f13.net

A revival of Heroes with almost nobody from the original cast returning.  Just HRG. 

I liked HRG.  I like that the only other known cast member (Zach Levi).  I do not like that there is no Sylar (Quinto) or any of the other characters that drove the original show.  I also do not like that I watched the entire dang original series because it was the only Super show on TV and it showed just enough in three or four episodes that I was tricked into thinking there was a chance that I'd see a watchable show every once in a while. 

I expect this to be a trainwreck.  I'm just curious if it will be a trainwreck where you enjoy seeing the collision, or a trainwreck where you just want to look away and pretend it never went down...

I'm not sure it could possibly get worse than season 2's Oil Eye Twins or Season 3's Paris in my Mind sequence. But they damn sure want to try!

HRG without Claire there is really stupid.

Ha, ha!  You remember storylines after Season 1.  You lose.  I can remember the first season in rough terms, but the only thing I retain from later seasons was the final scene of the last season at the Ferris Wheel...

I collect shitty pop culture like trading cards.

In that case you must have billions of cards labeled 'Seasons 2 -> ? Heroes'.

Peter. Oh Peter.  Where is your girlfriend, Peter?

OK, that I remember.  Talk about dumping a date and forgetting she ever existed...

I knew the show was doomed from the end of season 1.  If they had killed Sylar and moved onto an altered cast with a new story arc it may have been a great show but unfortunately characters became popular and they made the age old mistake of "find new excuses to keep them around" even when their arcs were over.

The problem with this genre is that the origin stories are the most interesting and they generally happen early. After that they become exercises in ludicrous power escalation.

When I saw an interview right after the end of Season 1 in which the showrunners were asked, "Why didn't Peter just fly off by himself?" and they looked dumbfounded and had clearly never considered the idea... That moment was the second I should have discarded the show.

I'm wondering what the show will be like after we've seen Marvel and DC properties do so well on TV.  Is it too much to hope they might learn some small lessons?

I knew the show was doomed when they introduced a guy that can freeze time/teleport with world wide range/freaking time travel, oh and another one who can copy everyones powers.  Sylar was a wonderful villain, but the show was doomed because of Hiro and Peter.

Not just that, but the original plan of shooting Peter in the face only required one person to die, his brother flying him off was entirely pointless.

Agreed.  They set up a climatic Season 1 ending with a bunch of super powered folks with no combat training against Skylar.  Cool! I really thought he'd kill one or two of them before they got him, but no, it was a shitty non-epic fight.

I watched a few S2 episodes and when Skylar ate the cheerleader's brain I bolted.

Man, in retrospect, when I remember being soooooooo excited to finally see a superpowered show on TV... and trying to make excuses for it in the earliest days....

It didn't really need excuses in the earlier days.

Go back and watch Season 1.  The first few episodes are ok-ish - and there is one great episode in the middle - but the rest is not good at all.

Other than being a little stretched out because of having to do a 22-episode season, Season 1 was mostly positive. There were maybe 3-5 good episodes in seasons 2-4 total.

Yeah, it was shitting on everything good that happened in season 1 that ruined the show.

Have you re-watched it recently?  I rewatched it about 3 years ago (just Season 1) and I was shocked how bad it was in general... 

I really enjoyed Season One up until the final episode, and I think anything that gave us Zachary Qunito can't be too bad.

To me though, 'Heroes' epitomised the show that was utterly destroyed by the Writer's Strike. Not that I'm blaming the writers, that strike was legit, but I do wonder how much better the story might have been if it hadn't had to be re-engineered on the fly into an abruptly short season two.

You mean MERCIFULLY short season 2 of course.  :why_so_serious:

I always thought the production values for season 1 were just miles superior to everything that followed.  From season 2 and onwards, it was all close-up headshots, overlit studios and typical NBC soap-opera style direction.  It looked completely different, and not in a good way.

Well... yes. But

An Corp!


Hiro was the only character in the show I really liked. So I'm pleased to hear he's returning for the new miniseries as a guest-star.

I liked the character, the guy was funny and charismatic. His powers were a huge problem though.

Yup given the massive powers hiro and peter had they had to keep being made stupid and horrible to make any challenge for them.

Powers and their implications are really hard for a studio to handle.  It is one of the reasons I've been impressed by Flash - a speedster is so powerful, yet they've rarely had complete failures in the 'why is this a challenge for Barry' category.  It is one of the things that has me wondering about the new MCU status quo - Scarlet Witch's powers are very broad and defy limitation... something that potentially makes her too powerful for the universe.  What she did in the movie defied the 'mind control and telekenisis' description that was given to describe her abilities...

It's a powerful version of the power yes and very impressive but her list of powers is actually quite small compared say, the vision.

Maybe that was her own telekinetic push?  But yeah, I hope they don't go crazy with her as a Swiss Army knife heroine.

I attributed that to the mental whammy that she put on him, especially since they seemed to want to film her like samara in the ring for the first act....which I'm kind of sad they abandoned.

