterpreting what made your show a success in the first place. A number of characters essentially rehashed their season 1 arcs, and there was a lot of running in place. I think part of the problem was trying to build a 22 show season, which means you have a good bit of padding and then realizing that the writer's are about to strike and OH SHIT WE ONLY HAVE 3 EPISODES LEFT! It would have worked better without the padding.

I honestly think the 22-show seasons on US television contribute to a lot of the problems of some shows, especially shows with heavy continuity. You end up having to pad things out between the very exciting moments of premiere/sweeps/finales. Really, a 12-13 episode run tends to work much better for these type of shows so long as your writers don't suck.

Japan's TV shows air in 13-26 episodes. Generally they tell one story and there's never a season 2. Sometimes there's a special and a movie (i.e. GTO), but for the most part, they tell their story and move on. If American shows were clearly defined to run for x amount of time and then be over, I'm pretty sure the problems with storytelling would be solved. Unfortunately we have no idea (nor do the creators or execs that signed the show) how long a show will run or if it'll even make it through the first season. Needless to say, the system is fucking flawed.

Edit: Before anyone says otherwise, I can name off the top of my head the last decades worth of live-action TV shows in Japan that got a second season. It is Not a long list.

You're like the rainman of useless knowledge.

He has a point though, an awful lot of shows with a great 1-season concept end up being dragged out ad ridiculam. Lost being a topical example of a show that just needs to conclude and fuck off.

I'm willing to give Heroes the benefit of the doubt, although season 2 wasn't as good as season 1 I feel that the writers strike buggered up the pacing and forced them to conclude prematurely. Overall I thought the story arc revolving around Hiro, Adam, Peter and the Company felt really well put together, the arc surrounding the Bennets wasn't as good, and the "magic blood" ending was an awful gimmick they probably had to throw in just to turn the plot around to meet the ending. The only real blight was the twins storyline, but the writers did a decent job of responding to feedback there and downplaying their role. I fully expect Maya to be killed during the season's premiere.

The telling thing with season 2 were the number of loose ends that were presumably left loose due to the squeeze on time imposed by the strike. For example the future virus plot I guess will be the baseline for this new season, but in S2 it felt out of place.

Pretty sure its 3 hours on the 22nd. 

1 hour of recap of EVERYTHING previous
2 hour season premier starting of the villians arc.

My thinking almost exactly.  Most of what was wrong with Season 2 was a few uninteresting characters (which may not have been a problem given more time) and a plot that had an uneven pace due to the necessity of having to rush to the finish line.  Still, it's always pretty much spot on when it has to do with the most important characters:  Hiro and Peter.  And Sylar as well, though the twins annoyed me.

It's funny that stupid strike last year turned me off a bit to TV.  I'm still planning on watching Heroes, but I'm not as excited as I used to be about it. 

Has anyone seen the commercials for the new season?  There are some interesting tidbits such as what Mohinder says in one of them.

Uselessness of his knowledge is subjective.

Season 2 might have been a bit weaker, but still, the worst episode of Heroes is better than a lot of crap out there.

Not really, unless all you watch is shit and then it's not the fault of TV, but your fault.

I'm sure a good number of series are just meant to go on for "as long as they'll keep us on the air" and I don't really blame them for how many decent shows get canceled every season.

There are some exceptions though.  Firefly was supposed to be seven seasons and I think Alias was supposed to go six.  That said... both shows got canceled a good distance away from those number so we'll never know if they would have tried to stretch the shows out.

I'm so glad that I checked the NBC website today. I would have totally forgotten to DVR the season premiere.

I haven't seen any ads for the show yet, so I'm a bit less torqued up than I was last year, but I'm still damn excited.

I just hope they don't screw the internet folks like a lot of other stations are doing and release the online version like a week later.

This pre-show hour-long premiere is really pissing me off. It's like one of those poorly hyped over-marketed waning shows "the thing you'll be talking about tomorrow at work" contrivances. This is a COMIC BOOK SHOW. Stop going for the frat-boy stupid mass market. You lost them at superpowers.

Didn't see any of season 2… …will hold off until it in DVD form (much more pleasant to watch, and if it sucks will spare myself the view time for other affairs…)

"A lot of the crap out there" mainly includes the stuff I don't watch, like Digimon, FOX News, and the Oxygen channel.

...

Well they sure didn't wait long to get this season going.

what....


the...



fuck....

I'm not sure if this season is the most awesome ever or just horrible...can it be both?

I loved both episodes.

Somebody will probably critique them for over compensating for the sloth of last season (too much time establishing characters, busted writer-strike pacing problem). But screw 'em, this was good stuff.


though if you're reading this, you're looking for spoilers.

I can name off at least five direct rip-offs of sci-fi/comic literature and media.  Not paying homage, rip-offs. 

It's like the past two hours were written by 15 year olds that were locked in closets all their lives.  Or else... the writers have no fucking shame. 


I'm interested to see how this season plays out... but those writers need kicked in the teeth.  The people that are actually watching this show have already seen these stories played out before. 

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! FUCK TAGS



That Sylar line was mightily predictable, but fun none the less. The Nicki thing has me curious and I while I'm sad that killed off Midas, I was glad to see Elle survived.

One thing that will bug me through the whole thing though, regarding season 2 - Are they going to give any resolution to what happened to Irish Lass? I know the seaon was cut short from the strike, but having her just kind of go poof in a future that didn't happen kind of pisses me off.

On the general topic: I never got "Heroes". On paper I should love the show, but it moved so slowly and was full of characters I couldn't stand and / or acted like idiots most of the time (for the episodes I saw - first few of series 1).

As to the above: US shows want to spin out past 100 episodes so they can get into syndication, while don't want to run longer than seven seasons with the same characters or else the actors in those roles get a huge pay bump. This works in conjunction with a "cancel it as soon as it looks like it isn't getting an audience" to make US television shows as schizo as they sometimes are.

Let's face it: "Lost" would have been awesome in two seasons, not mediocre-to-trash spun-out-to-seven seasons. "The Prisoner" did all its work in 15 episodes or so and was all the better for it. "X-Files" would have been better in 5 seasons. And so on.

RECAP

The first season was okay, like a wobbly legged baby gazelle which eventually gets its bearing and bounds clumsily off towards greatness!

Then season two was our charming little baby gazelle running headlong into a baobob trunk and there's this sickening crunch sound and we're not sure he's ever going to be quite right again.

Season three is the make it or break it part. Is it going to suck, or rule? Is babby gazelle okay???

Verdict: uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh TUNE IN TO FIND OUT WE'LL KNOW PRETTY QUICK

My take on the episode(s)....largely spoilerriffic.

The non-spoiley parts:  Awesome. Still not totally sure if things are working out the way I figured they'd work, but damn, that was some grippy TV.


This is either going to be a killer season, or utter shit.

That was crap, watchable because the hotties have multiplied (Maya, Elle, Claire) but I really lost track of season2 so I hope they give me a reason to give a fuck in a hurry or I'm going to stop tuning in.

God people, you are so spoiled.

I only slept 3 hours tonight because I made the mistake of buying the Season 1 box set and I watched all of the 23 episodes in a single session. (Glad I am on holiday)

The last time I just couldn't bring myself to stop watching a show was a long time ago. This is great television. Maybe all of you film, tv and comic book geeks are just too jaded to acknowledge that ;)

But seriously, I liked it a lot. If you think that's mediocre than I want to watch what you deem awesome. It has to be baby jesus in DVD form ;)

Well I have the luxury of being just ignorant about comic book stories in general so maybe I just doesn't get where they got inspired by (or simply copied from) so ignorance might be bliss.

I will go out today and buy the Season 2 set and probably don't get much sleep tonight either.

It's not Nikki, as shown by the power scene.  Instead, it's her sister.  Separated and mind-wiped when she "died."  The Company's done weirder shit.

As to the bitch that "everyone who's watching has seen these stories before."  You're wrong.  If that were all the audience Heroes had, it'd have gone the way of "Firefly" back in S1.  I'm willing to bet MAYBE 1/3 of the audience caught the Magneto reference, and probably 1/2 that knows the actual name of, "That flying dude from the x-men movies."

Seem obvious that it's Jessica, now that you mention it.

I'm a little unsure what to think about these two episodes.  It may have been a bit over-the-top for the start of a season.  I suppose it needs to be viewed as part of the greater collage, however, especially given the writers' tendency to explain everything later via flashbacks and time travel.

Some thoughts:

No, you are.   :awesome_for_real:


S1 is a great piece of work.  S2, not so much.  Remember that the writer's strike hit mid-season, so the middle of the storyline just goes fubar as episodes were cut, along with a whole freakin' volume of the story that was supposed to air in the early part of this year. 

They did good work starting this season off trying to tie up the story from last year, though. 

I feel better about the episodes today, but I still am a little peeved that they unabashedly stole from some of the other major stories.  These are writers for NBC, not fan fiction. 

I liked this season so far, it has potential, but there were a few things bugging me.

1.) Fake ass reasons to not use powers to solve simple problems.  Hiro - "I won't go into the past ever again."  Fuck, you mean like what you were doing with carefree abandon five minutes ago???  Potential for fucking the world up royally:  Warping back to Feudal Japan = high.  Hiccupping back to thirty seconds ago to stop yourself from acting like a complete moron = fairly low.

2.) Mohinder and the Unnamed 80's Movie homage.  The homage itself didn't bug (:awesome_for_real:) me at all.  It was the almost instant 180 that he did from the rest of the show, where he's trying to help and to control the power in people, now all of a sudden he's "powers for everyone, yay!"  One of the major flaws in this show, and not just this episode, is that the writers are making similar mistakes to the Battlestar ones.  They are making the show entirely plot-driven, to the point that they are making characters do what they normally wouldn't ever do, just for the sake of developing a pet plot point.

Mama Petrelli is awesome.  All the fucked up things she does, and I'm still not sure whether she's actually bad or just ruthlessly good.  Scene stealer.

Mmmmmmaya.  Her character is absolute shit, but I DON'T CARE ONE BIT as long as she keeps wearing those string tops.

 

It was Adam's blood, but that was my thought as well.  On the other hand, if that means that the blood of the self-healers will make others immortal after a simple injection, then I don't like where that might lead.

I love they finally have a part for the head terrorist they cut out of the original pilot, the african guy who hooks up with Peter in the desert.  Hopefully he can do more then paint the future, or else ol' Kringy has been a little short in the creative department.

Also if they keep saving Sylar he better turn into a good badguy aka Magneto in x-Men, I figure the only way they can keep him consistenly in the show is if helps everyone out.

Didn't really like it.  It's like their response to the criticism of the slow-ass 2nd season was to cram as much as possible into the start of the 3rd.  Instead of creating tension it just felt hectic and random.  I think it's getting bogged down by too many characters and plot lines.  For the love of God, kill wonder sex-twin, Sylar, and Bizarro-Peter.  I wouldn't mind Flyhinder, Parkman, or regular Peter taking a dirt nap either.

Was Flashette the blue-skinned chick from Farscape?  Anyway, I thought the best part of either show was probably watching Sylar do his thing.  Whodathunkit.

No.  I don't think you meant the blue chick anyway.

Blue chick = Zhaan = Virginia Hey
Grey/White chick = Chiana = Gigi Edgley
Sassy Flash = Daphne = Brea Grant

Maybe I expect less from network television? I definitely see it when they pay homage or rip off existing heroic stuff already out there, but I don't really expect them not to. Plus... are they really supposed to create newfangled powers in ways that the comic book guys haven't already done one way or the other? It didn't bother me a whit to watch it and see the powers in action.

Plus, the show isn't about the powers, it's about the plot and what the powers enable.

For something they had all this time to write and put together, the premiere seemed much more like something that got thrown together last minute.  Just one big freaking mess. 

This show is seriously testing my patience and making me think it has sucked all along and I'm just now realizing it.

QFT. She was not this hot last season, was she? The light of those glorious funbags in that shirt has made me completely forget.

I like this.  It's easy to understand too so they could use it!

Then I fully expect him to introduce rock and roll to the 1950s while his hands fade away.

Anyway Peter should go rescue the Irish girl stuck in the future, she's gotta be a little pissy about the whole situation right about now.

I think since they changed that future she doesn't exist there anymore.

She exists and is probably a terrorist, but she wouldn't know present day nor future Peter.

Peter is still just pissing me off, almost as much as these spoiler tags  :awesome_for_real: It's page 2. If you got this far, you are looking for spoilers, or watched the show already.

Err, yea, anyway: Peter: Go the hell back in time and put present day Peter on ice somewhere instead of suppressing his powers and dumping his soul into someone else. And I immediately thought his powers were suppressed. No way he couldn't have teleported/time-shifted/fireball'd his way out of that cell.

Forgot about Nikki the ice queen trick. Interesting stuff.

And I agree on everyone's thoughts with timeshifting and Hiro not wanting to do it. He's not stopping all of time in the infinite universe. He's keeping himself in stasis in a moment in time, which means time is already progressing around him, which means he's already in the past.

But I agree with whoever said this is becoming like BSG. It's plot points for the "let's see where this takes us" stretch goal rather than clean narrative. And that's always accompanied by superpowers becoming annoyingly underutilized to support a much slower pace that extends the product integration and other marketing advertisement methods.

I figured Future-Peter used that glamor spell.  Since he's been using it on himself the entire episode.  Used that glamor thingy on present-Peter, and tossed him in the cell.

I got bored with season two not seeming to go anywhere, retreading stuff we saw in S1, and some of the new characters being pretty uninteresting.  I gave up maybe 6 or 7 episodes in.

I really liked season one.  It was clunky in places but overall a lot of fun and had some incredibly good episodes like Company Man.

So... is it worth grabbing a DVD box set and catching up on S2?  Should I just pretend S2 didn't happen and dive into S3?  Should I give up and watch something else?  Advice?

- Q

Season 2 was rather lackluster overall, and only started getting good again an episode or two after you gave up.  Which was basically when they decided to ditch most of the new things they tried at the beginning of the season.  And Season 3 is looking rather sad so far.  They have another episode or two to win me back over before I give up on it and move on. 

The time travel stuff keeps weakening the plot. Events are no longer shocking, because they are all just part of the altered future, and we know the solution already: fix what future Peter broke.

The bizarre changes in characters, the impact of villains on the world ... it all lacks punch because none of it has any consequences, it's just a temporary future, so why should I care about Claire's pain receptors or what's growing under temporary-Mohinder's skin?

I think it's best to have watched S2 before S3. Various characters were developed far beyond what they were in S1 and are now playing big roles in S3.

I agree. I think they front-loaded Peter's powers too much. Or maybe they should have put some sort of diminishing returns or decay timer on his powers. Since he absorbs them through proximity, perhaps they dissappate.

Of course, it's too late for that now.

What I don't get is when Peter was around Molly, why doesn't he just combine his GPS and teleporter abilities to go to get whatever he needs. Add that to time travel and future Peter could do stuff and then undo it, finally learning that altering history is not a good thing to do.

Instead they'll gimp his powers while taking 21 more episodes to continue showing why altering history is not a good thing.

Um maybe I am just bizarro for not disliking the S3 so far as everyone else here seems to do, but it seems they took a lot of ideas from the butterfly effect movie besides the proverb.  The whole talks to Peter from his mother was all about how you can't play god, and you can't just go into the past to create a Utopia.  Anything Peter does in the past to try and fix something will fuck something else up just as bad, if not worse.

It looked to me like that was the point and future peter was getting that when he was told about Clair.

I can no longer figure out who's dead, who's come back from the dead, who has what powers, when they're in the past, present or future and if they should be dead during that time, who's good and who's evil, whether or not I've lost my debit card or if my kitty has swatted it under something again - I simply can't keep anything straight!  Watching the season opener, I kept feeling as if I had missed something - like an entire season. 

It's basically the exact same plot from the last two seasons which is one of the reasons I'm about to give up on this show.

bennet+sylar?

(http://pbmai.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/fonzie_jumps_the_shark.jpg)

Yep, with an extra side of

(http://www.balloonmodeller.com/images/clownshoes.jpg)

Two things:

1) That Sylar is being used but gets to do cool stuff anyway. And he really does steal the scene. It's so obvious he's being used and set up that I don't mind the pairing. It's not like he's being forgiven and now suddenly a good guy. THAT would be shark jumping.
2) That the whole Peter-being-the-sad-trapped-Jesse was resolved so quickly. God they could have abused that for six or so episodes easily.

As usual the Hiro bits were awesome (caper music in the move theatre, awesome). I don't like the Hiro/Ando split being set up though. Speedie chick is easy on the eyes too.

This season is what the last season should have been. Maybe it's back on track, figure next episode clinches it or drives it off the cliff.

SPOILERS ROUGHLY ALLUDED TO BELOW.

^^^  I'm with you on this one.

So far Season 3 has been EVERYTHING I HATE IN COMICS BUT ON THE TV INSTEAD.  Nobody stays dead, dumb soap opera plots, pro wrestling heel turns, THE SAME FUCKING PLOT OF THE FIRST 2 SEASONS.

Seriously.  NO MORE TIME TRAVEL.  I no longer want to see this oh shit horrible future that is changed every year and how will our band of clueless but generally attractive dimwits solve things yet still leave the main villain alive and more overpowered than before.

They are even power repeating, and throwing in experiments, missing twins, people acting totally out of character, and just the SAME BASIC SHIT done again, only this time its head slapping, and constant thoughts of "REALLY?".

I didn't mind season 1 and 2 outside of Sylar who should have died in Season 1's finale and anything less is shitty horror movie/shitty comic book cockamamie fucktardery.

Right now I think I watched episode 2 and 3 mostly out of inertia for the previous 2 seasons.  If I had a Neilsen box I would have quit after the first episode out of protest at the stupid.

And I like Torchwood.  I can handle things that are supposed to suck.  I can tolerate characters being dumbasses.  Heroes is just taking  :uhrr: to all new levels. 

It better not take away viewers from Sarah Connor Chronicles though.  I actually LIKE that show right now and don't want to see it end up like most other Fox shows.

I don't know, Darniaq.  The latest advert looks as if they're heading towards making Sylar a good guy or something.  I'm already very confused, even more confused than Lost used to make me.  If they keep the confusion going like this, I will either stop watching or become a very passive watcher.  You know, the sort that just stares at the screen for an hour and comments about how someone looks like someone else. 

Hiro is still my favourite, too.   :heart:

As long as the Hiro subplot is entertaining, I'll still enjoy the show.  I really liked the interplay between Hiro/Andro and Daphne.  It was light-hearted and fun.

The duplication of powers doesn't really bother me that much because there could just be a finite number of powers people have access to, sort of like there's only a certain range of colors a person's eyes or hair can be based upon their genes.  Tracy and Molly's dad both happened to draw the 'cold powers' gene, for example.  As long as the rational for powers in the Heroes universe is internally consistent, it's not a big deal to me that there's some duplications.  In a way, it actually makes more sense than everyone having a completely unique power.

So, Zimmerman makes Tracy/Nikki/Jessica clones, eh?   :hello_thar:

The subplot I'm really disliking is the Sylar 'anti-hero' plot.  Especially is sudden concern and deference to Noah.  I realize they had to expand his character to more than just a 'I kill you for your powers' cardboard cutout, but this sudden 180 is a bit much.

I realize why they keep using the whole time-travel schtick, but it's also getting somewhat tired.  There's something to be said for people trying to deal with an unknown future, rather than so many people having everything laid out for them.  Also, apparently Peter has the ability to absorb everyone's capacity to be a dumbass because he's such an enormous dumbass he had to have absorb the dumbassness of everyone he's ever met.

I'll say this, though.  Even bad Heroes is better than 90% of the rest of the crap on TV, so there's no reason to not stick with it until it *really* goes off the deep end.

I liked this last episode just fine.  Better pacing than last week.  The Sylar subplot doesn't bother me much, because in the end, despite how they dangle it in front of us, he is ultimately a creep and a lunatic.  At worst, this will all just add a bit more depth to him as he rationalizes his actions, but I don't think we're meant to forget what pschypath he is. 

Everything with Hiro is gold.  And Ando is even better.

I hate future Peter, but of course, we are supposed to hate him.  Because we like present Peter so much (don't we?), we can't bear to see him going down that path.  That's the point, right?

The subplot pissing me off the most is Clair's mommy suddenly coming back into the picture.  It doesn't seem plausible, and I cannot imagine anything interesting coming out of it.  It was just weird.

I absolutely love that Hiro keeps calling Daphne Nemesis.  Cracks my shit up.

Anyone interpret that painting of Parkman's original future as him with Daphne?  The girl in the painting sort of looked like her.

Last night was better simply by being Mohinder-free.

It is exceptionally Japanese of them.

I love and hate Heroes at this point. I hate that making a second Niki is their out to keeping that actress on the show though. Bitch still sucks.

I don't remember her dying in Season 2.  Am I just blocking out the pain or was her death just revealed?

She blowed up in a building after saving muscle-memory chick who has apparently memoried her way off the show.

Yes, seems that was a worthless sacrifice if Taskmasterette is gone for good.

Overall, I liked this episode. Sylar hasn't turned good, he still is a creep and a psycho with a new all-you-can-eat buffet, the Company still gets in bed with the devil "for the greater good" without thinking too much about the side effects. And Noah will try to use him and then get rid of him. Sound characterisation for everyone involved.

Yea, I don't mind the twists here because they still show Ma Petrelli as a conniving witch and Noah as a schemer. I always liked that double-sided insight into his personality: a good family man that will kill to get what he needs done, whether it involves protecting his family or is just part of the job.

Thing I remembered from Monday's episode: what's the deal with Sylar going for Jesse's brain, we seeing the blood splatter on the closed door, but then them both being escorted back to level 5? Did the Haitian show up? Did Sylar just upper cut the guy? I missed something there.

And where was Sylar when future Peter showed up to stop time? I assume he stopped time outside too, but either it's a plot hole that future Peter didn't take out Sylar while he had a chance, or Sylar's not a threat, or as Petrelli dreamed, Sylar's actually become a good guy. If this was season 1 I'd assume this was intended and we'll learn about it later. But given the travesty of season 2, I could as easily believe sloppy plot.

Yea, that was wierd. I would have liked to have seen Petrelli spend at least another 10-15 minutes (depicted over a day or two inshow time) getting Sylar to come around to the idea of not just consuming people's powers. As it is, they really just jumped from everyone-enemy psycho to Noah's sidekick in a big hurry.

And did Daphne call Hiro "Time Warp" again? I loved that from Ep 1.

I don't think Sylar will become good any more than I think edgy almost-bad-guy future Peter will happen.  Once again, they are just showing possible futures.  I think people like their good Peter and their bad Sylar.  Hard to see the writers changing that long term, though they will dangle it around for a bit.

It was Mr. Terror and Fire-Guy.

I think there might be a good Sylar in some dimension or future or past or what ever the hell they come up with.  I don't mind.  Don't comics do this sort of thing all the time?  I just want to be able to keep things straight.  I like the show and would like to be less confused while I watch it.  I think I miss some things while I'm trying to suss other things.  In any case, I'm not ready to give up on it yet.  I didn't give up on Lost and they got a wee bit better last season.  I think.  I could be confused.

They are definitely trying to keep the pacing fast fast fast this season. It may be going a little too fast, such as the Sylar/Noah buddy cop scenario. I think it's not totally out of character for Sylar to be trying to do good... after all, his whole excuse for taking the powers was he wanted to be special. And he kept talking about how he wanted to be the one to save New York from Peter blowing up. In his own twisted way, I think he wants to be good, but the hunger for more powers drives him to slice up skulls.

Too bad they killed Mr. Magnetism.

I'm still not sure why they'd bring Claire's mom back to "protect" Claire. Hottie can't be hurt... what's a fire-throwing chick going to do to help?

The show definitely needs more badass sword-wielding Hiro.

Oh wait. So Mr Terror bolted out the back door when Sylar Darth Vader'd Jesse and took his brain. I forgot about Fire Guy though. So it must have been Fire Guy escorted back to Level 5.

It was.

I wish they didn't lock them up so quick. I love Marlo.

The guy you guys are calling Mr. Terror - what was his power, exactly?  He seemed quick and strong, was that all it was?

He'd get incredibly strong when people around him were afraid.

My wife did. I thought it was his first wife until I remembered she was a brunette.

Looks like the FBI girl he was partnered with in this first season, audrey hanson.  Also andrew hanson was the name sylar was using when posing as an agent.  :awesome_for_real:

(http://img384.imageshack.us/img384/6902/audreyhansondc2.jpg)

vs

(http://img384.imageshack.us/img384/1199/spoiler20080509rb9.jpg)

I'm saying the fbi girl is the one in the painting, not that they're the same actress, those paintings are always intentionally obscure so of course you're supposed to think it the new short blonde haired girl

Oh I know, I just felt like posting both of their pictures. 

The speeder is passable. The FBI chick is one of those too homely for celebrity-dom but never really got famous actresses that somehow keeps getting work. Once in a blue moon, Selma Blair falls into that category.

Claire has no ability to fight someone who attacks her or defend herself or protect the lives of others, like her adopted mother and brother. Flame Mother has the ability and nerve/mindset/training to actually defend herself by attacking said person who would cause harm. Best defense is good offense?

Claire can't die.. she also can't do jack all else.

So she's pretty worthless as a hero really. 

She just needs to learn how to draw aggro, and then find a nuker to partner with.

I thought it was interesting that they FINALLY brought that up. Of course, she's approaching it like a niave teenager, but that seems appropriate. Asking Peter how he used his powers though was funny. But really, she's just a Highlander who'll have otherwise pedestrian human skills, including the ability to hone them for a few thousand years. At least Hiro could jump back to the beginning of his Samurai training every two hours, Groundhog Day piano-lesson style.

Claire is essentially deadpool. She really just needs training, weapons and a witty inner monologue....the first two are probably feasible.

Yeah.. she needs a training montage! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NCMUEWl4vk) 

You all seem to be forgetting that Mohinder could just inject her with some crap (or she could do it to herself).  Ding-gratz!  New abilities at level 2 and stuff.

That's where I think things are headed, with the foreshadowing of Ando's lightning blast against Hiro in yet-another-future. Claire didn't exhibit anything approaching real power though, but that was from future Peter's yet-another-but-not-the-same-future where mayhap the formula did or didn't exist.

Of course, we don't know what Hiro's formula is yet either, do we?

From what Mohinder said in the premier, the shot triggers you having a power develop, but what that power ends up being is based on blood/genetics.  So, giving that shot to someone who already had a power would likely do nothing.  Hence Claire using a gun. 

Mohinder starting to go all goopy could very well be similar to what killed his sister.  She apparently had a power, but it ended up killing her when she was young.  Which you'd think he'd have realized, but oh well. 

Mohinders sister died of the disease that was prominent in season two, the one that only targetted mutants, she didn't die because of her power which they haven't ever revealed.

I thought she could do something with dreams? Didn't she have some interaction with Parkman or some such?

No, mohinders sister died when he was around ten, way before having anything or ever being on the show and parkman would have been 16-20 maybe?. Mohinder did meet a young boy with dream powers that let him see flashbacks though, which may have been where you're getting the idea but as for (ashanti was her name?) they never did explain exactly how she was special.

Ah ok yea Mohinder meeting that boy is what I was misrememberating.

It is absolutely believable for Hiro however. The last time he went back to the past he nearly destriyed history and created a villain that tried to wipe out all of human civilization. I'd be a wee bit careful about travelling to the past after that either.

Also the last lesson of his father before he died was 'We have the power of gods, but we aren't gods'. Fate has to be accepted and one should not try to alter it. A lesson that Peter didn't learn apparently.

That's what I like about Heroes by the way. Sometimes the characters might be a bit boring or stupid, but believably so. The same with Maya. She is a simple and a bit naive girl that got a really terrible power that she couldn't control. She killed her entire village, didn't know what had happened with her and thought she was cursed.

That girl was desperate, really desperate to get to the one person she hoped could help her get rid of her 'curse'. The storyline itself maybe didn't amount to much but how the characters in it acted was quite believable (at least in my opinion)


I disagree. Mohinder always says that he wants to do everything for the sake of mankind but that's a lie he tells himself. All he really wants to do is live up to daddy's expectations and complete the task his father started long ago. Mohinder always was a bit drunk as far as his groundbreaking science was concerned. He even turned sides and worked with the company. Because 'they want to help people' is what he always told everybody but secretly it is because they provide him with the means and the environment in which he can conduct his research. If he were concerned about the well being of the world he wouldn't work for somebody that experiments with people's abilities and viruses that could destroy humanity.

Mohinder is a bit like Linderman in that respect. He actually believes that what he does is benefitting the greater good, he just has a very twisted sense of what that means. He also has serious daddy issues. He could be a really good mengele-type or Jekyll/Hyde character. He basically always doeseverything because of his own ego and the drive for knowledge and discovery and rationalizes it by telling himself it was 'done for the greater good'. A lot of scientists are exactly like that.

I don't mind all of the homages and outright stealing of superhero themed stories. Better well stolen than badly self made.

Maybe so, but there wasn't any previous indication that hottie mom knew how to fight either.

I understand Hiro's reluctance, but again, refer to the bolded point above.


That actually makes a whole lot of sense.  I've changed my mind about Mohinder now.  I still think his 180 (and it is a 180, reasonable or no) is a little too sharp.  It's kind of like the current deal with Sylar, where apparently all it took was Mama Petrelli to say "I'm your mommy and I love you" a few times to get him to behave.  Granted, not that he behaved all that well, but still.

The comment bennet made in the car with sylar was very telling.

HRG-"you know she's playing you, this is all just a game to her."

Sylar-"maybe but aren't you curious to find out what happens?"

This to me makes sylar that much cooler because it shows he's being calculating. Does he think he's her son? at this point I don't think he would care if he was or wasn't. He knows if he plays along he gets more juicy brains so why not? Sylar has no list to follow or was to detect powers in others so using the company makes perfect sense.

I'm pretty sure that Sylar knows he's getting fucked with.  He just doesn't care because this puts him where he wants to be, catching and stealing the escapees powers.

If you're sitting here looking at this thread 9 minutes before the end of the episode, you deserve whatever spoilers follow  :drill:

Why can Peter use his powers in Level 5 but nobody else can?

I assume they usually kept the other prisoners drugged.

FUTURE SYLER IS AWESOME.

As abysmal as season 2 was, deep down I was kinda hoping season 3 would recover.

You know who else is awesome?  Matt's new buddy Usutu (That's what his wiki entry says his name is, though I don't remember it being said in the show).  That guy is hilarious.  "You don't read much."

There were so many inconsistencies in that whole Costa Verde scene I'm not even sure where to begin.

Edit:

Why? Hiro said 'save the cheerleader, save the world'. Which they did. Never ever was it even hinted at that Claire would die. Just that they wouldn't have any way of defeating Sylar and stopping the destruction of New York if he got Claire's power. Isaac's pictures are very misleading in that respect. We saw what we thought was a dead Claire but look at her father. Isaac's picture depicted him as being dead but he got healed by Mohinder with Claire's blood.

It is also not entirely correct that she can't die. Several people already hinted at a headshot or severed head being the only way in which such a person can be killed. It's just that Sylar and Claire didn't know that at that point in time. It's basically like being a highlander you can survive anything but chop off the head and all is over.

Even then, I get the impression that if they stuck her head up to her neck it would reattach. Remeber, she recovered from having a two by four in her brain, once they pulled it out.

And I agree, the point of season one wasn't keeping Clair from dieing, it was keeping Clair safe from Sylar.

I don't think a head shot or decapitation would truly kill her. It will make it appear that she is dead but if the pieces are ever brought together or the object in her head is removed everything will grow back together and she will come alive again.

Destroy the brain.  Not just a headshot, pulp everything. :drill:

YAY KENSAI IS BACK!   :drill:

You mean Stark!

Didn't you see Terminator 2, dude?  Even that don't work.  

But Peter, being an empath, has her self-healing ability and  What's different this time?

That's because the other, non-scarface version was still running around somewhere/sometime.
Edit: Wait, isn't this a spoiler thread? Am I allowed to just freely discuss episodes without hiding everything?

I either don't get this or the writers are hacks.

How did they justify changing Sylars basic motivation from "I want to be the most special person ever" to "The hunger made me do it"?

Looks like a cheap ploy to me to transfer his problems to Peter and redeem him because it wasn't his fault.

I call bullshit on that.

The worst thing is they had the perfect out. Just let future Sylar say "Everyone has superpowers now. I'm special for not using them anymore. Yay me!"

I say that the day after the episode airs is completely fair game for spoilers.  If you haven't seen it by then you must not care that much.

I can sort of buy Sylar's change.  "I want to be special" could have just been one way of expressing "the hunger" before he was able to get it under control.  Eh.  I'm not going to rely on a gibbering psychopath to be perfectly accurate in expressing why he's doing what he's doing.

I should probably be more annoyed that they're taking all of the last season's bad guys and making them into antiheroes, since it's kind of cliche, but I like them well enough that I think I'm okay with it.  This show is all about having fun with superhero cliches anyway.

Hmm, maybe.

Since thats the only thing that bugged me and this season is leaps and bounds better than the last one I'll let it slide.

I like the new additions, hope African spirit guide can snark on some other heroes as well. Plenty of work for him there!  :awesome_for_real:

Well, he wanted to be #1 Special Guy before Angela Petrelli reenters his life as the doting birth-mother his peasant adopted mom could never be. I assume that between Sylar's capture/conversion to team player and Gabriel's paternal waffle-making, Angela had time to heal him emotionally and psychically.

Sylar's change makes a certain amount of sense, but I hate that they call it The Hunger!  The way it's described sounds more like a kind of OCD specific to 'I must know how things work'.  If you go waaay back to early in the first season before we ever actually meet him, there's an indication that at first he was struggling with this compulsion and didn't want to do what he was doing.  By the time we actually see him though, he doesn't seem to care anymore.

As for whether or not Future Peter is dead, Future Claire's comment could be taken either way I suppose.  It boils down to whether the writers want to be rid of him or not since they could justify it either way.

My only problem with the episode was how Gabriel started to pull all those old powers that he had supposedly lost out of his ass again.  Painting the future and the radiation powers were two that Sylar lost to that virus in season 2 and he'd never shown any indication that he'd regained anything other than his original power and the TK power.  Otherwise he should still have the freezing power, perfect memory and super hearing, just to name a few.  Also, whatever turned Sylar back into Gabriel also turned him into a giant wuss.  I can understand him not wanting to use his powers in general, but when his son was being threatened is a good time to open up that can of whoop ass.  Fear Guy should have been no problem at all for him to handle.

I agree with you that Sylar should of been able to take out Mr. Fear with the quickness.  It's kind of silly that either Sylar or Peter would have trouble fighting any of the current cast without the Haitian present, they're just too powerful.  The writers seem to try and overcome this by making Peter a gigantic pussy who doesn't really want to fight, only to bust out all his powers 30 seconds later.  That way he gets beat up but still wins in the end.

When it comes down to it freezing time is the win button, they need to come up with more plausible scenarios as to why it isn't used every 5 seconds.

It's too complicated.  The back and forth time trope is not working. And I think going with the formula route is too midiclorine-like.

The show worked because it gradually revealed a conspiracy (history) that made the spine of the stories (like the X-files).  It feels now they are trying to solve too many unanswered questions too quickly that don’t leave open enough new stories to be revealed.  I fear the worst.

Another thing to remember about Peter, is that he has to actualy "activate" his powers. If you remember back to the whole bit with him trying to learn to use them, he had to bring up the emotion he felt when he was around those powers. I've always seen it as he needs to activate them, so say he gets his arm cutoff, he activates his healing and it grows back. He gets shot in the head - well, then he's dead.

Of course that doesn't cover whether he couldn't activate the healing power before he got shot... Or when he blewup with Nathan, or...

This show is sliding from "mildly interesting yet flawed" to "steaming pile of shit" in a rapid fashion.

Well it's still full of hot people, so it has that going for it.

They are hellbent on uglyfying everybody though.

I was thinking mohinder-snake but my coworker says mohinder-roach

Roach seems most likely.  He can start calling himself Gregor.

Did anyone else notice him in the family photo with Zimmerman and Traci/Nikki/Other One?

lol I had a pet Madagascan cockroach named Gregor Samson in college.

I enjoyed the "future Sylar in an apron in the kitchen" scene, and I started to like future badass Claire. Both actors got to have fun.

Probably the Haitian being there.  If he dies with his powers off, he can't come back, I guess.  Which would also maybe explain the scar, he got cut with his powers off, and they won't heal anything that happened with his powers off.  I think present Peter still had the cuts on his chest from psycho Claire, and the Haitian was there, then, too.  Of course, that brings up the question of why they went after Sylar and Peter at the same time without him there, but that's just one issue among many any more. 


I'm hoping this stupid "I'm special!" thing of Claire's gets settled soon, it's pretty silly. 

Oh yeah, that's right. I remember realizing last night that that was why he was staying dead.  :uhrr:

Here's some things I remembered today:

Which future are we supposed to be worried about? The destruction-of-Tokyo Hiro jumped a year into the future to see (when Ando killed him) or the destruction-of-Costa-Verde city the Peters jumped four years into.

Also, future Peter was trying to paint this picture of a future where everythings gone horribly wrong in a nuke-of-NYC sorta way. However, when he arrives with past Peter, you see a bunch of people going about their business as if all is normal, except they can fly and run fast and whatnot. And his brother the President isn't some lameduck stupid guy but rather seems to know what's going on. So what's the deal there? Is the future fine with people having powers but the story is that future Peter doesn't like it? Are we being set up with past Peter seeing himself become the enemy in the future that everyone's scared of? And why? Because he's no longer special and yet yearns to be because he's got Sylar's power?

Finally, the part I actually didn't like at all: why the hell does he need Sylar's power anyway. He can just queue up any power he wants, including the flying ability he tried to swipe from future Nathan. wtf?

I think the two futures are the same.  In Hiro's future, Ando had super powers, right?  That's completely compatible with the future that Peter saw.

As for why Peter needs Sylar's power: because Peter can use any power he's come in contact with, but he seldom understands them, and he's usually not very good at using them (except when it becomes important to the plot, of course, but let's ignore that for now).  Sylar seems to understand the powers he's absorbed better than their original owners did, and can therefore use them more effectively.

Future Peter was freaked because of the scenes from further in the future he'd painted.  Sylar saw the same thing, hence him helping Peter gain his power.  Nathan and many others don't see any danger in powers becoming widespread.  It's not those single events, but what they all lead up to, warfare or mass violence with all sorts of powers instead of guns or bombs.  Like nuclear holocaust, but where everyone's the nuke. 

Apparently, the reason he needs Sylar's ability isn't that it lets you take on more powers, but that it grants you an understanding of how things work, not just with powers, but people and events too, I suppose.  They haven't explicitly said though, I don't think.  They've always tried to show Sylar as being able to push people's buttons and manipulate them.  Peter wanting to slice open Nathan wasn't for his power, but was triggered off of him wanting to know Nathan's intentions.  What made him tick.  Just another expression of this 'Hunger' thing they've decided to go all out on.  It wasn't enough to try to read his mind, he needed to study it. 

To switch gears a bit, one thing I find interesting, though it's questionable if they'll ever address it in a decent manner, is that while aspects of the future have been changed by all the time travelling, the fundamentals remain the same.  The future is fucked.  Someone losing control of a power precipitates action by the government that will have dire results.  Peter is an outlaw, etc.  If anything, though, the future gets more and more fucked every time someone decides to change it by mucking about with the past.  We've gone from a dystopian future where things were definitely sucky but the majority of people were relatively safe, to the world actually getting wiped out. 

If I was Peter, honestly this is what I'd do. Peter's a freaking god. He can afford to try to talk to people before utterly decimating them.

The crazy time travel is getting to me too, but with so many time travelers running around, I think it's inevitable. I've pretty much resigned Heroes to a "Time Travel" story now.

The only reason I can think of why Sylar didn't just start whupping up on the Fear guy and Claire et al was because future Sylar/Gabriel seems to be kind of like a twelve-stepper. He's finally on the road to recovery for his hunger or whatever. Starting to whip out the various and sundry powers he'd collected (uh hello, magnetism) perhaps would have been like an alcoholic having "just one beer" at a cookout.

He didn't want the little boy to see him use his powers, was his main impetus as far as I could tell.

Who's the mama? I put my money on Elle.

I want to know how he got possession of Mister Muggles! Claire's mom would never have given him up willingly.

That could be goofy. Like they decided, "Hey let's take these two mentally unstable super-people, and pair them up while they get better! And for added fun, we'll use the guy who ate Elle's dad's brain killed Elle's dad/took his power as the groom!"

I know the company is not always doing the smartest shit, but fuck.


As to not wanting the kid to see, I'd agree as I feel that fits in with my twelve-stepper Gabriel concept.

Peter keeps moving closer to godhood.  With Sylar's abiltity, Peter he could learn to use everyone's powers better than them much faster.  He could speed around use Molly's power to locate every known superpowered individual and learn their power.  Probably figure how to use more than one power at once with Sylar's ability.  With some good planning I bet he can get the Haitians powers as well. Basically unstoppable.

I just wonder how this "hunger" thing will play out. If Peter needs to cut open skulls to learn how powers work, then he can't take powers. If somehow, his empath ability + Sylar/Gabriel's ability means that he learns the powers, but doesn't necessarily have to hack the heads off little girls and put them on his wall, then I'd say, yeah, he's on a god/demi-god path.

My guess is that we'll see the writers use the internal struggle with the hunger and his ability to see how all of the butterfly effect shit works to drive the rest of the season.

EDIT -- I haven't really figured out the re-introduction of Adam stuff yet.

Evidently, all he'd have to do is hit the Haitian over the head with something. That poor dude gets knocked upside the head like three times in the last episode.

Both good insights and makes a lot of sense.

I have nothing more to add.

The most recent graphic novels weren't bad though.

Man, this show has really gone down hill IMO. The writing is fucking horrible. I am giving it a few more EPs to get better and then I am done if it doesnt improve.

My god. I love watching you people try desperately to make sense of this train wreck of a show. You're definitely doing a better job than I can. I just start hurting inside and stop trying to make everything logically consistent.

Heroes is now essentially the worst possible combination of tropes that television has ever seen: It is a soap opera with temporal paradoxes.

soap opera with temporal paradoxes.

...uh, so?

fangirl alert  :awesome_for_real:

So nothing makes sense and the characters are written into so many holes that the only escape is to write it so at least half the characters are dumb as bricks and communicate with each other poorly and make irrational decisions.

Now, the more powerful a character's capacity to create plot holes, the more exponentially likely they are going to be continually crippled by happenstance, suffer amnesia, get stuck in other people's bodies, thrown through time, or knocked unconscious repeatedly, or otherwise just act like a tard.

Maybe they should combine trainwrecks. Michael Schofield helps Peter Petrelli escape from the future.

So is Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles.

Most of it makes sense to me. Why does everything have to be watertight? It's fiction, and it's television, for fuck's sake.

We need a nerdrage emoticon.

Jeezus, you people are like scourged MMO players. I won't go bitch about your nigh unenjoyable grindy-ass grind if you don't come piss in my pond, mmkay?

It is also bad for fans of the show (i am included!) because, in its present form, Heroes will not survive. It will continue to be excoriated by critics and fans alike until it is dropped, made a subject of a handful of sharkjump-analysis/What Happened articles, and vanish.. tearing down the whole scififictiondrama thing's prospects in television, and it will be all the more potent a sad thing because, I mean, looking back at season one, this show can be good. It has it in it.

A few observations:

US american TV series seriously suffer from the ADD of their viewers. I follow a few discussions about Heroes on american fansites and the ongoing tenor is 'Oh my god they haven't wrapped up something hat they hinted at two episodes ago. Stupid writers'

The arc is 20 to 24 episodes for a whole series, why has everything to be explained/wrapped up/revisited one week from now?

I miss the 'let's wait what the writers have in stock for us' days which have been replaced by self entitled whining of the fanbois. 'Give us everything now or we don't watch any more'. I call it the Comic Book Guy Syndrome.

Season 3 is still great entertainment and one of the best shows on television right now. What you all seem to do here is complain on a very high level. If ratings stay as they are right now it will most probably be replaced by something far worse.

I watched Seasons 1 to 3 back to back and I can say that there are far less logic holes than some fans seem to imply. A lot of the cnfusion stems from the fact that it has been nearly 9 Months since the end of Season 2 and most people already forgot most of the story.

In restrospect I think it has been a very bad move by NBC to not continue with Heroes after the strike had ended.

Wow. Watching all 3 seasons back to back to back gives you a different perspective of the story flow  :uhrr: Doesn't invalidate the opinions of the people that watched them while they airied.

Well that was an episode that didn't suck.



Having saved the past two seasons on the DVR, it does make a big difference to see it without the delays. There are quite a few old loose ends being tied up right now.

That's it. I'm done. When you have to have a narrator narrate the past scenes to tell people WTF is going on, your show officially sucks.

No your viewers do. Follow a generic forum discussion on any one of the current series. Most people can't even remember what happened last week let alone what happened last season.

Why do you get all of the 'previously on' stuff and the Lost and Heroes recap shows and stupid recap shots in the episodes themselves or people actually saying things that reiterate past events in an episode.

It's all done because most people cannot even remember what happened 10 minutes ago. If you don't do it you bleed viewers as more and more tune out because they can't follow the narrative any longer.

I'd prefer they do it like Mad Men.  Just show me clips of prior scenes that are relevant to this episode and leave out the cheesy voice over.  The narrator actually called Noah "H R G".  :awesome_for_real:

So it seems the theme for this season is to turn all the previous heroes into villains and to turn the one villain into a hero.  Well, except for Hiro since I don't believe for a second he actually killed Ando.  At least the plot is starting to come together in a way that makes a certain amount of sense.

No, it really doesn't make any sense at all.

The basic plot isn't that difficult.  Poppa Petrelli has decided for whatever reason that he wants everyone to have powers, so he initiates the theft of the two parts of the magic formula and recruits 'specials' to his cause (though most don't realize that's who their throwing their lot in with).  Mama Petrelli is trying to oppose him, largely ineffectually.  Everything else going on is just window dressing that may or may not influence the plans of one or the other senior Petrelli.  That's certainly more than what we knew an episode or two ago.  It may or may not be a good plot, but it does make a certain amount of sense.

I've almost given up. They've thrown a lot of their character development out the window from the past seasons. Hiro became an overnight asshole with no emphasis on why. I know he's obsessed with being a hero, saving the world and generally going on "missions", but seriously, they can't actually make us believe he'd do what he did in the last episode.

I don't think it's that shallow, you fickle lot. No character development? Are you fucking kidding me? That's all they've been doing.  Or, it will be the premise for Ando going villain. Doy.

Hiro hasn't turned into an asshole overnight, he's just becoming a little more savvy in the use of his powers, and a little less "Tsugoi! Supa-man!".

Wow, this show is becoming a trainwreck!

Anybody still the same person they started out as (and no, circumstances can only change so much, they can't eradicate basic personality traits)?

If Hiro did something else than faking Andos death the writers need some antiretardation medicine.
And if he did that will be a "Yawn, ANOTHER fake death" moment.

He's not using his powers though, it's all stuff that defines his character.


They're very close to shark jumping/"Lost"ing it.

Srsly, you think they're just gonna shit-can his inner self in one episode? And then you call foul over it?

The alternative is plain lazy writing because everybody who knows Hiro knows he didn't kill Ando. One whole season was his quest to undo Andos death!

Besides, Hiro as the comic book geek that he is should fucking know he does everything at the moment to make Ando his archnemesis. Straight out of the Superheroes 101 playbook.

Holy crap, you people need to stop watching TV because honestly EVERYTHING on TV sucks. You can't get away from it. Geez, next thing you know, you'll all be asking for a fun MMO!

And still talking about MMOs is fun enough to do it in forums.

Go figure!  :awesome_for_real:

Watch Mad Men if you want to see the best writing on television.  Watch Heroes if you want to watch a light entertainment popcorn show that you should never take seriously but is still more entertaining than 90% of the rest of the crap on TV.  Personally, I watch both.

My money is on Ando's death being a magic trick.  There's even some precedent for it in the novel "Saving Charlie" (yes, I read it, no, it's not great, but it's not horrible either), where he has a brief stint as a stage magician.  Stop time, swap the sword for a fake, start time, stab Ando, stop time, dump a pint of blood into his shirt, start time, pull sword out, stop time, swap sword back for original, restart time.

Daphne would be the only one who could catch him at it, and only if she was doing her speedy thing at the time.  Which she wasn't.  And Ando would be just sharp enough to play along, I think.  That or as part of the trick Hiro could have whacked him on the head or shot him up with tranquilizers to make sure he reacted appropriately.

Slyfeind is just crazy.

As for you, Nevermore, while good, Mad Men doesn't have the best writing and Heroes isn't the best light entertainment.

That is, if we're talking about truths rather than opinions. :awesome_for_real:

Or he could have stopped time as soon as he touched the sword to him, then told him the plan. Hiro didn't stab Ando that quickly.

I don't think Heroes is necessarily the best light entertainment, but it ranks up there.  It's certainly good enough to keep a comfortable position on the Tivo.  I'm at a loss as to what could have better writing on television than Mad Men, though.  Please to share, I'd like to give whatever it is a watch.

The show is careening into "So bad it's funny" territory, which is fine, but I have to admit that it is starting to test my "guilty pleasure" threshold.  Watching it with Voodoo is where most of my enjoyment is coming from this season.

I love Mad Men, but for writing I prefer Boston Legal or Californication or even Pushing Daisies (mostly because of the narrator, ok, because of the narrator).

Pushing Daisies has the best writing on TV right now. From a pure wordsmith perspective, it is art. The narrator helps, obviously.

That's because I stroke your manly chest while we watch it.

My wife has told me she's done with watching Heroes.  "This seems a lot like the previous seasons."  Then she goes on to point out the same dopey heroes making the same dopey mistakes and the fact that MAYJAH was so prevalent in the first episode.

I'm not sure I can watch this alone.

I love how she goes from being a FOB to being fluent in English (with no accent) in only one season.

Blah, people took what I said as thinking Hiro did kill Ando. I'm just pointing out that it's god awful story telling. Most of it is. Nikki was created? Sylar the brother?

Thank god Dexter and Entourage are still :drill:

Only the NBC edition of Heroes had the narrator by the way. The canadian and syndicated broadcasts had the standard 'previously on heroes' intro.

Seems to me that NBC is getting a bit nervous.

If they were just going to kill mayjah (is that really how they spell her fucking name?) off, they really should have done it last season, before she started wearing skimpy clothing and everyone realized she was smoking hot.  Now instead of cheering that they finally got rid of the emo-death chick, I find myself a bit sad that she won't be prancing around in skimpy outfits anymore.  I'm so conflicted.

lol.

Episode was weak. They've gone from telling a story to perpetuating actor(ress) contracts. It always sucks when it happens but at least it's obvious a mile away. They realized their base wasn't big enough, or wasn't growing enough or some shit, so focus group'd their way into simpler storyline, transparent twists and change for the sake of change just to occasionally interest those otherwise chatting with their kids/spouse/friends or folding laundry or some crap. They just need to move this to around 3pm, or whatever slot doesn't compete with Oprah.

I'll catch this thread weekly and maybe watch the episode if anyone notes anything is worth tuning in for.

Can Hiro bring other people up to speed while he has time stopped?  I'm pretty sure that only worked on "Out of This World."   :grin:

No, but he can touch them, then stop time. My feeling is he touched the sword to Ando, stopped time, they both went for sake, chatted about how they were going to fool the Bad Guys, got a retractable sword and some fake blood, had lunch, went back, rehearsed it a few times, then unstopped time and went "Behold You Must Be Sacrifice Ando." "No Hiro You Has Betrayed Me."

I don't remember him ever doing the "touch someone, stop time" trick before.  Remember when he was trying to convince Charlie that he could really stop time, and he had to do all these little tricks to convince her?  If he could have just stopped time with her, no problem.  I seem to remember him having similar problems with Ando at some point.

The only two people I can remember him ever being able to talk to with time stopped are Daphne and Peter, both of whom have their own abilities that allow them to manipulate time.

I think this show's writing sucks but yet at the same time I hold some hope that it could be repaired from current train wreck status before it is cancelled.

How to heal Heroes (http://tv.msn.com/tv/how-to-heal-heroes/?GT1=28103&silentchk=1&)

Maureen Ryan: That's It, I'm Done (http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/10/heroes-nbc-syla.html)

Both offer good ways to re-rail this show's current plot by comic book committee gone wrong.

I'll give Pushing Daisies a try.  Never really considered it before since the premise didn't grab me.  I only have basic cable so Californication is out.  I'd have been watching that and True Blood if I could.  As for Boston Legal, I watched it the first couple of seasons and didn't like it much.  I'm not really a big fan of David E. Kelly.

I always enjoy David E. Kelley stuff in the beginning.  As his series' ages, however, I find the plots, dialog, just about everything becomes tediously silly and I end up not watching.  Boston Legal has been at this point for sometime now.  Boston Public, Ally McBeal, LA Law, etc.   Every one of them ended this way for me.  The only one that didn't get there was Picket Fences and, I assume, that's because it didn't have the chance.  I don't know if he wanders off at some point and gives over the ideas to others and doesn't bother paying close attention or over-seeing scripts, or maybe I just get tired of the style. 

Hiro can teleport people to different times/places by touching them, though.

Yeah, he can definitely teleport other people, but he's never done the stopping time bit with someone else.  And I don't think his time-travelling abilities are sufficiently finely tuned to the point where he could bring Ando to another place and time, do a bunch of stuff, and then bring him back to the exact same instant.  I'm still going with a tranq dart in the butt.  (For dramatic reasons it's probably going to be something that doesn't kill Ando but further drives a wedge between them; a plan that Ando's not consulted on and is possibly dangerous/painful to him would qualify.)

Weaksauce episode. Parts of it are good, but the Mohinder arc is just killing me. It's so goddamn dumb. Why is he kidnapping people and wrapping them in phlegm? Is he becoming an ACTUAL Spider-Man? For all his talk of helping people through 2 seasons, he gets a shot in the arm and becomes Jack the fucking Ripper? Does not compute.

The Hiro stuff has been real uneven too. I thought Hiro had gotten his stupid out by going to the past and getting his father's instruction. But he's still just as stupid/naive as he was first season? What was endearing then is annoying now because we've seen him act better than this. Does not compute.

Vortex man was cool. Too bad he can't stay. Making Sylar a hero? I'm just not sold on it yet.

I thought they were going for The Fly, but yeah, that arc gets the Official WTF Award.

The whole Mohinder transformation thing is turning out to be a dud (why doesn't Maya feel all that crap on his back when she hugs him, anyway?) but the one thing I like that's linked to him is he really fucks with all that precognition it seems like half the cast has.  Everyone with all these visions of the future, dreams of the future, painting the future and outright traveling to the future, they all think that the magic two-part formula is what causes the dystopia.  And there's Mohinder coming up with a formula all on his own.  It just amuses me that they could all be wrong about the cause just because they can see the effect.

The Mohinder arc got off on the wrong foot, simply due to having him shoot up... on a random pier?  I thought he was supposed to be smart.  Lazy writers ignoring character in favor of "plot", a quick road to mediocrity and beyond.

I think the whole point with Mohinder is that he was tired of being abused by people like Sylar and thought this was his key to making him an equal.  Of course the consequences were epic fail.

I get that. Only Mohinder has never struck me as a COMPLETE dumbass, which is what he'd have to be to just inject himself with SuperSauce.

Much like in the first season with the nuclear explosion.  First it was a bomb, then it was Ted, then it was Sylar, then it was Peter.   :why_so_serious: 

As such, I'll be a little disappointed if the Mohinder formula doesn't itself turn out to be a misdirection.

 :-o

so...adam...sucks to be you?

One of the complaints I've heard about the show recently "I hate it that characters die, but you know they aren't really dead."

Yea, don't think that applies in Adam's case here.

My biggest current complaint about this show? Near the end of the hour, the commercial breaks are longer than the bits of show between them.

That's what Tivo is for!

So at first I thought maybe Petrelli Sr. just sort of consumed Adam's lifeforce or something, but him stealing Peter's powers at the end it looks like he stole Adam's powers too.  Must run in the family.  At least the plot is still moving along fairly well.  Better than Season 2, that's for sure.  The only big problem I've had with this season so far is the characterizations of Peter, Sylar and Suresh.  At least now hopefully we won't have to deal with EVIL PETER anymore.  As annoying as Emo Peter could be, Evil Rebel Without a Clue Peter was worse.  Still liking African Precog and Flashette the most out of the characters this season.

The moment Suresh shot himself up full of chemicals on the dock, I thought it made perfect sense. This show has always been about putting the characters in situations such that they can either become a hero or a villain. Suresh strikes me as the kind of person who talks big about saving the world, but if given power, really doesn't know how to handle it.

I'm fucking pissed they brought Adam back just to kill him off in the next episode, he was one of my favorite characters.

Also, fucking time paradoxes.  If Peter doesn't have any powers, then he could have never traveled back in time to tell him fucked things get, which means he never traveled forward and took Sylar's power, which...oh fuck it.

More Hiro comedy time travel please, less  :uhrr: time travel.

If Sylar and Peter are going to keep fighting I want one Epic battle between both of them before they start to get along.

Oh and two 'The Wire' characters on Heroes FTW.

Do you really think Peter's not going to get his powers back somehow before the season is over (and WELL before he would ever go back as Future Peter)?

...really?

Overall, I liked this episode.  The "Ando's not dead" was okay, and expected, but the stuff that happened after that was classic.  "What could one minute hurt?"  Also, I like Papa Petrelli's version of the gain powers ability. 

I don't think they thought any of the time travel shit through.  I'm sure at one point someone tried to storyboard it with pictures and string connecting them, but eventually strangled himself with the string in some futile attempt to make the story coherent.

I mean hell, future Peter was killed by Claire, with past Peter standing RIGHT FUCKING THERE, so you think that when past peter goes back to the present, when he becomes future Peter he'd be all like "o hai, this is where I get shot in the face! *duck*"  Of course, if he ducked, then unless he told past peter that he needed to remember to duck at that exact moment he would die but then he...... :ye_gods:

That's an example of why I'm wondering about the multiple timeline thing. If this was a valid sci-fi show that's where it'd net out. Some sort of huge lesson about not being able to affect the future because all you're really doing is affect one possible future. Once you get into multiverse infinite time stream stuff, it all actually makes sense.

But this is a mainstream show, so it'll all probably be Suresh's Dad's dream or some such.

While I swore off the show last week, I caved and watched last nights'. I actually enjoyed it a lot. Pacing is spot on. They'd have drawn out everything last season, particular Tracy and Nathan being locked up by Suresh. Instead it all worked well. And literal laugh-out-loud at the Hiro/Painter stuff. Very glad that's back.

Plot stuff:

- Peter losing his powers: I wonder how much of his power to absorb other's powers is a power unto itself. If it's innate, he'll just get them right back. If not, he's gonna need to visit the good doctor. Perhaps instead of Suresh, Pa Patrelli dangles Peter's powers in front of him to get Peter to do his bidding.

- Claire/Puppetmaster stuff: this was the one part I thought moved a bit too slow. I feel like the Claire stuff in the last three episodes was all too slow (though for the first episode "Claire, that's disgusting" was totally worth it).

- Sylar: Him trying to be a good guy is actually believable now. It happened too fast in the beginning but water under the bridge. That fight should have been more epic though.

- Peter: not reading his father's mind: dumb. Stupid dumb kid with too many powers he doesn't know dickall about.

I got secretly hopeful that since they killed my favorite actor, they'd 'surprise' us and kill peter the fuck off too.

Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb.

I defended the show quite a bit over the last few weeks but last episode lost it for me.

The Hiro story was absolutely hilarious they should do more like that. Killing Adam was stupid, they should rather kill stupid Emo Peter. Also does everybody with powers have to be related to everybody else? Those Petrellis sure breed like rabbits.

Peter's Father stealing his powers is all kinds of WTF. The whole power thing is seriously fucked up. If it's genetic then you shouldn't be able to steal/remove them. If it's magic you shouldn't be able to give someone powers by changing his genes. Also they should just seriously have thought about what powers actually work and what don't.

Hiro's time travelling works because although he can travel to the future and the past it doesn't do him much good. Every time he travels to the past he figures out that he is not actually able to change anything because his travelling to the past already was part of the timeline. Adam already existed in his timeline he HAD to travel to the past to make the present right. Travelling to the future just helps him see WHAT happens but never HOW it came to be.

Well New York blows up, but is it Sylar, Peter or something else that does it?

Also Hiro has a believable code of honor which means you can sell some of his decisions as using his power responsibly.

Peter's power (and Sylar's for that matter) are just too powerful and both persons therefore always have to act stupid or selfish in order for the writer's to not write themselves into a corner.

They seriously need an experienced table top roleplaying group to playtest their abilities. In my group we would use the powers so creatively that Season 3 would already be over by now.

If they did that then they wouldn't have to let people act like complete and utter morons just so that a rogue power doesn't kill their precious plot.

Also the cast is getting out of hand. They don't know what to do with half of them but somehow have the urge to feature them in every episode. A big cast isn't necessarily bad they just have to present them better.  Focus on one or two plots at once and switch them between episodes. So one episode could feature Hiro and Ando as plot one and Claire, HRG and family as plot two and the next episode you have the Petrellis and Parkman/Daphne. Everything else is just filler at the moment.

I feel the writers don't even know what to do with Nikki/Tracey/Jessica, Nathan and Mohinder or any of the supporting cast.

Yea, they sure dropped that Nathan-as-Disciple-budding-rightwing-Senator thing right quick didn't they.  :awesome_for_real: However, I wonder if that's more to do with contemporary politics than anything else. How long ago were these episodes recorded?

I agree the cast is getting unweildy. In addition to bringing in tabletop gamers they should consult with a soap opera writer. You've got whole plotlines that skip entire weeks. That can work. Heroes is the traditional drama/soap that retains viewers so well, but they need to get better at being that so they can shed folks who are looking for something more substantive.

Peter's innate power was dumb to begin with.  The show would've been a lot better if they were all at X-Men power levels and they cut out any non-Hiro-centered time travel.  But they made one guy Superman, and now they don't know what to do with him.

Actually sounds very similar to the actual Superman problem   :grin:

Like all of the other superheroes, Peter needs a foil or achille's heel. I still like the idea of his powers being forgettable. Unlike Sylar who groks a power and retains forever, Peter should have been able to borrow anyone's ability but for it to fade over some time. The first season worked well for him because he was figuring stuff out for most of it like everyone else was. But now he's a god in a see of one trick ponies. They've been screwing it up by first making him unable to handle things (the future stuff from last season, the Sylar thing from this, then trying to make it interesting with Pa taking it all), but ultimately they'll likely just hamfist aforementioned achille's heal and it'll be dumb. Unless it's my idea, then it's not dumb  :oh_i_see:

Also, can anyone tell me if Pa Patrelli was ever in the show before? I tried looking but got lazy. It's just I was sorta surprised by the setup for his emergence this season, from basically nowhere. And if he was in the beginning, what took him so long to get to anyone who could take him off the bed? It would be cool if it turned out he was behind Sylar trying to get Claire's power in season 1 so that he could then absorb Sylar. But I really don't give the writers that much credit.

He was supposed to have been dead, from suicide.  Mama Petrelli/The Company probably tried to kill him somehow.  In the first season, when Linderman was trying to convince Nathan to help him in his plot, he talked of the group of heroes he had been part of, and how they'd saved the world, but that the group fell apart when some lost their way and became greedy or some such.  That could have been somewhat truthful.  Linderman also said Papa Petrelli was 'weak'. 

Monday night's episode was a significant upgrade from the previous week's. I'm still not sold on the Mohinder arc, but at least they are going somewhere with it. The Hiro/Precog interaction was fantastic. More of that, please. This was the first episode where I genuinely believed Sylar's attempt at a transformation, and wanted more of that as well. Yes, we definitely need a longer Peter/Sylar fight. Hell, we need more big fuckers flying against each other type of fight than we get. Shame that Adam had to bite it. It looks to me as if Peter and Sylar got the same power from Papa, only with different emotional facets. Sylar's works off of aggression, off of seeing something and understanding how it works. Peter's used an emotional trigger without any need but proximity, and Papa feeds off contact. I'm thinking that Papa's power are only temporary, but removing Adam's ability to heal himself meant he aged to what his body should have been. Either that or Peter will have to start collecting powers again.

The obvious logic hole is that that room is filled with all the powers and all he has to do is get emotional.

The biggest problem I have with the redemption of Sylar isn't so much the idea that he can be redeemed, it's that he's shown absolutely no remorse over what he's done in the past.  Not that I want emo-Sylar.  But if we're to believe that he really wants to become a better person, he needs to at least recognize the evil he's done in the past.  

Part of the problem could be that it doesn't seem like Zach Quinto has much of an acting range.  He makes a good sociopath because he's got the whole 'I don't give a fuck about you' attitude down pat.  Unfortunately, whenever he tries to convince someone he's trying to be good and/or trying to control himself, he still gives off that 'I don't really give a fuck about you' vibe.  It just doesn't seem sincere to me.

To give the writers some credit(ha!) I like to think of Sylar as an alcoholic who knows he's done bad things, who wants to change but who is still blaming the bottle for all his troubles. It was the booze talking, the hunger doing those things, not him. If that's the case he's really not reformed at all, he hasn't hit any sort of rock bottom and a relapse comes easily. I would like to think the writers have put this much thought into it but I'm still hanging onto my hopes for this show.

That's pretty much how I read it as well.  All his talk about "the hunger" is just his way of dissociating himself from all the bad shit he's done.

This week was pretty good.  Parkman came off as a bit of a doofus with Daphne, but he is such a  :oh_i_see: its all part of why I like the dude.

Most of the cast still does stupid things though.  They really do need to have things run as an RPG campaign.  Peter and Sylar's PCs woulda taken over the world by now, or at least taken each other out of action permanently.

Except that it's affected Peter as well, so it would appear to be well established that it's linked to the power itself.

Which now begs the question, is Petrelli senior going to start lopping open brains now?

I've just started watching this season, had pretty much forgotten most of 2 so the lack of resolution on those plot points doesn't bother me too much. Having read this thread I can see how having the time to nitpick some of the stuff that's happened starts to kill the show. I think Jeff has a point that spending all your time rehashing what's happened and delving into every possible action a character could have taken is going to kill off enjoyment of this show. There are a few cases of genuine stupidity but personally I think they handle Hiro's time travel thing quite well simply by making Hiro, well, Hiro. His attempt to capture the African precog was fucking brilliant.

I definitely buy Sylar's conversion, Mama Petrelli was just what he's been wanting since Season 1. A mother who thinks he's awesome and special for being who he is, he didn't really snap fully until his (adopted) mother called him a monster. Also like any addict I think Peter telling him there was a future him who had overcome his problem genuinely has given him some hope, though I agree I don't think he's really hit rock bottom yet. I think he's getting set up for a redemption so that he can fall way back down later. Either that or Peter falls and Gabriel gets to be the new hero (would that confuse viewers way too fucking much?)

Also HRG is a selfish fuck and I think Claire is starting to catch on to that. He doesn't give a fuck about anyone except his family. That is his one and only concern and I think Claire has had a little too much exposure to Peter to accept that this makes him a good man or father.

Definitely better this week.  The Hiro/Precog stuff was fucking brilliant (1 minute earlier, lol).  Sylar becomes more believable, I actually find myself sympathizing with him a bit.  Mohinder....eh.  Out of character - but then again, the writers have a way of explaining things well after they introduce a new problem, so I'll be patient with that line for now.

I wasn't liking Daphne much in the early going (except for, well, the whole boobs thing), and Parkman has always been a doofus, but somehow I'm interested to see where it's going.  Daphne is growing on me a bit.  And, boobs.

The time travel stuff doesn't really bother me at all.  You people need to be a little better at suspending disbelief, to be honest.  Especially when you consider that time travel is nothing but, you know, a completely unproven theory that nobody can possibly know how it is supposed to work.  


Agreed with all your points NowhereMan, but doubly so on this.  I kinda like Noah, but I get tired of him claiming that he's just doing it to protect his family.  A big part of it is him wanting to protect himself.

Oh, I'm sure it's linked, but he's like an alcoholic blaming his problems on the drink and not taking any responsibility for his own choices.

I'd say "No" to that idea. Peter had been around Sylar numerous times and should have picked up the power via presence, but it wasn't until Sylar taught him how to understand how the power worked that the hunger clicked in. Yes, I know that Peter needs to know how to use a power before he can use it, but I'm thinking this condition (understanding how things work) is the trigger for the hunger.

Plus, now that I think of it, Pa Petrelli should have Peter's "just need to stand near you to get the powers" thing going now. If they had him zap his son first Adam wouldn't have had to die.  :ye_gods:

Has it always been the case that NBC only allows the viewing of this particular season's full episodes? I'd like to rewatch some of season 1, they're not on the site, and I'm guessing they want me to buy the full season on DVD or some such (other option is iTunes I suppose).

Or Netflix.

Netflix is how I watch almost all my TV now (at least whatever I can't get on Hulu).  It's a hell of a lot cheaper than buying each episode on iTunes.

Nobody watched it last night? How am I supposed to know whether it's worth my time?! :grin:

Last nights was pretty meh, just seemed like a lot of useless filler to me.

It was kinda meh.  Some cool parts, but a lot more dumb stuff that dragged down the cool.  Plus, we get to wait two weeks for another flashback episode, which comes at probably the worst time possible.  Split them up and stick them into relevant parts of present time episodes, another forced 'one year ago' episode just serves to kill what momentum they'd built up. 

Oh, and they're apparently going to be building on that comment Sylar made to Elle about her possibly being the one most responsible for what he became or whatever it was.  So....meh. 

It wasn't too bad for an episode with a lot of Mohinder and not enough Hiro.  Parkman leveled up.  There are a couple of spies and traitors.  The future has already been changed unless Peter somehow gets his powers back.  The pieces are almost set up for a big finale, it seems.  It should be happening in 3 or 4 more episodes.

Yeah, filler episode.  I like Elle okay, so that was all fine.  Kinda fun that her powers are shorting out.

Still can't tell where they are going with Sylar, but that thing he did near the end with Peter had me all  :ye_gods: and then I was all  :awesome_for_real:

Sylar's really growing on me, I like Parkman's subplot, but everything else was just kinda meh. I can't believe Mohinder could ever knock Sylar out...unless Sylar wanted to be knocked out, HMMM. I'm not thrilled about another flashback episode. I feel like we know everything we need to know, and any new developments can be explained by moving forward, not moving back.

Some thoughts.

-Parkman using new powers is awesome, parkman not reading daphne's mind is retarded.

-Petrelli senior seems like such a one-dimensional 'rawr i'm the big bad guy' that it's silly. They should have spent at least a minute trying to develop his character.

-Sylar, I really don't like where they are going with him. They are blaming everything he did on his powers but suddenly he gets some friends and he's a good guy?! He a god damned serial killer, or did we forget what happened to maya's brother even without "the hunger"  The whole point of sylar was that he was a heartless, analytical psychopath. He didn't kill for money or for some twisted morals like linderman, he killed for power and anyone that would get in the way of that. Suresh senior was also someone who "the hunger" wouldn't explain him killing.  They had made the perfect boogeyman in Sylar, one that could scare even villains but instead of pursuing that they opted instead to make him choose a side in this heroes/villains war when he never should have been on either.

-Maya was annoying but I'll miss that mocha beauty if she leaves for good.

-Fire mom, seriously we get it...you have fire powers. Do you really NEED to be holding out your flaming hand every time you meet someone new? It's like the annoying guy in mmo's that just HAS to show you his new epic weapon, dude calm down.

I agree about fire mom. I was thinking the same thing last night. Maybe they are trying to show that she is insecure and desperate for validation?

I liked the episode because it was all about positioning people for something big in the near future. Just as in previous seasons the characters are starting to converge into groups that will (most likely) all end up in the same place for a big event closing of the season. I just hope it's a good close and not a shark jump.

It's not jus the fire mom.  They are constantly referrencing all the powers ad nauseum.  If I hear Marlo say he gets stronger because of the fear one more time I'm going to scream.  Claire whines aout not feeling pain at least three times an ep.  They repeated the "wy didn't peter die" line three times. We get it okay?  I think the writers think the audience is as dumb as the characters.

I think some NBC exec told the writers: "Your show is too confusing!  :uhrr:" and the constant reminders on the character's powers and the stupid voice-over at the beginning of the episodes is the result.

Edit: grammar snake

Now that I think about it, a flashback episode could be interesting if we see Sylar's descent into evil, or seed of evil, or whatnot. And yeah, that narration needs to go away. We don't have to hear that Elle lost control of her powers. We can see it happen on that convenient screen thingie that came with our television sets.

This is where the flashback episode could help.  Remember, Sylar started off the same way.

This. Or they need to ensure each episode clearly explain who is/does what for new people or those who are lapsed viewers. This is executive "show ratings don't improve because of the audience you already have" thinking.

Further, on flashback episodes, they're needed to cover origin stories that are covered through the online graphic novel that only a niche of the third-season viewers are reading. So while you can skip over origins on the TV show, you need to get some people up to speed to answer the questions like "why is Pa Patrelli evil" or "how did Sylar go from 2+ seasons of sociopath to good guy". There's also origin stories they don't explain online at all, waiting for the show to do it first.

Finally got around to it. It wasn't bad. While it was definitely a setup for future things, there's some interesting bits:

- Sylar didn't want to lose his powers to Dad but was still a family man after all
- Dad's as manipulative as Mom
- Primatech is still around at all. Wasn't sure about that one nor the fact that HRG was still working with them. I thought he was a lonewolf.

The flashback episode coming is more palpable because it looks like it jumps around a lot, like the whole thing is Hiro's spirit walk.

So I hadn't been reading the comics (totally forgot about them), the amount of extra story and colour to the world is :uhrr: I like that there's extra stuff out there but I do kinda feel like not reading these before really left a lot of the world out for me. I guess there seems something odd about telling so much story for a TV show in online comics, but then I guess there's more than just the show and... I just feel a bit :uhrr:. I cannot decide whether I think it's a good thing or not.

My take is if you don't think supplemental material is a good thing, don't look at it.

Jesse Alexander and Jeph Loeb let go (http://comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=18664).


For those who don't follow comics, Jeph Loeb is a fairly well known writer in the industry (and was also a writer/producer on the second season of Lost and a few seasons of Smallville), probably best known for writing Batman: The Long Halloween.  In recent times his writing has gone from decent (and overrated) to abysmal.  In particular he did a short run on Wolverine, that I can say without hyperbole are some of the worst comics I've ever read.  I don't want to sit here and bash the guy (he's been through some hard times in recent years, and don't like seeing anyone lose their job), but I think as far as Heroes goes, this can only be an improvement.

I'd forgotten Loeb had written some of the recent Wolverine stuff.  That explains a lot.  Yeah, it sucks that he lost his job, but...oh well.  Maybe they can get Heroes back on track now. 

Yep.  He's also currently writing the critically panned Red Hulk storyline.

Is this the real problem with the show though? Season one was pretty damned good, but it had the benefit of being an origin story with a whole bunch of unknowns and a big cataclysmic problem a bunch of people weren't sure how to deal with. Season two seems like it was affected by the writer's strike but also didn't have much direction and a ho-hum main issue. Season three feels a bit more like season one in that you've got the same faces but with some origin-story-like issues (particularly Mohinder, Hiro not wanting to timewarp, Sylar).

I'm basically wondering how much of this is due to writers going from great to suck from first to third season versus the formula of the show really not able to be extended versus the office MBAs micromanaging focus groups and weekly ratings resulting in recurring from-the-hip course changes that destroy consistency.

Something's been going on, but I'm not convinced it's the same writers that gave us the first season.

Well, while Loeb might have been writing for it since season 1, he wasn't the only one.  One of the writers for the first season was Bryan Fuller, who left to do Pushing Daisies.  Considering how awesome I've found the first season and the few episodes of the second of that I've had time to watch so far, I'm thinking he was a big part of what made the first season work.  He was apparently the one who wrote the "Company Man" episode, which I thought was one of the high points of the first season.  Add in he was behind Dead Like Me and involved in Wonderfalls and Amazing Screw-On Head.  So really, I'm thinking he was the lifeblood of the first season. 

Get Showtime and HBO. Bump some real threads.  :why_so_serious:

Comin from the guy who made the Smallville thread...

Smallville is much more entertaining, even without Lex. Heroes is dogshit.

[edit] Actually, let me put it this way. Smallville has managed to have some life in it in it's 8th season. Heroes already lost me on it's 2nd. And a lot of other people.

Oh wow. Smallville died after its third season, when they started going "OMG NEXT EPISODE WE REALLY MEAN IT CLARK WILL FLY AND HAVE A SUPER SUIT AND FIGHT DOOMSDAY AND EVERYBODY WILL REALLY REALLY CALL HIM SUPERMAN WITH MUSIC BY JOHN WILLIAMS!!!" and the "next episode" turned out to be Clark hanging around in the bathroom for an hour trying to poo without making the toilet explode. After they did this for three years I kinda gave up on it.

Which has been total shit. Loeb has REALLY REALLY lost what little he had and probably needs to take a fucking vacation to recharge his writing battery. I don't see him off of Heroes as a bad thing at all.

They are definitely building for a fall finale. Big fucking power war is what it ought to be. We still don't really have any kind of good motivation for Peter's dad being evil - the "give everyone powers" thing seems rather stupid. Would you really want some of the guys you used to drink with in high school to have super powers, especially when you can't control what powers they get?

I was thinking about that, and I'm not so sure it ends up being random.  In the flash-forward episode, we saw everyone having the ability to fly.  And we already know that Nathan's flight ability was introduced artificially.  Coincidence?

The departures of Lex and Lana have been the only positives for the show since the writers can't recycle the same conflicts and relationship drama for the eigth year in a row now.

Cute as she may be, Lana won't be missed.. But I didn't mind the rehash of Lex conflict. It was hilarious. In fact, I think that guy has like a record or something for most "knocked out unconscious" scenes in the history of TV.  :grin:

That's right, it was Mohinder's formula that had random powers. They haven't said how the Petrelli formula works. Or if Peter and Sylar are results of the experiments that produced this formula.

Mohinder's formula doesn't even necessarily work randomly.  So far he's only used it on himself, right?  Maybe the Mohinder formula turns anyone who uses it into Bugman, and the Petrelli formula turns everyone who uses it into Nathan.

I think that's unlikely. Mohinder himself stated that the powers that would be induced were random depending on the person (at least I think he did). I'm also not sure that papa Petrelli's plan is to give everyone powers, like you said it's a stupid plan and I don't think they're setting him up to be that dumb. Giving them to everyone may be an unintended consequence of what he's planning but I think putting together his own army for world domination seems far more likely (if a mite predictable, I mean classic).

Umm, wasn't this exact storyline done on the 4400? 

Man I miss the 4400.   :sad:

Been wondering about that. Will it be that he wanted to give everyone powers so he could keep sucking them up to continue making himself more uber? Peter could do it, Sylar had the hunger, Nathan seems to be the black sheep in that he can only do one thing. Dad being able to eat siphon powers makes me wonder if the whole Cain and Abel thing they're doing with Peter and Sylar will be due to Dad's ability splitting on his two actual kids (one got absorption and the other got he hunger).

For the first time, I was really NOT happy with last night's episode.  The way the tried to tie everything together was simply too much to believable...they've stretched it before, but this was waaay out of bounds.  Also, the acting and production values of this particular episode were just unbelievably shitty.  The whole papa Petrelli storyline might be interesting if it wasn't so poorly executed.

Sylar/Elle - again, a possibly interesting plot line, but so cheesily executed that I was cringing.  What the fuck happened to the acting and prod values from Season 1?  Hell, even 2 was better on that front.

And that shit that looks to be happening to Hiro in the end....let's just say it Better Fucking Not.

I was extremely upset to see Usutu lose his head.  :ye_gods:

This!  :mob:

Yes. Usutu dying really sucked. Other than that, I thought this was probably their strongest episode this season. It really brought back the old character-driven feel of season 1. I especially liked how all this time, we've seen the "Heroes" falling from grace, making bad decisions. This gave us a chance to see the "Villains" at least once in their lives try to do the right thing.

Right, let's just straight copy comic books and add tons of retcon BULLSHIT to the show.

So much wrong in this episode but the most glaring offender was adding the father patrelli to a scene he wasn't even in from season one. WTF

If they're taken away Hiro's powers, then it looks like the writers have eliminated the powers that were giving them the most problems story-wise (Hiro's and Peter's).  If they ever get powers back, I expect them to not be the same ones they had before.

Can't sleep. The latest episode was a piece of dogshit and the lore was fucking terrible.

Do not want.

They could resurrect this if Hiro slingshotted around the earth to recharge his time powers and then landed in 1969 San Franscisco, where only a whale signing at a correct frequency could stop some satellite from destroying the earth. 

That might be true, but it would be the straw that broke the camel's back.  Without time travelling Hiro, this show has less than no chance.

Meh. The abilities will all be given back eventually. There's no way they're that stupid, RIGHT? Seriously though, I bet Syler gets them all of their powers back or they burst free and go back into the people once the new crappy villain is killed.

I think the thing that pisses me off the most about papa Petrelli is that the guy playing him absolutely sucks, and all of his crap is so poorly acted.  And don't get me started about how he was just a mind-reading/altering douche before the accident, and now he's conveniently decided to steal everyone's powers and be uber bad.  Ugh.  He needs to die, like next week.  You know what?


Or something.

Isn't Papa Petrelli the Bail Bonds Guy from jackie Brown?

BTW they don't need to take Hiro's powers, because he has a code of honor that prevents him from abusing his powers. They even did a whole Season1/Season 2 story line (ending with the death of his father) to give the character a plausible backstory for not using/ not abusing his powers.

Peter/Sylar/Pa Petrellis power is just plainly broken and shouldn't even have been introduced in the first place..

What this show really needs though is to use those people more that actually can act. This means less Peter/Sylar/Cheerleader more Nathan/HRG/Parkman/Daphne/Ma Petrelli.

It's funny that you say that because I find Nathan and the mom totally intolerable. I prefer Sylar to either of them. But really, all 3 are just ugh.

I like Supernatural more than Heroes now.

To be honest most characters on the show have become totally unbearable. Hiro/Ando, that african precog dude and parkman/daphne and HRG/Sylar were the only watchable storylines and characters in my opinion this season.

But if I have a choice between different unbearable characters I'd choose to see those that are being played by actors and not the 'I only have one facial expression and mode off speech' duo Hayden Panettiere/Milo Ventimiglia.

Did you just ask to see LESS of Hayden Panettiere?

You shut your filthy goddamn mouth.

Bite your tongue, boy - that's Robert Motherfucking Forster you're talking about.

Usutu wont be dead -- it was all a foreshadowing dream Hiro had.  I hope.

Blame it on the direction then, but every scene he is in absolutely stinks, IMO.

He looks like a hobo they gave a suit and a shave before pushing on to the set.

He's Banyon, guys! Come on.


Heh, just found out he and I share a birthday (different year, doy).

I got some more good news fer y'all.

If Pushing Daisies goes under, Heroes will cannabalize it for lost creative nutrients

http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2008/11/heroes-1.html

If Pushing Daisies gets canceled for Heroes, someone needs to stab a motherfucker.

What a shit episode. I think I'm done.

Can't figure out what I thought of that one.  Some good, some bad.  Better than last week, though.

Anything was better than last week. This was still shit though. Right now we're rummaging through through an ESL class trying to find the author of the next great american novel.

God this show is crap.

I suppose it's only fitting that I can blame the same guy who fucked up Lost and Smallville for fucking up this. Loeb has the fucking touch of death.

Can't really argue.

That bites. But I'm not surprised either. Even the graphic novels have been getting worse.

Way way too much soap opera sexual attraction shit in this one.


This show needs a great big hero on villain fight that blows shit up so terribly bad.

I was waiting for Elle and Sylar making some pottery together. It was that bad!

Well I am about to give up hope on even trying to convince people that the show is worth saving because everyone's turning against it so harshly.

Admittedly I have stopped watching it myself even when I think there's nothing else I wanna watch in that general timeframe! I would rather play solitaire!

Holy shit, the only thing worse than that episode appears to be what I see in the preview for next week.

Uh, Zachary Quinto without a shirt?  :drillf:

She lightning bolted it right off of him, leaving his pants completely unharmed.

Maybe it's just me but if I were female and had that power and wanted revenge on the guy who murdered my dad I think I'd aim a bit lower.

That's the beauty of watching it on the NBC site (in addition to being able to multitask through the crappy parts). They don't show the previews, so you don't know that things are only getting worse until you watch the next episode  :grin:

Funny that there's enough room for a B-movies about heroes (http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/push/) but not enough to call it Heroes  :awesome_for_real:

It's your job to stab a motherfucker now.

GO STAB SOME MOTHERFUCKERS, DUDE (do not stab me please)

STAB STAB (someone else)

i am very upset about this

Yeah.  If there is one superpower they could add to save the show, its actual writing talent. 

Why do people still watch this?

This series of Heroes has been moved way back late into the evening in Australia - that's unheard-of, it's Heroes, it used to rate its tits off.

Yet again I am in opposite from everyone else land.  I actually am enjoying the season far more than I did in the beginning.
Though I agree Daphne getting all googly for Parkman and his widdle chubby wubby face (If they ever make a new Spaceballs movie he is SOOO a Mawg...) was a bit too abrupt and quick.

I had no problem with Sylar and Veronica Mars hotness though.  Mainly cuz Kristen Bell is smokin and her character has pretty much been shown to be fucked up mentally from the start anyhow.
(And the previous week was part of her and Sylar's continuing retcon into interesting characters.  Too bad its doing things like comics though which REAAALLLLY stretches believability in the process.  Comic book writers do it all the time sadly.  And we are supposed to pay 3.99 US now for 22 monthly pages of this kinda shite?  Riiight....)

Unsure what to think.  Moderate improvement, I guess.  Seems like they are trying to undo a bunch of their mistakes, which may be a good thing in the long term.  I'm genuinely curious to see how they will resolve the loss of powers.  Maybe they'll swap them around a bit.

The scenes with Clare and her daddy were annoying, however.  Make up your fucking minds, already.

I LOL'd hard when Parkman kept doing that silly head tilt and when Daphne came out of the room on crutches. Both just looked ridiculous especially the crutches.

The Canadian preview revealed a bit too much about next weeks episode and I can see things either going really well or really bad depending on who they kill off. (If they even go that far)

I hereby predict that they will all get their powers back the moment the moon shuffles over and gives the sun some space.

Sylar and Clair could both die since their actors look to be heading on to bigger things.

The eclipse scream deus ex machina.  At very least why wouldn't the the old heroes know about the the eclipses?

I thought the head tilt thing was genuinely funny, because they were poking a bit of fun at themselves.

The Daphne twist caught me off guard, and it was a fairly clever resolution to the personal problem they were leading up to.  But for fuck sake, make the bitch practice some more on the damn things before you shoot the scene, okay?  She looked like a person who had never even seen crutches before, let alone had tried them herself.

So last nights episode was only "really bad" not "fucking horrible".

Zain, its ok that you play with dolls and lots toys all over the place and have questionable taste. But this season is bad beyond belief. The writing just went down the drain.

"It's Coming" sheesh. HORRIBLE!

If my girlfriend didn't demand I watch it with her, it would have been off my DVR quite a while ago.

Yeah, I'm veeeerrrry close to chucking this series.  It's been one of my favorites, but after last season, the slow start of this one and the lightning-bolt burning a shirt away love sickness, I'm nearly done. 

I'm on the fence as well. This episode finally made me figure out the problem. It's not just that there's too much soap opera stories bleeding into the narrative (with the who loves who shit). It's that the whole framing of the show has gone soap opera. The way the camera will shift from one person to the other (during the Elle/Sylar/Arthur scene), the way the characters recap what's been going on every time they come back from commercial and even some of the dialogue. It's way too soap opera and not nearly enough comic book action. Go ahead and dragon punch a motherfucker, goddamnit.

I went from having this on while I do something else to fast forwarding through the dumb parts to deleting it from my DVR as of yesterday. Feh.

It stems from a lack of focus in the story and a lack of consistency in the characterizations, both signs of bad, bad writing.  At this point it's very obvious the writers don't really have any idea where they're going with the story.  They're just making shit up as they go along.  Can we get Bryan Fuller back now, please?

Edit: at least they ditched that horrendous voice over during the recap at the beginning of the show.

Yea it really does feel like they lost the good writers from the show. The premise still works for me, even the ever-changing conditions of the main characters (we watched them get powerful and now what how they adapt). But that flashback episode really does seem to be the flipping point. Stuff made sense to that point, even Sylar's try at normalcy. But since then it's been all over the place. And now they're back to Sylar the (powerless) bad guy?

^^^ Its like I said, just like comics.  Except its free on TV as opposed to 3-4 bucks for a 22 page pamphlet.  

Which is Heroes' biggest strength AND its greatest weakness.  (And possibly part of the rumors that Jeph Loeb is getting the boot because even the clueless network fucks realize some things in comics ARE FUCKING DUMB and part of the reason people are dropping it like a bad habit.  Its why many people don't read comics in the first place.  Or read them and left.  Or are on the fence like I am.  Or go over to Manga.)

Outside of the costumes and lack of FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT it is very much like modern DC and Marvel comics.

And while I have not seen Monday's episode, its not annoying me or anything, but I won't be buying it on DVD either.  But I have never liked Heroes enough to want to buy it outside of through much of Season 1 before the ending.

However if we compare it to other shows staying or going, I would much rather Terminator the MILF Chronicles live and Heroes die.  It took a dumb idea and made it really fucking good while Heroes took a good idea and then ignored it outside of some really good moments and a pretty solid cast.

(Which is again like real comics.  Marvel and DC have some amazingly great characters ruined by stupid ass stories.  Or for another comparison, its like Pro Wrestling levels of dumb with OOC heel turns and endless storylines that move slowly if at all.  Which kind of explains why so many comics fans are also huge wrestling fans really.)

I love how all you assholes complain every week, all "ruined, ruined! it's dead to me, dead! deus ex machina (wtf does that even mean, anyway)!", and yet you keep watching. Even if it's just to bitch about it. Which may actually be worse, fucking trolls.

(Now's when you guys all get bent outta shape and reiterate ad nauseum why it sucks and why it's ruined, dead to you, etc.)

naw I quit watchin. I was p. much the last in my group of friends.

I'd show Daphene how to use those crutches.  :drill:

People complain because it was once a great show with a lot of potential and is now maneuvering into trainwreck and 'soon to be cancelled' territory and they want it to be great again.

Also Deus Ex machina (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina) is just extremely lazy writing.

NBC announced its January schedule. Heroes is not in it. Will return "at some later date". Same with Chuck.

SAME WITH CHUCK? WHAT

WHAT

WHAT

WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAT

http://www.tv.com/story/11947.html?tag=headlines;title;1&om_act=convert&om_clk=news

Looks like typical. Series don't usualy run back to back on themselves.

Also, 2 hours of Superstars of Dance!!!  :ye_gods:

Thank god for BBC America, is all I have to say about that.

The thing I love about Heroes right now is that it is a total soap opera, and train wreck, just like Paris Hilton's New BFF. It treads into So Bad It's Good territory to me, and that's okay. I like Taco Bell sometimes too, almost as much as a nice moules frites with aioli.

Let me quote myself for you.

So why be offended that other people are enjoying talking about the show bein' a train wreck if you agree it's a train wreck?

I just caught up on episodes 5-10 and I actually enjoyed watching them back-to-back. It felt more like the old Heroes - I suppose it didn't feel so drawn out.

Phew. Chuck and Heroes return in February. Which still sucks monkey cock, but at least Chuck isn't canceled.

I just get tired of seeing all the hate and rage. I love it for the reasons you lot hate it.

Local TV might not even buy it - it's down to 11pm timeslot and 300,000 viewers, instead of 2 million viewers at 8.30pm.

I got to see last Monday's episode yesterday and it was lots of fun mostly.  Hiro and Parkman just fucking make the show, and HRG was back to his awesome self, whilst we had Veronica Mars and Young Spock being all hot and sexy Bonnie & Clyde style, only twice as fucking crazy in the head.

But I seem to be in opposite land from most of you.  I thought the first 2-3 episodes were incredibly shitty and I nearly quit, but yall sorta kept me watching.  Now I like it, and most everyone else here seems to think its butt.

The Pod People need to hurry up and convert me over.  It sucks here in (I'm an) Individual Land.  :(

I know the bandwagon is headed in the other direction, but I actually pretty well liked this last episode.  It's getting sorta back on track for me. 

I missed last week's episode so I wasn't entirely sure how things led up to this point, but I'm liking the way things are going for now. It'll never be as good as that first season, because everything was so omg new back then, but it's still good stuff. I don't understand the hate for it.

Hiro was freaking awesome. I loved the juxtaposition of OMG DARK SYLAR KILLING then Hiro...well, he just does his thing. He's just Hiro and that's that.

At the end, where he pops in (Bad Man!) and out three times in quick succession...that was awesome.

Thinking back on it, I really feel like that was symbolic of the whole season so far....

Yeah, pretty much.  Might seem like a cheap tactic, but that's what's awesome about Hiro...when he finally decides to, he can basically do whatever the fuck he wants.

OH man.... Cyrrex you need to get that on the web and watch the end fast.

FAST

Last night was a very good episode IMO.

Lol, I feel stupid...totally forgot I could do that.  Thank you, Intarwebs!

I'm afraid I don't share the positive feelings about this episode.

One small nit to pick..



Just saying... cause they have done plenty of hokey stuff and this isn't much of a stretch.

Same. The writing is just horrible. I WANT the show to be good, but its so bad it makes me want to break stuff.


They need to kill off about 90% of the characters and get new ones like they did with Niki. Kill Nathan, kill Claire, kill everyone except Peter, Hiro (and Ando) and Parkman. HRG should have been a reappearing act, not a focal point. Stop bringing in lame badguys like BlueFireGuy.

Oh yeah, stop making Peter all Emo.

I knew it and you knew it, but a good number of people in this thread were speculating that this would result in the powers being "shuffled" or something stupid like that.

The show had me back.  Now this episode makes me hate it again.  So much stupid in one place.

About the only good things were Hiro and Parkman and Speedgal.  HRG being ok but not great.  You would think he would fucking have finished the job he began in this episode.  Guy with his skills and knowledge effectively acted like a survivor from a fucking horror movie!

Its because of them that I will even bother to give the show to the holiday break.  Whenever I think the show is getting good, it finds ways to be even more stupid. 

The good news is a friend showed me Hulu and that it has the first 2 seasons of Babylon 5.  So if this show finishes off my desire to enjoy anything besides Hiro and Parkman's storylines I can find somehing else to watch for a while.

I disagree, the show was fun. I like it.

I hate to do this, but I just can't bring myself to wade through 11 pages of this.... can someone give me a brief rating of the seasons after 1? I quite enjoyed season 1, I thought it had some decent moments but was nothing amazing.

Suppose I want to know if the rest of it is going to offend me with shiteness or if I'll be able to just treat it as mildly entertaining fun.

I think the show's a good premise with a lot of bad writing, bad casting, bad acting, and bad pacing.  It's pretty entertaining throughout, however, and a few story lines always seem to redeem it as greater than total crap.  I just couldn't take the idiocy and dumb crap that was happening of this beginning of this season and dumped it. 

I'd say you'll likely be pretty safe watching the next season or two. Heck, you may never reach your breaking point.  Kind of like how I kept watching Buffy until the end although season 7 was eroding my will to live.

OK cool, I'll start finding out when it's on again then :)

Ya know, I realized tonight I have a pretty high tolerance for a lot of the bullshit they've pulled this season. Last season they could get away with the halfway-through contradiction because of the writer's strike. This season though it's like the writing staff literally got up and left, and they're using standins. I know something was said about that here, but I can't find it. It seems like the first six episodes were the springtime team and everything that's followed has been whoever they had left hamfisting it.

But I can take Sylar being an on again/off again good/bad/emo/goth guy. I can take HRG being a psychotic over-protective father being setup to actually have an agenda besides protecting his family. I can even take emo Pete.

What I CAN'T take is divinely-intervened Nathan. Once, at the beginning of the season, ok. I can deal. Particularly if they do something with, which of course he didn't. It seemed to happen again at one point but I can't remember the episode and don't feel like looking it up. And now he's all GoGoPinehurst with the zealot look of a True Believer. Again.

I think that this episode for the most part redeemed alot of what happened in the last few shows.

"Oh.  Cake!" *door slams shut*

"You're not a killer, Peter.  I am."    :drill:

Oh, and using Chad Faust from the 4400 as the marine was pretty cool.

Again, I'm torn. There were some good moments, mostly with Sylar (but especially with Hiro and his mother) followed by some serious cringe-worthy moments with Claire. Really, everything with Claire is bugging me now, as is Mohinder.

"What's happening?"

"I don't know!" Goddamnit, you're the fucking scientist that just injected something into another living being. You don't have any idea of the process? ARE YOU COMPLETELY RETARDED?

Oh wait, scales on the face say yes.

Kill Mohinder, kill Ali Larter's useless character, take Claire off the stage or just make her interesting again ang give Peter back his fucking powers. And get to the Hulk smashing.

I was let down by how fast Hiro gained something meaningful to him as a character, and then had it ripped away from him by the evil bad man for the season.

It had the potential to be meaningful character development, and was pissed away in about five minutes. Not the best writing there. Plus, if it was that easy to just take, it didn't have to sit there until Hiro got it. It makes his character moment even more trivial.

That part was what bugged me too. The rest was ok, but I'm getting conditioned to fast forwarding through all of the Claire parts. They're cloying in a Anakin/Padme or Peter Parker/MJ in the movies bad sorta way.

This episode just really made me miss 4400.

I like the 4400 but it was just as much of a mess, if not more so, than Heroes is right now.  And the acting was even worse, though it did have Summer Glau in a few episodes.

Other than the future people protecting the lead actor, I loved the way it progressed to the terrorist/revival camp.

Killing Arthur Petrelli is going to return powers to the characters that didn't die when their powers were taken. So far, that's just Hiro and Peter, iirc. What I can't figure out is, how can future Sylar have Elle's son if she's dead? Oh wait, I smell a time-travel.

It'll be fun to see if the Marine uses his powers for  :awesome_for_real: or for  :drill:

Did you not notice his shaking as he got injected. I would not be surpised to see him as the reason the earth shatters due to some kind of termor power.

What?

Wait. In the future where Peter got Sylar's ability, was Sylar's son the son of Elle?

And if Arthur's death returns powers to those who didn't die when he took them, why isn't Peter all Sylar again?

Hiro I can explain away because I'm not sure how power transfer could work in this scenario through a 16 year different. But then, I also don't know how Arthur got the power to go back in time to take time travel power from Hiro either. There was that throwaway line about other people with the same power, but that would mean Arthur could travel through time all along, or magically found the power to steal in the time frame from somehow discovering who held the Light to whoever got it to whoever had it 16 years later.  :uhrr:

I'm sure it'll all be retconned. That paragraph is the most thought I've given to this show this season. It's best when you just ride the coaster of whatever the writers thought was a good idea for that episode.

Elle being baby mama was my assumption. Arthur died right at the end, so Peter doesn't know he has his powers back yet. That Arthur was there 16 years in the past is a bit of a conundrum, but I don't claim to have all the answers. :P

Arthur got the power to teleport and time travel from Peter.  I have no idea how he knew to go back 16 years and get the catalyst from Hiro, though.  The only thing I can think of is after Sylar told him Claire escaped, Arthur decided to just go back and get the catalyst himself from Ishi Nakamura on the day she died (so as not to mess with the time stream, would be my guess).  He probably would have known she had the catalyst since they were all in that cabal together at one point.

As for Hiro and Peter getting their powers back when Arthur died, that's an assumption.  You could be right but we don't know yet.

You got where he got the time travel from, nice even my wife missed that one.  However, You forget how Arthur was sketching the future at the end of the episode 2 weeks ago.  I figured that's where he saw himself getting "The Light" from Hiro.

But is it really sketching the future if it happened in the past?  :awesome_for_real:

I don't understand,

Wasn't future sylar convinced still that he was Peter's brother?

This show's starting to annoy me.

He could still be a half-brother.  :uhrr:

In that future, Arthuer Petrelli had gotten his way and gave everyone powers.  Presumably he was able to do so because Sylar never slipped his leash, never killed Elle, never went and became a lie detector, and never killed Arthur.

Going on the theory that the only way the future changes is through the actions of someone who's come back in time from that future (i.e. Peter), all that's left to make sense of the plot is to figure out the chain of cause and effect that goes from Peter knowing what happens in the future to Sylar going rogue.  I think I'd have to go back through the old episodes to do that, but I bet a case could be made.

Apparently so, unless the "last comic" was drawn 17 years previously, lest you forgot that's how Hiro wound-up there in the first place.  :grin:

I am halfway through Season 2 on my iTouch and am losing interest. Hiro in Japan is annoying. The whiny Brazilian babe with the black eye power is annoying. Claire's new boyfriend is a douche.  I bought the whole season so I am oging to finish it, but right now Season 3 ain't happening.

Maybe there is hope for this show after all.

From i09: (http://io9.com/5107155/wait-bryan-fuller-can-save-heroes)

Bryan Fuller is going to be returning to writing for the show, he did a lot of the first season.

Interview snippet:

Word-of-mouth for the next season is going to have to be phenomenal to get me to watch again.  If they never tell another time travel storyline, it'll be too soon.

Hallelujah!  He gets it!

Just don't kill that little group of Hiro, Ando, Parkman and Daphne.  Kill any or all of the rest for all I care.  Even Sylar's schtick has gotten old.

They should kill of all other characters apart from Hiro and Ando and convert it to a "japanese time-travelling duo travel in time!"-show where every episode shows them travelling to a different place. In time.

Yes.  They could have an episode where they run into Scott Bakula.  :awesome_for_real:

Hiro and Ando's Excellent Adventure.

Well, tonight's episode concluded the 'Villains' arc.

Not that impressed with the ending. For a finale with superheroes, there wasn't a whole helluva lot of superhero style fighting. The peek ahead into the Chapter 4 story was not encouraging, but not bad enough that I'm just done.

Meh.

Yeah, the last few episodes have felt like "Oh crap how can we fix this before it's over?" Very rushed, not bad, I still like it, but it's been better.

I have a feeling they know what's gone wrong. I hope they have the opportunity to make a better season....

It's Wednesday, so no spoiler tag. You've had your chance and I'm not going to spoil anything anyway.

The episode left me feeling better than the rest of the season and story arc. The fact that there was closure on a bunch of stuff, even if it wasn't all great, really helped. More time travel on a new person was totally meh though. It's hard enough to deal with that stunt without more people who can pull it.

I'll watch the next run, with hopes that the way this one ended "Crap, let's clean some of this up." results in a better start to the next line.

The "running so fast you go backwards in time" bit really bothered me, it bothered me even more that they tried to do the whole "IT'S SCIENCE!" thing.  Traveling close to the speed of light would allow you to technically go forward in time, but not backwards.  I can take magically blinking and poof you're in feudal japan, but for fucks sake don't try to justify it with science.

I'm also really upset that Hiro didn't get his powers back, I would be happy with a weekly Hiro and Ando adventure hour, so I'm bitter.

What the fuck was up with wise-cracking african shaman reappearing at the end?

Did Peter get /all/ of his powers back, or did the injection just give him the ability to fly?

Sigh, I really want to love Heroes, but they're making it harder and harder every season.

I'm guessing that he got his original power back, which was the ability to absorb people's powers if they were around him. Since Nathan was around, he soaked up the filght ability.

Or they could have just used that as a reset button his overpowered-ness, setting him back to just flight.

Technically, we don't know if Hiro has his power back, since it didn't seem like he tried to use it after he realized Arthur had taken it.

I really like Ando's sparkly pink super-charge power.

I heard from this dude, that heard it from another dude, who heard it from this other dude at a comic book convention that this show jumped the shark and fell right off the end of a flat earth.

Having watched through the last episode now, I have deleted 60GB of Heroes from my computer. I recommend you do the same. Delete Heroes, Save the World.

I'm going to give Bryan Fuller a chance to right the ship.  If he can't do it in the next arc, then the series is done.

I don't think I'm gonna because I'm too pissed that he chose Heroes over Pushing Daisies, which is bullshit. Though, very obviously, it's a money thing.

I'm not sure what to think.  Sylar probably should be toast now, at least according to the definition of "stab the invinicible guys in the spine right at the base of the brain" rule.  On the other hand, Papa Patrelli shouldn't die just because of a silly headshot wound...the forehead, mind you.  He got Adam's and Peter's powers, so no way that should finish him off.  I hope I'm wrong about both, though.  I also hope that Fire mom is gone, because she was just fucking annoying (though how she can die in a fire is beyond me...I think Noah said something about how it was going to make the building collapse, which would make more sense, but I wasn't seeing that).

When Hiro punched the ice queen in the nose, I near lost it.  He, Ando and Parkman make this show, and even Nemesis to a lesser degree.  They should just make it about those four, and let the rest of the characters.

And Mohinder may now be cured of his one power, but shouldn't he now have another?  Hopefully it's the power to not be such a fickle nutsack. 

The dossier on Mohinder at the end said something along the lines of Adaptive Evolution or something. I'm guessing he still has some of what he had before, just without turning in to a cockroach.

I'll continue watching because there has always been at least one sub group I've been able to enjoy. In this case of course its the Hiro/Parkman gang.

I totally lost it laughing when they "resolved" Marine guy. Was bored to tears by Sylar's Saw ripoff though, and found Pyro-mom's ending to be amazingly anti-climatic. Usualy scenes like that are meant to choke you up - this one failed bad at that.

It failed because she was a sucky character and I, personally, was quietly rooting for her to die.  If they wanted gripping TV, they'd have had Noah shoot himself.  They offed her because she was a lame character.

Or so I fucking hope.

I thought Marine guy was stupid too...

Marine Guy:  Sir! Are you okay sir?
Nathan:  Pretty much, dude.  Hey!  How's that whole injecting-a-platoon-of-marines thing going?
Marine Guy:  Sir!  We got worried about you when you didn't show up Sir!  Even though the actual boss is dead and we didn't know that at all, Sir!  And who are you, by the way?  Sir?  You just kinda of looked important.
Nathan:  Wat.

I was puzzled by how she died.  She can control flames and they danced around her and blue-flame dude all the time but suddenly she can't and Blooie?   Unless she died in the rubble, which still doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense as the room was concrete.. flames don't melt concrete.

If I think on it too hard I get a headache.  I'm just glad she's dead.

Yeah, Sauced was like "What is this, Saw?"  :awesome_for_real:

The only thing this episode was missing was a good running from the burning building, having Claire, Angela and Noah blasted forward by the asplosions, then Claire ending with a good "NOOOOOOO!!!!!" scene. That woulda really set the finale off perfectly.

The one and only reason I really think she is dead is because Noah utters some statement to the effect of "hey, that bitch gonna blow up so big the whole building is likely to collapse on top of us all if we don't start running in dramatic fashion right now!"  I believe that line was written in for the sole purpose of answering these kinds of questions.

The thing about Sylar though, the more I think about it...remember when Peter died by the exact same method, only to come instantly back to life upon removal of the object?  And the time when Claire died by (sigh) the exact same method, got cut all down the chest and midsection only to come back to life upon removal of the object?  There is no reason to believe that Sylar is dead for certain.  Clearly someone can just find his crushed, burnt corpse and pull out the shard of glass.

Seriously though, don't think too hard about it.

Because glass melts.

Yeah.  Especially when blonde people explode at such outrageous temperatures as to collapse entire buildings.  Good point.

I think the biggest change at the end of this season is that the time travellers are now all gone. I really want Hiro to still have cool abilities, maybe find a way to give him teleportation without time travel. The problem is that time travel makes a sucky plot line and if Hiro gets it then Peter gets it, then suddenly Arthur Petrelli's got it and for some reason not bothering to just use it for his evil plans except for fucking with Hiro twice (in Bono voice: "Don't forget Africa!")

Yea, I'm more interested in the fact that time travel is sorta dead than in the "Villains" arc being over.

Sylar's death begs the question: what happens to someone who gets burned and crushed while their invincibility has been turned off? I can see him coming back for another final round before the inevitable Star Trek TV show kicks off.

The finale wasn't great. Too much time on the Saw stuff and conflicted Sylar. Peter getting his shit together was good to see, but I'd have preferred someone's aforementioned rubber match with Sylar while trying to save Mom other than the tear (not) jerking "I love you" emo crap.

And Nathan is just pissing me off. He's the least consistent character on the show. Divine light, zealot, politician, single-minded CEO, obsessed with spreading power, now obsessed with containing it. X-men 3 here we come.

It's good to see them narrowing the character count though. I can take one-dimensional characters if there's less than them. And as long as I can watch the episodes while posting, it's all good.

I'm chalking the last episode and the interview done before to the fact that they finally gave up trying to save the arc and did what they could to kill people or set things up so ehtye can actually get back to decent heroes again next season.

My wife and I despised this guy so much in The 4400 (as an actor) that we both groaned out loud when he showed up and spontaneously cheered and high-fived each other when he was taken out.  :drill:

I thought they pulled Heroes' ass out of the fire with the last three or four eps.  Many storylines have been resolved and it seems the focus has been brought back.  They finally let the heroes and villians use their powers so that was cool.

Overall I'm pleased, except for Nathan for the reasons described above.  Now he and Pres. Obama (hehe) are gonna make hero internment camps and everybody is on the run.  Not too thrilled but willing to give it a try.  Maybe the writing staff can read some more XMen.  :oh_i_see:

Honestly the only thing keeping me watching is Hiro, Ando, Parkman, and Daphne.

Everyone else can eat big bag of dick.

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/f13/heroes_don%27t_even_know_anymore.png)

Saw this on TV.com. The comments on the right pretty much say everything there is to say about the show.

That superbowl advert with them in it was just weird!  It made me laugh!  Cheers for reminding me.  I want to watch the new episode.  I even almost very nearly remember the last one!

If they want to make Heroes awesome, they should kill off everyone who isn't Daphne, Parkman, Hiro, and Ando.  Everyone else is a dick.

And bring back the invisible Dr. Who!

I've always thought comic books needed more friendly chatting in taxis action.

This is like what happened to the black smoke monster from Lost. Did the actor die, piss of a producer, go back to england, follow thru and just retire in show and fade out. ZOMG wrap up the loose end or tell me!

HEROES SEASON FOUR IS GO

(http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/1825/heroesgoanrx8.jpg)

Very interesting start. Now they must follow through with it.

Yeah, decent start.  Though they can very easily mess it up again.

Tamnhauser's Xmen comment underscores one of the reasons I was never a big fan of Heroes. At least in this episode, they mixed in some Birds of Prey for a change of pace.  :awesome_for_real:

It's was trying too hard to be relevant.  Next season they are going to do a plot about if heroes should be allowed to marry other heroes.  :drill:

"Government abuses power for a dubious claim 'Safety' " is hardly a brave topic in 2009.

Hell, x-men have been milking it for decades.

But to different audiences each time. And set in the Marvel Universe, where viking gods and science mistakes get ticker tape parades but mutants get shot at for doing exactly the same kind of things.

I'm actually on the fence about this mutant persecution angle. I agree it's an 'easy' subject but I'm not sure heroes needs to tackle anything overly complicated. Getting back to a very simple storyline like the first season may work well in the shows favor. Last season we had supervillains, mutating indians, clones, ridiculous amounts of power-swapping, power-losing and a plotline so convoluted that it would take a day to explain.  Just saying "gov is trying to round up mutants" is a much easier setting for all the stuff people actually want, which is the char interactions.

I almost gave up after the first half, but it got better. By the end, it was actually interesting to me again. At least Peter's getting powers back. I still want to dick stab Claire in her eyes for being such a twit the first half of the show. The direction was absolutely HORRIFIC, though. Too many cuts, too many shots of gigantic-pores closeup, too many cutaways where half the screen is something in the foreground whilie two characters talk. I thought it was the assclown director of Catwoman behind the camera on this one, but apparently not. Whoever it was needs to not direct that show again.

Wow what a mess.  Heroes is like the evil anti-Lost.  What-not-to-do.  Shame.

This felt like a series reboot. Except they forgot only their veteran viewers watched this. So I'm still pissed that Peter still refuses the mantle of the insta-hit tankmage, Parkman is still wishy-washy, Nathan's doned personality #34 in as many days, Claire and Mohinder are as useless as ever, HRG has flipped again, and this episode did nothing to address all of that.

I always walked away with a big deja vu, namely that period back in Buffy the Vampire Slayer when the guvmint formed that anti-Vampire/Demon paramilitary group from which Buffy's beau (and Adam) came. For some reason I see a stronger connection to that than with the recurring X-men theme of an untrustworthy populace/government.

At least they're still paying the Hiro/Ando writers  :grin:

Imagine that this is a post-Loeb series reboot wherein the establishments of character here are going to be important and not fleeting.

The least positive indications for season 4: Trying Too Hard To Be Relevant, with the hardly revolutionary "keeping us safe from the terrorists, I mean, superpowers" plotline, that also appears to be headed on a (literal) crash-course into Lost territory.  Bad cinematography, with too many cuts and closeups. Some characters have been reset into crude antagonistic pastiches.

Most positive indications: Lots. They dumped most of the extraneous chaff and soap-opera dynamics out of the airlock, along with Loeb. Nathan gets in a taxi with Mohinder and they have a fairly straightforward dialogue, present their points, and (gasp) agree to disagree and depart on civil terms. Watching it was surreal in the context of how dramabombish people had been acting in the prior seasons. Both Peter and Hiro have been stripped of the Plot Hole Induction superpower, which had been considered a necessary prerequisite for a new season that wouldn't suck. Sylar is looking like he's back to being a compelling character, after having shook off his Badass Decay (ref: TVTropes). Most importantly, they have hit the reset button and gone to a very simple, straightforward storyline.

Season 4 has the potential to be good. This potential is absolutely the last shot they have. Season 2 and season 3 sucked. If season 4 is not an improvement, the show is gone.

The problem is Sylar is STILL ALIVE, and they just can't fucking stay away from VISIONS OF THE FUTURE.

Yea, that's the only problem.

Pfffffffffffffffffffffft.

This show has 99 problems, and a bitch happens to be one.

Yeah, they definitely need to ditch the visions of the future shit. It's really annoying and absolutely hamstrings them.

Assholes.  :angryfist:

man this episode tonight was dumb. one minute Daphne rescues Claire, 2 minutes later Claire back in custody Claire is not freaking out Daphne being shot right in front of her she is complaining about the same damn thing she was with her two fathers before Daphne rescued her.

Although this does remind me of one of the first futures where Hiro and Peter become terrorists and Nathan(Sylar) is the president.

Hey, they found a way to let Peter keep his power but to make it less overpowered.  Awesome.

Wow, what a fuckbag full of stupid.

Peter is now UltraMan from the Legion of Super-Heroes. Great. Ok, at least he's no longer the whiney I Win button. Sylar is becoming Magneto, which is really the only part of the season worth a damn. Claire is SO FUCKING ANNOYING - I just want her gone, but now she gets to sit around and text message with Unknown. I'd rather they bring back West. HRG is going to play both sides against the middle. Parkman is the vengeful prophet - STOP THE PROPHETIC SHIT. It's old and very boring now.

And fucking Daphne is dead. Fuck you guys. You got one more episode and you don't even deserve that. Hiro needs to get his power back ASAP or this show will finish its swirl down the toilet.

The part that pisses me off the most is they kill off the interesting characters: Daphne, Eden, Candice, Usutu (vision Usutu doesn't count), D.L. and even Adam was at least interesting.  Yet they won't get rid of that horrible fucking useless Ali Larter.

fwiw, I never thought Daphne was particularly interesting.

I liked Daphne and am annoyed that she's gone.  And in such a stupid pointless way, too.  Parkman is a fucking bag of fail for seeing her standing in the spot where she was supposed to die and not getting her the fuck out of there RIGHT AWAY.

Like Peter getting his power back but having it majorly nerfed.  I honestly did not see his surprise escape toward the end coming.

Hiro's doing another quest to regain his powers?  I guess they couldn't think of anything better to do than what they did in the first season.  Yawn.  Maybe when he gets it back he'll have lost the time travel part.

Do we know for a fact that Daphne is gone?  There were a lot of bullets flying around, but I only saw her get definitively hit in the right shoulder.  I was waiting to see something final, but I didn't see it.  Parkman didn't even react in a way that made me believe that she was gone for good (though that could have just been poor direction).  It was a poor sendoff for a generally intersting character, which is why I don't believe it.  I could even see Hiro going back and saving her when he gets his powers back.

At least when Adam died, you were like "yep - that motherfucker's deader than shit".

My first thought after watching that scene is that she isn't.  Would be about the third or fourth time they've done the "here's a drawing of the future where this person gets killed, oh wait they were just shot/got brought back to life/it was someone else" thing.  Parkman and the others don't have any time to examine the body, Nathan's narration doesn't specifically mention her death, and the scene ends fairly abruptly.  Everything about it feels like a fake-out to me.

It probably is a fake-out. But it's a ham-fisted fake-out because yes, the direction is SHITTY and you can't really tell what the fuck went on.

I thought Daphne was shot in the shoulder then moments later she was shot a couple times in the back or gut to finish her off.


Are we at the point where that executive producer was fired now in terms of the episodes being shot. The big news a couple months back? Heck I can't even think of what the producer's name was.

She was hit at least three times, once in the shoulder and twice more in the back.  Yeah, they could bring her back anyway if that's what the want to do.  In a show like this, they could bring back anyone if that's what they really want.  Either way, the whole thing was just poorly done.  The directing and/or acting was just awful.  Parkman, Hiro and Ando didn't look like they cared very much that Daphne just died (or appeared to die).  Nathan didn't look like he cared very much that his grand plan ended up with the deaths of at least a half dozen Americans (both soldiers and 'detainees').  Noah's 'I'll do anything to protect my family' has become stale and the precog-du-jour has grown beyond stale.

In hindsight, they should have stuck with the original idea of having each season tell new story with all, or nearly all, new characters because I'm just not liking anyone on that show outside of Hiro and possibly Sylar (sort of) anymore.

Hard to say what was already planned or written when Loeb and Alexander were let go.  In an interview with Bryan Fuller regarding his return to Heroes (starting with episode 19, and the episode that just aired was 15 I believe) he mentions that Loeb and Alexander were involved in setting up the Fugitives arc.  He also says he thought episodes 14-16 were strong, but that 17 and 18 "gets a little dense in the middle in terms of the mythology", so with his return he's shifting things back to being more character focused.

You're thinking of Jeph Loeb, and yes, the two episodes we've seen so far are without his influence.

EDIT: Or not ^

I don't know if that is entirely true or not, but I do know for certain that I saw Loeb's name in the credits.

Heroes is just series 2-4 Prison Break now.

Its not THAT bad and still salvageable. I say wait till we are the point in the episodes where Loeb is fired.

They had to off daphne. her powers were too good for the plot.

no jokez. had nothing to do with her character, who would have been excellent for the season otherwise. she was just cursed by having a too-good power.

so they had to shoot her until she was so completely irrevocably dead that she wouldn't show up alive for at least three or four more episodes.

All these superpowers and nobody's come up with ressurection or zombification yet.  Sadness.

According to the webcomic, the Haitian's father could do the latter, but only because his son negated some mindcontrol thingy he had.

Just watched the two new episodes. Sucks that Daphne died (maybe) and Hiro needs to get some decent powers even if he doesn't get his old ones back. The only other point I'm worried about is Mini-Sylar, I'm not sure where they're going to go with it but unless it winds up with Sylar callously sacrificing him in a few episodes time then I don't think I'll like it. Otherwise I like that they're going back to a simple plot and hopefully they'll get some strongly defined characters rather than having people doing random things and switching sides at the drop of a hat. It feels like a reboot and I think they've got a shot at making it an entertaining show again.

I think I'm going to stop watching this. It's crap.

If Daphne's dead I am probably gone.  Especially since Sylar is apparently never able to die and we just can't leave PROPHECY alone.

Heroes is like the nerdy version of ER.  They kill off everyone I like usually in retarded ways and do the same shit over and over again till we all stop fucking caring unless hating the writers counts as caring.

I would also note that Jeph Loeb is responsible (long with Quesada, lord of the fat heads and marriage haters of America) for taking a giant shit on the Ultimate Marvel universe that is apparenly so bad, they have decided in true shit meme style that because we like reboots they are gonna put a reboot in our reboot..

I really don't think Daphne's dead. Matt just wasn't upset enough for that to have happened.

They’ve killed Eden, Simone, Candice, Elle, and now Daphne but we still have to wade through the horrible Claire and Ali Larter’s characters.  There is no justice.  Couple more episodes without some good shit and I'm out.

Oh god no...please don't encourage them.  That's the last thing we need, weekly comic book deaths. 

It's especially ironic because both Hayden and Ali desperately want to leave Heroes because they both cannot stand the horrible writing anymore.

I say let them leave. Their characters suck the most.

For a moment I thought you meant Reboot was coimg back to tv somehow and I was happy.....then I re-read and felt disapointment, it would have been a better show than heroes.

Why is it this season has to rely on characters acting like COMPLETE DUMBASSES? There were way too many times during last night's episodes when I said to the characters, "What did you THINK was going to happen? REALLY?" The big ones were of course Claire and Nathan. Did they really think their actions weren't going to end up blowing up in their faces? The same goes for HRG. Did he really think he could keep it all together?

The Ando/Hiro subplot was pretty throwaway and resolved way too quickly. I was hoping hot Indian chick might have a power besides turning guys on that would explain their presence there, but really, it was just a waste. How did they even get their if their assets have been frozen and credit cards targeted? I mean, Hiro has plenty of money in Japan, but he was in the US so how did he access it?

The only positive parts were that I liked Aqualad and the Sylar interactions with the kid.

Fleshing Sylar out to be calculating, ruthless are FAR better than last seasons misunderstood 'hunger'-addict explanation of the brain eating. At least it's believable to think that while he's a power-hungry psycho he is a very calculating person in his evilness.

I thought nathan was dumb as well/ wasn't peter supposed to be the naive one?, i think niki/jessice/whatever crossed a line by killing a guy like that, whether is was bad writing or acting or whatever it seemed like the mans death had no impact whatsoever to her. Imprisioned illegally or not, icing the guy seemed out of place to me.

Not to me. After all, she iced William Katt's character and there have been no consequences for that. She felt a little bad (bad enough for some "I just killed a guy" sex) but then got over it and got down to scheming. They are trying to portray as her the amoral survivor type, but they are doing a real shitty job of it. Hell, Niki from first season was a much better, more fleshed out role.

It's liberating to read the spoilers and not bother with the actual show.

I guess I do see where they want to go with the whole cold ice-queen angle with larters character but honestly either it's the writing or her acting but everything about her just seems off to me, she doesn't seem like she acts like any real person would given the circumstance regardless of prior actions like killing the greatest american hero.

Why can't it be both?

I'm to the point where the only reason I tune in is for Hiro and Ando. Everything else is just so much inane, obtuse, confusing bullshit. There's just nothing cohesive about the story anymore. It's not like there's anything overly complicated going on, it just feels like they're making it up as they're shooting the scenes. No thought behind any of it. Was season 1 a complete fluke?

Edit for spelling on pain meds and beer.

It's pretty clear at this point that this show is good at setting up shiny new characters, but no good at creating a plot that makes use of well-established ones.  Season 1 was all setup, and it was good.  And since then, the introduction of new characters with the accompanying slow filling in of backstory has usually been interesting.  Everything else has been very meh.

They should definitely have gone with their original plan of starting over with new heroes each season.

I actually kind of enjoy Sylar's plot so far. Mostly because it involves him killing faceless government troops. In fact throw in a bit more of that, not just random rocking vans with noises, and I'd watch the episodes for it.

This might be the 3rd funniest show on television, behind East Bound and Down and 30 Rock.

The last 2 episodes were tiny steps away from being total shit. Still don't trust it.

However, it's still better than Dollhouse. :awesome_for_real:

Jeph Loeb is still in the opening credits.

Is Sylar really so stupid that he hasn't figured out

No, he's probably figured it out, or at least has the suspicion. First thing he made mention of when the kid microwaved his cup was essentially 'oh ho ho, kid across the street from my MYSTERY DAD has a power too, what a coooiiincideeence  :oh_i_see:'

I have a sneaking suspicion he didn't come back and save the kid just because he likes having a pint sized sidekick. They've already established Sylar wants some sort of family connection.

Sylar: "I'm not a serial killer".
Whatshisname: "You have a pattern, you collect momentos..."
Sylar: "Ok... so technically I'm a serial killer".

And the damned NBC site is now running two commercials between each break. And they won't let you fast forward. I can't be arsed to watch this on TV (at least on the PC I can watch it windowed). Next episode better be damned good or I'll catch the recap in this thread.

OMFG just kill all heroes who can see the future/paint the future/crap the future onto the floor and stomp on it and all time travelers in the next episode please god just do it as thats the only thing that can save this sinking ship.

Most powers from the original heroes were broken by design and would be exploited to hell and back by any capable table top roleplaying group.

I liked the approach by the writers in Season 1 however where Hiro had those powers but chose to not use them under certain circumstances because of the mostly negative repercussions. That moral codex was a lot more believable than the current crop of stories that involves people acting like morons, conveniently forgetting that they had certain powers or getting them taken away by 'magic'.

It doesn't help that most of the cast is just useless and lacks acting skill and that the writers don't really know what to do with them either

I still don't understand why Parkman doesn't just get Ando to turbocharge him, pull a Professor-X-gone-bad, and kill all the bad guys with his fucking brain from the comfort of his latest hiding spot.

Because that would be awesome, that's why.

Sad but true.

On the other hand, Peter finally stopped being a giant pussy who can't ever apply his powers usefully.  Being limited to one at a time has indeed sharpened him up, as I hoped it would.  I wonder how long he's going to hold onto flight; it seems like it's turning out more useful than I'd have thought.

Yeah, flight is useful...but I rather liked Peter's former powers, MINUS the time travel (only Hiro ever did any decent time travel stuff).  Or maybe what I really mean is that I enjoyed the far-too-rare clash of the guys with the major powers, i.e. Peter vs Sylar, for some good old-fashioned ass whooping.  There is far too little cool stuff going on right now.

I'm quite amused how much this series improves when Claire is not present. She really brings the whole ensemble down. How come the makers didn't realize that yet?

Totally agree.

Also agree on badass Peter who only has one power at a time. The series creators were so hopped up on powers in season one that they ran into the problem anyone who's played an MMO through the first expansion could have told them about. Where do you go when you've already maxed out your levels?

So instead they do a big ol' nerf with forced class-based specialization and finally have a good formula again.

Last night's episode really drove home for me their goal. Again typical MMO mistake (and a Star Trek one): focus only on getting more audience because "you know you can keep your base". So while I think Peter last night was great, I fully expect emo Peter again, useless self-loathing Claire again, misunderstood HRG again, and we're already seeing Mohinder the misguided/manipulated-scientist.

Another thing that pissed me off: where was Hiro and Ando at all? Less waxworks/more quirky humor plzk.

I have so much time that I can't help but watch it.

This episode showed promise but the government involvement, Mama Petrelli, and a particular casting choice leaves me still in the category of "this show is white noise crap at best."

I just caught up on all the episodes of this season.

I don't get the angst, this season is so much better than last season so far. Its incredible. Now, thats not saying that much, cause last season was fucking horrible. But I have decided to keep watching "for now".

I'd rather watch Dollhouse than season 2 of Heroes.

You're right, saying this season is incredible compared to last season is "not saying much."

Last night still had characters acting like COMPLETE DUMBASSES. I keep going back to the line "What did you fucking expect would happen?" I've always liked Peter, but Parkman is starting to annoy me. And the fucking prophetic powers really do suck the life out of the show. So now we have to stop suicide bomber Matt and the burning/destruction of yet another American city by unknown means. I know comic writing is often unimaginative and trite, but fuck me, this is just terribad.

Yep, that's it for me. I am done.  You can have my stuff.

This. It's barely worth watching if I have it in a window while posting here. But it's really not a show you talk about, except to talk about how its not worth talking about :-) There just isn't anything there but mindlessness. It's like the LoTRO of MMOs: fine for what it is but few people care outside of the session of playing/watching.

When they did the big "Daphne is alive" reveal for Parkman I said to myself "Wait, he thought she was dead?"  Either his acting sucks or the writing does because at no point did I ever get the idea that he was in mourning for the great love of his life.

Its Heroes.  It sucks.  Don't expect intelligence out of this show.  I'm not sure why its even on my DVR any more.  I could be watching disk 2 of the Cartoon Network He Man show instead.  Its more intelligent and it was made to sell toys to children.  Its more logical and makes more sense.

AND THEY WONT FUCKING QUIT WITH VISIONS OF TEH FUTAR!!!!!   GOD STOP THIS FUCKASS FUTURE VISION SHIT.

I'm going to hang in there until the writer who left Heroes after season one to do Pushing Daisies is back and has a chance to improve things.

The comic shop guy is smokin' hot, and oddly built for a "nerd". Mama likey.  :drillf:

Really?  The agent lady in the show called him a hot guy too, and I (from my extremely manly position, mind you) wasn't seeing it.  He just looked like a knob to me.

Its sliding downhill again quickly.  :uhrr:

I am afflicted with fetishes for both nerds and Jewish boys. That kid was like kryptonite to me.  :drillf:

I think Aqualad is decent enough looking.

This episode actually gave me hope. Sure, there were still some characters who are too stupid to live. But I think they are honestly trying to unfuck some of the idiocy of the earlier bits of the season. Making Claire's mom a stronger character was a damn good start. Peter's getting smarter while Nathan gets dumber. Apparently Peter is Nathan's brain kryptonite. The situation they put Parkman in is interesting at least.

Could be better, but it's starting to look up.

The only question is when will they fuck it up again?
EEEVVIIILLL Covert Ops guy looks to be a strong contender for doing that.
OMG THEY ATTACKED MY HOME TERRISTS RAR.
Umm.. fuckface what do you expect given what you have already done to them? 

Exit, stage left (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?board=23.0)  :awesome_for_real:

^^^ So its ham fisted LOOK AT OUR REAL WORLD RELEVANCE BITCHES!! kind of stuff?

Well.. fuck.   :heartbreak:

why did bennet not throw the guy right out the fucking window after he found out about nathan?

Taking the intelligent course of action would have ended this half of the season back in January.

That was exactly my thought.  Where's Mr. Morally Grey when we need him?

And after a brief glimmer of hope, it goes right back to shit. Even the Sylar part with his father was disappointing as hell. I like that actor - totally wasted in what was essentially a monologue with himself. Why the fuck am I still watching this shit? Why would Claire help out Doyle - what the fuck did he do to convince her he's changed? And why the fuck would she care if he had? He practically raped her and both her moms. And how did Danko NOT figure this out earlier? And yeah, Bennet should have just judo'ed that motherfucker Danko right out the window with Nathan.

I've stopped watching.  I think it was a month or so ago, maybe less...

I bet Rebel is little old Mika.

You mean Micah?  That's my guess, too.  Although to be honest, I find myself not really caring much one way or the other about any of the current plot threads.  The show just isn't very good anymore but it's not as horrible as it was there for a while, now it's just meh.

Yea, honestly, that was my thought. For some reason, certain shows can't resist their current events allegories. The realm of the uncreative. Or the realm of middle management. Probably both.

The nice thing about Heroes is that every time it jumps the shark, you can just pretend that Hiro took the show back in time to the moment before it jumped the shark, thus giving us an endless loop of "ok, it's getting better," then another shark jump.

That said, it's good enough to watch on the DVR when I have time on a Tuesday or Wednesday.

Same, I only read this thread.

The problem is if you don't watch Heroes, your probably a one more canceled/concluded series away from stop watching television. Unless your one of those poor dumb bastards who still think American Idol is quality television. I'm about two shows away from stop watching television once heroes runs its course.

/sigh

I didn't hate it, but that just isn't fucking good enough.  I've got 3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica on my HDD that I've yet to see.  Somebody please tell me I'm going to love it.

I'd almost suggest skipping season 2 but at the very least it's watchable, especially when you see it in one or two big gos.

Yeah, BSG is much better when you can watch multiple episodes at a stretch.  The biggest problem with it is not enough happening in any one episode.

After catching up with Season 3 (stopped watching at 308) I am baffled as to why they renewed Heroes and leave Chuck (an order of magnitude better than Heroes) out in the cold.

Chuck wasn't renewed?  :crying_panda:

Chuck is getting worse ratings than Heroes. :uhrr: But there's been no official word one way or the other about whether it's getting renewed.

More than likely Rebel is the Israeli woman they were calling Network. She can control any computer system with her mind. They introduced her in the web comic and then featured her in one episode where she convinced Ted to stop hiding out in the middle of the Nevada desert and go help the heroes. Of course, this ultimately led to Ted's death by Sylar. All this happened way back in Season 1.

I think Mika "repaired" Hannah, as she was disposed of in the Web Comics but he can repair all things technical.

I thought in the webcomics Hana transferred her consciousness into a communications satellite before her body died, or something wacky like that?

There were webcomics after that. In her last one, she was presumably deleted while being on a mainframe.

mika's power isn't repairing machines, it's essentially controlling them and hasn't shown any upper limit afaik. He can repair them or he can interface and control them. Now whether he can actually fix hardware and manipulate that or simply bypass it hasn't really been explained yet.

I'm not even sure his abilities are limited to machines.  Didn't his cousin - the muscle mimic - not begin to show any sign of ability until he gave her a little hug and then some glowy thing happened with his hand on her back?  I always thought that he somehow gave her the power.

Yea, I was thinking Hana could be Rebel.

For fuck's sake. Why can't this show just settle into being irredeemably bad? Why does it have to hover tantalizingly above that point, low enough to hemorrhage viewers, but high enough to avoid assured cancellation?

What??

that was a good episode.

Micah is back, Ali Larter's latest poorly-written character is dead, Ando learned hadoken, and Hiro has some of his power back (with a predictable nerf).  Things are looking up.

Thing about Ali being dead is.. her sharded face winked.

Wtf?

I missed that.  Maybe now she's like the Sandman from Batman and she has an icy form can reconstitute itself by melting and re-freezing?  That would be lame, but since they can't seem to let go of Ali I suppose it wouldn't be shocking.

Yeah it was really quick.  I thought I was mistaking a cliche 'water melts as a tear' for a wink at first, but my wife said "did you see her wink?" when we were discussing it later.   I had the same thought about the "ice form" thing, but more a-la Bobby Drake not the Sandman.

I read it as a tear and a blink, like most people do when they cry.

Not as a wink.

I'm guessing she won't be totally dead, but with the Pushing Daisies writer back on the show, all characters stand to improve. Even hers.

It was a great improvement over the last few weeks, but I hated that they killed Daphne. Better to just have let her die back when we first thought she died then to bring her back for one manipulative tear-jerker moment. It felt decidedly out of place.

Agree on Ali Larter's Ice Queen. She did wink. Which sucks, because I was actually happy to see her annoying ass dead. Here's hoping they keep her dead and the writing keeps improving. They have a long way to go.

At least Daphne got a good death. It wasn't shit writing or choppy; it was good for the character development of Parkman as a side bonus.

Time to see some fucking powers, please.  They need to ramp it up.

Ali Larter's got at least one more clone we know about, what's the next one going to be?  I didn't see her wink, I saw her eye closing... ending the character. 

And Daphne's death was weak.  We went through six weeks of waiting for Parkman to find her and she dies of an infection?  The show insults my intelligence sometimes.

Was this one with a new writer? Daphne's death gave me the sense that the writers were coming back to give a better close to Daphne than 'omg she was shot, now she's gone.'  Yeah, the infection was a shitty death, but guess what, people die in shitty, stupid ways.  It felt real to me, particularly since it was sepsis and that's nasty, and it was a better send-off than they'd done to other Heroes.

Bah, step back and grab a factoid.
Bryan Fuller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Fuller) came back to the show on this episode. The show is a mess, the writing has been crap, we have more characters than we can track or they can even respectably show through the medium and the plot has become "powers" instead of "characters."

It's not an insult, it's a good writer saying "You fuckers did WHAT? For how long???"

Killing Daphne, it's a solution. Get her out of the show and it's one less power and one less thread to track. Same with Tracy, and I hope she's gone even if she's not. He's a better writer than the folks who have delivered the most recent work, and this episode showed it. Killing pointless characters? That's just extra win for me. I'm hoping for a nice consistent culling over the next few episodes. Lots of shock value, and lots of plot narrowing. Please.

Now if only they can kill mohinder because he is clearly to stupid to exist. I think he has to meet some clinical definition of insanity he keeps doing the same shit again and again and expecting a different result.

Why is it that every single time Hiro and Ando pop up a smile forms on my face? They are beyond awesome. The rest, meh.

Overall the show's writing still sucks donkey balls, but there were some good points to this one. If they were not going to keep Daphne around, this was a much better ending than - "Oh no, I see her shot in a vision, so I shall run to that exact spot and do nothing while it happens" was.

Really, Ando/Hiro and to a limited extend Silar are the only things keeping me watching. The wheelbarrow scene was perfect.

Shows like this make me cry about how much people ignore briliantly written and acted shows like Terminator.

I mean come on, not even a token attempt at explaining why Peter was hanging around in a fucking elevator shaft?

TSCC is getting canceled. Heroes might go for a 4th season. One less show till I stop watching television. 

Maybe it's the new writer but that last episode was enough to wash a lot of back taste out of my mouth. People went back to being characters with powers instead of powers with faces.

Isn't it amazing how better writing can make all the difference in the world?

Yes, yes it is.

Claire's new haircut was nice, too.  :grin:

I'm tired of the "hey I have a genius plan, let's use Sylar as a living weapon" angle.  I liked him better when he was off doing his own thing and splatting any government agents who came for him.

I don't know, writing him in like this makes a lot more sense to me. Plus he isn't even going around using his powers like he could. Pointing a gun at sylar is useless, even if the guy thought he could jam something in sylars brain the bullet wouldn't even reach him, not to mention he could have used his little object memory power in the apt. They made it clear on several occasions he didn't want to use his power just because he could, rather he wanted to enjoy the hunt and further corruption of the agent.

I like this a lot because it's not using sylar as some juggernaut power-machine but like the serial-killer pyscho he used to be that was powerful but that wasn't what made him scary.

Powers were used in this ep but in clever ways[claire using super drinking ability] for instance. Overall it just didn't feel hokey and felt like a dramatic show with powers once again. I think some of these actors can be great with good dialogue, bennet for one. Peter is kind of a hopeless case but at least he's not unbearable anymore.

I'm in with the notion that good writing improves any show premise. It's true. Same as I don't want to read a shit book; a show with shit writing quickly becomes me doing something else. I don't much enjoy the TV as it is, so lacking good writing I'm not there.

Yesterday's episode, good writing. The trip through Catholicism was a bit unusual; but good for the characters. It fit the family well and should have been used before.

The writing was a major step in the right direction, though I want to see some power usage.  It's like they blew their wad with last week's ice chick explosion. 

The show needs to bring this story to a close and let the writers get to work from scratch.  It also needs to cull some more characters.  I want to see badass future Peter and Hiro become what they're supposed to be. 

So many people cried out for moar powers after season one(including me) and we got seasons 2-3 out of it. I'd been happy with them keeping powers toned down for the most part. I'd rather see characters use powers in smart ways rather than abundantly. 

Did anyone else notice the distinct lack of characters focused on this episode? I think there were a total of three plotlines with two of them overlapping slightly. I hate to gush about this episode, afterall it was just one but after the downward spiral the show had been taking I have to say I'm really psyched for the first time in a long time watching it.

Two things that bother me though is one, it might be too late to save the show, I'd like to see a couple seasons of this kind of substance. Secondly that they now have the perfect out to replace Quinto should he want to leave the show.

I seriously expect a 'reboot' in season 4. Many storylines are so fucked up that only a decent amount of retconning can fix them. This would also be the perfect opportunity for culling the cast.

Something is seriously wrong with a series that needs so many reboots.

It only needs one reboot, and killing Sylar so he can go gives a great opportunity to have a huge climatic battle with lots of corpses. Effectively the reboot that they need, one or two survivors who can be used in the next season and other new folks as PLOT demands.

I read that as "People went back to being characters with powers instead of powers with faeces" and nodded in agreement at such terminology for the old writing.

Yeah, I hate to say it because Sylar is an interestingly evil character and well played... but the show is spinning its wheels until it kills him.

Sylar in season one was the perfect juggernaut... every time you miss killing him he gets harder to kill with a new power... solid premise, big climax, voila the little-guys win.  Next Season.

Having the uber-Sylar that keeps getting uberer is pulling the show down paths it cannot logically follow.

The power proliferation plots have been the undoing of the show (Peter, Peter's Dad, Hiro-sort of-, and now Parkman) - one dead, two nerfed, and one (inexplicably) still growing.

It goes from being an interesting drama with the twist of limited and unusual powers to some sort of WWF cage-match complete with flying chairs and bimbos tossed to the ground.

Then again, that might be been their end-game all along.

They NEED some WWE style cage match action. I mean, it's a show about people with FUCKING SUPERPOWERS. Why make a show about people with powers then do everything possible so they don't use them at all?

Yeah, the writing has improved, but I almost gave up on this episode. A little too much soap opera and not nearly enough action. I don't like the Danko/Sylar collaboration. I'd rather have seen him work with the teenager he went on the roadtrip with. I haven't liked the Danko character at all. The whole Catholic sideline was out of place.

The writing is better, but I'm feeling less and less inclination to give a shit about the characters or plot.

Whenever I see Danko all I can think is Gov. Devlin from Oz.

I kind of like the ma Petrelli salvation type bit. It was a bit odd but it was also a well written reason for Peter to actually continue giving a shit whether his mother lives or dies. Maybe it's just because I think back at the beginning of the season they would literally just have gone for Peter saving his mother without any actual continuation, he would just have kept helping her. I also think that I'd have preferred Syalr working with the kid and to be honest I thought that was going to go horribly wrong. I'm just left thinking Danko is the biggest idiot on God's green earth. He's scared to death of people with powers so he turns to, the guy with the most powers in the world who is also a serial killer that has killed over a dozen of his men. And he's happy to team up with him and help him get more powers. In return he gets the sort of info he could probably get from Noah Bennett if he said please. Seriously just send Sylar back to chopping people up and throwing in the odd ironically funny moment, I would eat that shit up as a sub plot.

It is worrying that I'm watching this acknowledging that the writing is much better but there's still lots of stuff that makes no sense and I'm hoping for some minor reboots. I think it's just battered geek syndrome that's kept me here, the show keeps slapping me around with retardedness but then I remember how Sylar used to be and how Hiro made me giggle and I think it's gonna be like that again. And then for one blissful episode it is, and my hope flames back into life and I believe that the series can change, this time it'll be different.

Personally, I'm hoping to see Sylar use microwave-boy's power in one of the next few episodes, wrapping up where the kid went -- and getting rid of another character with no point. Sylar and Danko working together may be weak, but it's also right up there with the territory of common tropes. Let's just hope that when it's resolved they both go down and further the notion of better plot lines in the future.

One point about the writing, it's better and the guy is back... but he still has to clean the shit up and is not going to do that in a single episode. He needs time to do his work, or prove he's going to fail at it.  :uhrr:

I liked this week too. The trucker's accent was a bit over the top but things are coming together and narrowing; always a plus.

Was that the Asian comedian from the South? I can't remember his name, but he used to do the "Evening at the Improv" circuit in the 80s. He had a joke about how they call basketball "chink" in the South and that hearing people talk about "shooting some chink" used to give him the startles. Since Asians are impervious to aging, it'd make sense that he only looked about 40.

So I am the only one finding the suddenly appearing storage room a ridiculous story device? The one the landlord never bothered Mohinder to tell about while he lived there?

Yeah, I thought that was kinda retarded.  Much like the continually resurfacing "last drawing from Isaac Mendez, no really this time we mean it."

Yes to both those plot devices. But the episode was definitely an improvement. Moving towards Coyote Sands was a good move (but why dig up the bodies when you could just say "We killed a shitload of people out here?"). It looks like they really are trying to tie up a lot of shitty story loose ends and move forward with a tighter set of characters.

Since when has Ma Petrelli ever just come out and said anything?

My take on digging up the superpower killing fields is that they need to appreciate that the current purge ain't the first time they tried that.

I think.  Maybe next week we'll be back to emo Claire.

The storage room was weak, but not as week as a lot of the crap they pulled this year. I was ok looking the other way on that one.

Emo Claire is not allowed to return. Ever.

You are not the only one.  :uhrr:

I love the shitty wig they have on Claire since Hayden Pannetiere broke a contract clause and bobbed her hair irl. Obvious wig is obvious.

Sad thing is, I think it looks better than her hair did.

it's not even half over and im hovering over the post button. I think the damn show hooked me again

Seems to be going in the right direction.  They've found their reset button in the whole "form a NEW company" thing.  Not loving, but also not hating.  Did they also just write Mohinder out of at least a few episodes, or are they up to something else?

I like the direction, but what was the point of digging up Coyote Sands? 

Maybe Peter needed to see how fucked up you get if you cut yourself off from everyone else rather than forgiving them for their mistakes.  And Mohinder and Nathan needed to have it drilled into their heads further why what they were doing before was a bad bad bad plan.

That's it exactly, I think.

Also, I enjoy your new avatar.

It's more of an easter tradition of Samwise

Yay tradition!

Character development. Sometimes they do things to give you more insight into a character, not to advance a story line.

I had to watch it tonight, and thought it was pretty good. Angela is likely to become a bit more important to the show which is why we got all that character info. Her sister could be a future BBEG if they want -- she's a wildcard now that they eventually have to play.

Everything else, it was all character driven and sets up the end of the season (heroes have a motivation and targets of opportunity) and the next season (no way they can do anything other than take the first few footsteps in this season's remaining time.)

I'm all good with that.

The casting choice for young Angela was so dead on it was scary.

Yeah it was.  It had me thinking that they surely must be related IRL, but I can't be bothered to actually check.

I went and checked.  No relation.

The problem with using Coyote Sands for all that was that to any non-fucktard, that should have been self-evident. I mean, the idea for Coyote Sands was good, but the execution was meandering weaksauce monologues where characters don't really talk to each other at all. It felt like filler masquerading as REALLY IMPORTANT DECISIONS. When in reality, it was just filler and not good filler at that. It didn't feel like any real decision had been made, and it made characters go distinctly against type to make the decision they did, especially Peter. The whole Mohinder's "I gotta go walk the Earth" thing was ultra-lame.

If not for the cliffhanger, I might have quit. Halfway through the episode, I wanted to turn it off. It was only the last reveal that made me want to keep watching.

I will debate you profusely on the fact that everything Mohinder has done in recent memory has been ultra-lame.  :grin:

Edit: Therefore it was entirely in character.

To me peter's decision made morse sense than many other things he's done. From the very start he was supposed to be the kind and caring one. Hell they even made his powers empathy based. I would say much of what he's been doing these last two seasons was very much outside of what he was originally intended to be. Somewhere along the line when it came to peter they started confusing emotional with emo and turned him into a petulant 16year old boy.

I agree there was a lot of monologue in this ep but I appreciate it because for a long time the show had been pandering to what I would say is their hardcore audience. They same people who wanted more powers, more character and more 'cool stuff' on a tv drama budget. The problem is the writers stopped feeling the need to explain anything, characters just did things with very little explanation as to their motivation. Lest we forget mohinder injecting himself or peter just going along with adam for the heck of it.

What's happening is a season reboot at the end of the season so you are getting a lot of dialogue lumped together to try and make sense of what's going on but not enough episodes to spread it out. I don't like it but it's still a million times better than what it was. It was a very solid episode and while not the best ever it was certainly not filler. If anything the episode packed a lot of minutia into it that should have some out throughout the season prior but didn't due to poor writing.

Fake edit: Mohinder has sucked from day one no matter who the writer is.

You have me there. I loved how everyone who talked to Mohinder and tried to convince him "you're a good guy" completely ignores the coccooning random fuckers on the street to experiment on a fomula to save myself from the formula I created to give myself powers history of the character. I mean, really, why haven't they just like punched out his heart already?

A lot of talking again but, I liked it.

also, at the end with parkman? took me a second to realize what he was doing but  :drill:

What Parkman thing were you referring to?

The whole Sylar thing...I dunno.  I realize the character is a bit of a schizo, but I wish they'd make up their minds with him.  So close to redeeming himself again, and then he goes completely the opposite direction.

I didn't see that as redemption. Its his character flaw (strength). The only thing he supposedly has empathy for seems to be children (or maybe orphans). Might have to do with his own childhood trauma of his father killing his mother and selling him. Fact in all his rampages he never killed a child. He didn't slaughter Molly when he had the chance to, he (sadly) didn't slice Aliens in America brat, so rescuing Micah was in-character.

Plus, Micah called him special, and Sylar loves people telling him that!

I think he meant the part where Parkman told them to get close to him, and then they didn't run for their lives.  The whole "I'm here but you don't see me" bit of his mental abilities.

No, the thing that bugs me about Parkman as a character is that he's emotionally flightier than a 16 year old prom queen.  He's ready to snuggle up to the wife who kicked him to the curb PDQ after his 'love' Daphne bit the dust.

Plus the whole part where right before she kicked him to the curb, he read her mind to find out that the baby wasn't his (it was his coworker's, a vestige of the affair that ruined their marriage). I did think his whole "Daphne who?" emotional turnaround was pretty funny.

There's definitely a lot of ret-con going on, you can tell the daphne character wasn't well liked by the new staff and while she was cool and all she'd have made for a better love interest to ando or something. Lest we forget that parkman fell in love with the girl 'just because' there was no real set up, just that they were married in the future so obviously he had to fall head over heels for her. From a human standpoint, he'd been with his wife for many years already and wanting to get back with her even after a lot of bad stuff does still make sense.

This show has left me seriously wondering if there are some decent writers working with severely fucked characters and storylines or if they actually have a separate writing team for Hiro and Hiro related stories.

Also thinking about Hiro's stories reminded me of Adam Monroe who has been the best villain I've yet seen on the show and got killed off so fucking Pa Petrelli could get out of bed before being killed off as part of a plot-line noone really gives a shit about anymore. On top of that he was a much more menacing figure while he was bedridden.

Can't agree more on all those points.  They've wasted a lot of good characters/actors, and Adam's was one of my favorites.  He went out like a bitch.  I also liked the guy who played Bubbles on the Wire.  He was the character that could create pockets of negative force (or mini black holes, w/e).  Also wasted. 

As far as the writing, we're what, 4 chapters/3 seasons into the series?  And writers have changed hands at least twice that I know of.  I hope the new writers can stabilize the show.

The deaths are only a problem until they give someone the Pushing Daisies power.  Then, the show will be pure  :awesome_for_real:

Bonus points if that someone is Lee Pace.  :awesome_for_real:

Soooo...

I don't think healing powers like Claire's can ever bring someone back from the dead; just back from the brink.  Dead is dead, at least as far as we've seen.

I didn't think it was out of character for Angela at all.  She's always been about doing questionable (morally and sometimes intellectually) stuff for the greater good.

Yeah I saw it as pretty in character for her.  I called the water-bitch thing as soon as we saw the guy's apartment was flooded.  Woo.

So they went the Mimic/Proteus route.

Lets see how that works out.

Hopefully with more dead characters.

Meh.

They probably are done with him but in true shitty comic fashion they can't let anyone ever truly die so if there's popular demand or a lull in ratings he'll be back  . Though sadly I think this is the end of quinto on the show which annoys me because he was one of the few good actors.

I strongly doubt he's gone for good.  Parkman took away all of Sylar's memories (including DNA sequences for all the people he's touched) except for Nathan's. 

Just as he's getting some of his Sylar memory back by fixing the clock, he'll unlock the DNA memory at some point next season.

I'll put my money down on Sylar sleepwalking as Sylar as first manifestation of his "return". Remember when he changed into that agent during the night?

This review by i09 was pretty spot on about how I feel for the show.

http://io9.com/5231488/what-the-hell-is-sylars-deal-anyway?skyline=true&s=x

Quinto was the only reason Sylar was a good villain. Without the actor, it's just a lame plot device that needs to die.

Edit: I can't quite place my finger on it but something about that review comes off as terribly annoying to me.

It's a rant, not a review.

But I agree with most of it.  It's not all the writer's faults; the strike boned things hard for this show.  But they've done a terrible job with one of the coolest premises I can remember.

Just got to see it.  UGH.  Sick of Sylar.  Good actor, STUPID character.

They just had to give him an out to come back didn't they?

Its like the writers really want to make sure everything stupid and shitty about superhero comics ends up on this show.

I still have a soft spot for Quinto (mostly as Sylar, but can't wait to see Star Trek :drillf:), but I thought the io9 rant was hilarious and apt.

Finally watched the finale. Meh is right. Just when the good shit is about to happen (Sylar/Peter/Nathan fight), the door closes and we get to see nothing. Fuck that.

Oh, and at the upfronts for NBC today, they announced Heroes IS renewed, and Sylar WILL be on the show, but there will be a new big villain.

Hello Aunt Petrelli. 

That would be funny if I wasn't so afraid they'd ACTUALLY do it.

I just can't wait to see whether or not Sylar is confined to his new personality or might possibly start to reassert himself and we could see the Return of Sylar! OMG that would be so awesome, like Sylar coming back from people thinking he was dead, that'd be so sweet cause everyone would be like, "No way! Sylar isn't dead! This is totally rocking my world and I am shocked to the core of my being!" And then he'd probably like think about helping the good guys cause he'd have all this baggage of being Nathan, and the new bad guy would be really evil and mysterious, but then at the last moment he'd do something totally evil like kill Clare (cause she's a hot young girl)! Then everyone would have to band together to defeat Sylar (maybe even the new villain would realise he's actually pretty shit and Sylar's the real threat) and Sylar could try to take over the world!

When they just rerun the plot from and cliffhangers from series one and two again, I totally called it.

Aunt Petrelli reminds me of this:

(http://images.southparkstudios.com/media/images/207/207_bunny_hostage_no_gun.gif)

Meh is right, but that is far better than the previous finales, which were godawful.

They clearly don't have the budget for a Peter/Sylar fight, so the closed door was as much better approach than just using shitty effects.

Plus, they really benefited from Peter and Hiro not being so overpowered that they could have won at any time if they were not fucking retarded.



Also, the finale had something very few episodes have, non-supers. One of the biggest problems Heroes has is too many permanent super heroes on cast, they don't seem to be able to afford any non-supers to interact with (We only really had Noah, his wife, and pantomime Danko for this season?). When everyone is super, nobody is, and the whole show degenerates into soap opera.
 

My problem is that you have all these supers running around but refuse to let them use their goddamn powers. Maybe it's budget or just lack of creativity, but a show about people with powers not using the powers is like a show about cops where no one gets shot, arrested, or beat up.

I may be alone in this, but I thought the season one finale was completely fucking awesome.

You are not alone. Season 1 finale is how it should be done, only with more crash bang pow.

Yeah, and that applies to everything about season 1, not just the finale.  Even the basic production values (light, sound, camera) has gone to shit.

Having finally caught up with the season, I definitely feel like they're back on the right track. Feels like they hastily assembled the finale, but that's just an extension (and finalization) of moving the chess pieces back around so they can end up where they started, with the Company, Peter's conflicted over-poweredness, HRG being HRG, etc and so on.

I'm curious if they'll try a doomsday scenario again or evolve the show into something beyond Mutants vs Humans. I think that's what's needed at this point. They either need to have some sort of global war between various mutants of different nationalities, or some aliens need to show up to threaten Earth, leaving the mutants the only things that can effectively fight them. I'm getting bored with the Buffy vs Military vibe they've dragged along for so long.

You all spent most of season 1 complaining about filler episodes.


Anything where they use super powers to be actual heroes, rather than ...

Nearly blow up New York in a manner that could have been trivially avoided by just moving out to the desert, if only Peter wasn't retarded.
Nearly release some stupid virus by being retarded.
Nearly create an evil army of super mutants by being retarded.
Or create a stupid government initiative that nearly lets Sylar take over the world by being retarded.


However, the Sylar/Nathan thing makes me think we're in for a couple of episodes which use up all the interesting ideas that Sylar/Nathan has to offer and then someone finding a way to release Sylar by being retarded.

I think someone being retarded is the only thing we can count on reliably in a Heroes season.

Also, we can count on Ali Larter being brought back to life...again.

So, in one of the quiet moments on my commute home I started thinking about this show for no particular reason. For that very same reason I suddenly remembered the entire Irish girl storyline -- she's trapped in a future that wont happen. Which frustrated me as a loose end that was created for no good reason to begin with.

Then a bunch of other loose ends sprung to mind and the ship started taking on water.

I think I want to like the idea of what Heroes could be much more than the reality of what it is.

Which does not bode well for my tolerance for stupid in the next season. More killings and trimmings of the plots will help. More stupid will put me on more game time.

So you missed the stinger at the end of the finale then?  She didn't die as ice woman, she became water woman.

Yea. Which I hated. Which is largely why I only watched the 2-minute synopsus' for 2/3 of the season. It's obvious the storylines are running right into actor's contracts. It's forcing the same sort of retconning we see in comic books, just for very different reasons. The end result is the same: I can't get into it.

I could get into Ali Larter  :drill:

Everyone else has on the show.

 :rimshot:

Just wait till she's steam woman. I recall the water woman stuff, s'why I'm going with steam woman.

Doooomed! (http://www.aintitcool.com/node/41490)

Hah yup I bet next season is the last for Heroes. On the other hand it'd be awesome if Bryan Fuller got to do a new Star Trek series based on the new movie.

It seems like Bryan Fuller's destiny is to be shuffled from dying show to dying show, staying with each one just long enough to prolong its death spasms.

Thats what I was thinking. Although, didnt he do Heroes from the start?

Yeah, but he was then shuffled off just as it got its feet under it.  At this point I expect the same to happen to the Trek series if he gets involved with that; he'll write the first half a season, it'll be good, he'll get whisked off to do something else, and it'll be back to Nazi space lizards.

He was there at the beginning of Heroes and also created Pushing Daisies, Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me.  His fate is to write quirky shows that don't get a big enough audience.

Edit: Oh, and he already has Trek experience since he wrote for both Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

I wonder what Voyager episodes he wrote? I can't think of any off-hand that were as good as what I'd expect from him and I'm sure I've seen them all.

If only there was some resource people could check to find out these things. (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0298188/)

There are 172 episodes of Voyager.  Fuller was involved with 81 of those as either writer, producer or story editor.

Bryan Fuller (ST: episode list) (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Bryan_Fuller), I'm rewatching DS9 at the moment, and honestly "The Darkness and the Light" wasn't anything to write home about.

Well if he was that involved with Voyager perhaps he isn't the right choice to head up a new Star Trek series.

Apart from Pushing Daisies, I've never really understood why everyone is so gay for Bryan Fuller.

Admittedly, in the case of Heroes, *any* new writer is cause for celebration.

I liked his Dead Like Me a lot too.

Oh thank God.

Is the Trek series confirmed or just strongly assumed? Want. But only if it's based on the movie, told as the movie was, uses most/all of the actors from it, and left without the middle management from the home office.

Fourth season starts tonight.

It does.  Two hour episode.  I'll watch it.  Sounds like they are trying to send the whole thing back to start, but I'm dubious.

Yeah, I think I'll be watching House instead and catching this on Hulu.  The last season failed to rekindle my excitement.

House for me, too.  Heroes is on On Demand so I'll watch it tomorrow or something.  I never know what the heck is going on, but I still seem to watch.

Doesn't NBC put their shows up online the next day? If so, I think I'll Tivo the House episode and catch Heroes online.

Look at your avatar!  Is that a book cover pic?

I'm pretty sure both shows are on Hulu these days.

Saw it.  Did not hate.  They are obviously trying to restart the whole series, but it is going to be hard to forget some of the shit that happened the last two years.

When you cannot possibly think of any way to make your story make sense going with carnies is clearly the best way out.

I can't help but see Mia from Californication everytime Claire's college friend shows up.

So far my reaction is middling.  It's not going to be as awesome as the first season, and Matt Parkman is still a whiny bitch.  At least there was much less Mohinder, hope they stay that way.

Hiro: It is my code! I must never change time again!

ok, just one time...

I have a new code! Yatah!

 :uhrr:

Yay for ando getting a piece of that...


but yeah, the whole premiere was a resounding 'meh'  let's go through this piece by piece in no particular order and fuck spoilers, heroes doesn't deserve them.

1. Setting up water-girl and bennet for a partnership and possible romance? Eww?

2. Why the fuck wouldn't parkman use his powers? They were never a burden and he never used them for evil, in fact only good ever came of them afaik. Just a cop out reason to bring sylar back and once again turn parkman into a wuss, taking him back to square one from being almost prof. x

3. Sylar...wtf, i love the character but seriously just let him go. The act is played out and he's turned from seriously evil and scary into a saturday morning cartoon villain.

4. Claire, oh claire.  How many times are we going to have someone accidentally find out she has powers? Also, wasn't there a running gag somewhere that the only thing her powers were good for was being a crashtest dummy?  Honestly they couldn't have telegraphed her scenes in a more obvious way than they did.

5. Peter was actually someone I didn't mind. Seemed to be level-headed and doing something useful, moving forward with his life. I expect them to fuck this over royally.

6. Last but not least we have hiro and the gang of carnies.  First off I also dislike the hiro's whole code of non interference was thrown out the window.  I do think it was possible but not in the way they portrayed it.  Basically the carnie was trying to tell hiro you could still change little things in the timeline if you wanted but big events(like diner waitress dying) could never be changed.  I really don't think they wrote this well.  I understood and even agree with the concept of what they were doing but it came out badly.

1.  I think the water girl think made okay sense.  But if they turn it into a romance, then yeah, fuck that.
2.  I do not agree.  He did a few things that were a bit naughty and didn't sit well with him.  The thought of him having major regrets about what he did to Sylar are perfectly reasonable.
3.  Somewhat agree.  I'll like what they're doing with him for one episode and then hate him the next.  You're probably right that they need to dump him.
4.  Heh, yeah. 
5.  Agreed.  I found that the angle they're taking on Peter right now is perfect.  They'll have screwed it well up by midpoint in the season, though.
6.  I'll wait to see how the carnie thing plays out.  Fast knife guy was kinda cool.  I don't mind Hiro being wishy washy about his code, because when has he not been?  The part that bugs me about it is that he doesn't consistantly apply when he will alter things versus when he won't.  All in all, though, the Hiro/Ando parts are still entertaining.

Not sure if anyone else noticed, but the "fast knife guy" is Ray Park of Darth Maul fame.

Decent episode, but disjointed and really slow in parts. A lot of the foreshadowing was really, really obvious.

I actually thought he looked familiar, but didn't clue in.

I also find it funny that I recognized Robert Knepper (the guy with paintbrush) from being in Carnivale.

Overall, I liked this episode a fuckload better than the last two seasons. Peter was definitely the best part of it, but then I've always liked him as a character - when he's not being whiney emo Pete. The biggest problem I think they'll have this season is unfucking the bad choices of the prior 2 seasons. Claire's story wasn't terrible, but they just really can't seem to find a good use for her or her powers. The continual dismantling of the most powerful characters is annoying, because it shows they overreached. Sylar is great, but he can't be the boogie man forever, and the whole "Let's not kill him, let's put him in Nathan's body" copout from last year is going to weigh this season down. I knew I recognized knife guy. The best part of the episode was watching the goddamn knife fight - that's the shit I expect to see on a show about people with powers. MORE OF THAT, GODDAMNIT.

It was good enough to keep me watching.

I recognized him from Prison Break.  It's going to be hard not seeing the really fucking annoying T-Bag whenever he's in a scene.

I was supremely annoyed by both the Californication chick and T-Bag in their respective series. I hope that doesn't carry over to Heroes and ruins it for me.

Matt is whiny again and I thought we were over that. Hate that development. As I do the Claire parts. She can go now. And the news on the Japanese front? Wary about that, also Hiro is the biggest pushover in history. He is like a ferret on Caffeine, he changes his never changing code more than his underwear. Enough with that already, at least cut down on the "My Code" speeches that rub our noses in your hypocrisy!

Holding out on the Bennet sublot (minus the new friend of her ex and the Ice chick romance parts). Liking the new Peter. And the Carnies idea, despite it feeling like Carnivale redux.

I like the carnies BECAUSE it feels like Carnivale redux.   :drill:

You have a point there. Maybe they could sneak in a conclusion to the Carnivale storyline. "You see old Timejumper here? He loves to tell us stories about the Great Depression. You know, there was a great fight between some farm hick and a fortuneteller from this very Carnivale. God bless grandma..."   :awesome_for_real:

I stopped watching back when Daphne got shot. It was dumb beyond my tolerance. I don't miss it. In fact, I'd forgotten Heroes exists.

One other thing bugged me, though - the goddamn prophecy seeing the future angle. Can this show really just NOT live without a fucking deus ex machina foretelling that manipulates everyone into doing something? Fuck's sake, ENOUGH WITH THE WE CAN DRAWZ DA FUTUREZ plot points.

What was the prophecy this time?  I must have blinked and missed it.  I know T-Bag has his whole 'we need someone who can travel through time so we can 'fix' currently undefined events that happened in the past' and there's the magic meta-detecting compass MacGuffin but I don't remember a prophecy.

His tattoo on the girls back was claire and sylar's faces. Thus he has magical future tats.

Since he used his Tattoo power to strangle the Speedster, it may very well not be future sight. He also asked her who the people from the Tattoos are, so her power seems to be more divination related than his. It could be something as simple as mutant detection for possible recruits.

I don't know.  Both their powers were so vaguely defined it's hard to say what exactly was happening.  I took it to be more of a magical tattoo yellow pages for finding people.  How did he know who to look for?  No idea.  But it doesn't seem to be a prophecy like the other painting guys.

Thought his power was telekinesis since he moved the earth the beginning too.

Would explain moving ink around under the skin too.  Er, maybe.

Good catch, had forgot about that earth moving thing.  But then why do that weird strangle thing, especially to a speedy guy (who admittedly just fucking takes it for some reason)?

By prophecy, I just mean some kind of telling the future vibe. I got the same vibe from the African painter dude who died too quickly, the Issac comic book and the mythical missing Issac comic book from season 3. Every goddamn season there is some from of automatic drawing of TEH FUTCHUR! and it is really starting to bug me since it's really just a plot device to make the characters clash.

Jeesus christ people, heroes isnt designed for the type of people who frequent this board. You guys are picking apart the bullshit entertainment they slap togather to keep the masses enthralled with "teh new shiney".

It's a show about super heroes.  I submit that it actually kinda is geared to people like us. 

I ate popcorn and watched it. It's kind of like a popcorn movie, which can be nice. If NBC aired a show that made me really engage my brain, I'd be worried that I'd somehow slipped into bizarro land.

I thought it was good for Heroes. This show should have really been on HBO or Showtime, if only because then they could do more without having to run crap past network censors and stuff. It would give more of a point to having Ali Larter on the show, I guess.

I don't particularly mind it having to conform to NBC's standards, but I agree it would have flourished better somewhere else, like showtime or HBO, or maybe FX.  All the freedom in the world wouldn't matter, though, if their writers continue to suck.

Honestly for a season opener I just found it really meh. The Carnie thing (Zomg! A community of people with powers what has been around for years and seems to know everything about people with powers but has never come into contact with the company or any of the other powered folks) just seems like a desperate attempt to restart the plot. The Sylar/Nathan thing would interest me if I thought it had the potential to be handled even moderately well as an opportunity for Sylar to genuinely reappraise himself and come to terms with 'who he really is', a chance for a fresh start for the character. Instead it's going to be him eventually breaking out and going murder happy on Angela, Bennet and Parkman. As other people have said the best part of it was Peter who is going to end up being a whiny bitch when he gets to a couple of accidents too late to do anything and decide he's useless and doesn't want anything to do with anyone anymore just as they need his help to defeat Sylar/Carnies/Polar bears in armour that want to get their hands on the compass.

I'll watch anything that has polar bears in armour!

You might be slightly dissapointed (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385752/).  I like where this new season is going, if only because its not going the same way as the last two.  This might be the first episode since the first season where i dont wanna kill Peter.

I take away all I said about claire's storyline, if it keeps going like this.... :drillf:

It's not about superheroes. I's a melodrama about people with superpowers.

Reap what you saw my friends. If you had largely ignored Heroes for the majority of season 1, like I did, then the show would have never reached season 2. Now its what season 5? Expect season 10 to roll by with half the ratings and double the funding. Heroes was never like Smallville which had a strong beginning but faltered and down right became awful later on as season dragged into season. Heroes was horrible in the beginning redeemable only at the tail end of season 1 and never picked up steam since then. Peter, Hiro, Claire all annoying characters from day 1, yet the fanbase grew to the point that this show isn't coming off no matter how shitty it is.

 :headscratch:

If the beginning was trash and you continue to watch it anyway...4 seasons later it will still be trash.

um