The movie itself gave up on the idea of describing her powers, with Marion Hill just summing her up as weird and the rest of us having to nod and a "sure". Scarlet Witch powers are whatever they have to be for the plot. Because for all intent and purposes what she showed in the movie amounts to her basically being able to rip people in half, the ability to glide in and out of peoples blind spots unnoticed, casual mind rape, telepathy/empathy, and enough telekinesis to stop a train.

And that was before she got super pissed off.

How do you separate ripping people in half and telekinesis? Look I know it's knitpicky but she literally only did two things, manipulating objects with her mind and screwing with peoples heads.  No of course those two powers have BROAD uses, since that basically describes professor X and Jean Grey combined but it's not exactly "Anything goes"

Wait, what? that's like literally the only real complaint about the show.  That's what makes the reverse Flash part of the plot so good, he is the only villain that Barry shouldn't be able to easily dispatch.  It makes the "robot bee girl" or "regular criminals with fancy guns" episodes just so completely dumb in comparison.

Yes, it is one of the few complaints of the show - but I'm amazed it is a complaint that is only really valid for a few episodes when it could very easily be true for most episodes.  Creating reasonable challenges for a speedster is hard.  When they said they wanted to do Flash on TV, I thought it would be impossible to give him reasonable challenges at all.

They've done very well with it.  I fully agree that the 'Rogues Gallery' foes with their glorified guns should be easy take downs, but a lot of the other foes are valid enemies for a speedster.

And now it gets a trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHClJhC8Wfs).

Nothing in there makes me think its writers will have learned anything.

They've said a few of the right things - focusing on capturing a bit of the feel of the first half of the first season... but it feels like one of those limited series comic books they release every decade or so to keep the rights to dormant characters alive.  I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and watch the first episode... but I kind of expect to see my doubt removed pretty quick.  My only curiosity is what they do to address the absence of the two most powerful characters from the universe.  It'd be like Superman disappearing from the DC universe - it must be addressed.

For anyone interested in seeing the new series, it starts tonight.

Check out the prequel videos at this link: Dark Matters (http://www.nbc.com/heroes-reborn/dark-matters/episodes)

The prequel series explains who at least one of the new characters is and gives an idea of what happened with a few of the characters from the previous series that will be in the new one.

I've spoken with two people that saw the first three hours.  The most useful review for me:

"It feels like a continuation of the last season of Heroes.  I think.  The last season of Heroes wasn't that memorable."

I'm on the verge of not even watching the first episode.

I'll likely end up hate-watching this for the sake of completeness.

This is getting bashed in reviews.  I don't have much hope for it.  Especially when there are so many good superhero shows on now.

Katana girl's power is DAOC graphics.

That was really, um, not very good.

Wasn't this show originally going to be an XBox or PSN exclusive? I'm almost certain that at one point it was part of the MS "TV TV TV" pitch.

I just read a summary of the two hour premiere. I want those 2 minutes back.

It was not season one Heroes at all. It was a few sprinklings of half decent season two Heroes, intermixed with a bunch of season two annoying oily eyed girl type stuff, plus a ten minute Poser animation demo.

I don't find the story any different than the last series.  Save Whoever, save the world.

Yes its like okay your super power is being transported into a really terrible video game that looks like its over a decade old??? You wuz robbed girly.

If they simply removed katana girl completely it would be sorta okish maybe?

There's too much stupid even without her. Like, ok you can teleport things but you never tried to figure out how it worked? Or even tested like, one time to see if you could teleport something across the room? Or instead of just sticking his hand through the wall, the Holy Ghost proves he has powers by...completely floating through the confessional to smother the dude like he was an altar boy.

There's just a lot bad writing here.

True, katana girl is at just a whole other level of badness that makes the rest of the show look better by comparison.  The worst part is i can totally picture the meeting where they decided this was a good idea.

The second episode was on last night. It was a little bit better than the first. Not quite so many WTF moments.

Mostly it centered around Molly Walker, who is from the original series. I had to look her up on the internet to find out her power is to be able to locate anyone by thinking about that person.

They packed a lot into one show. There was a continuation of story for: teleporter kid, Chuck and crazy wife, Molly Walker, Noah and conspiracy dude, Katana girl, and Mexican wrestler's brother. Two new powers were revealed. Two cool power stunts were shown. And there is a big event coming that the villains of the show may be the cause of.

I watched the first episode of most of my feelings about it track what you guys have said. The katana girl stuff was start to finish fucking stupid and the CGI world looked fine except for the one part that really need to not suck, which was Katana Girl's model. It was fucking awful. The best looking character (El Vengador) was killed in the first 45 minutes for... reasons and we're stuck with drunk, dumb ass brother of Mexican wrestler whose story is utterly not interesting at all. Then let's kill off one of the few interesting holdover characters from the first series Rene because again... reasons. Why are we continually stuck with the least interesting, most annoying stories out of this?

There are some real bad examples of enemies he should be able to cream in season 1, but there are more good ones than I thought they could muster.  It is hard to challenge a speedster with something that shouldn't be a gimme.  They did it more often than I thought they could.  That is what I was saying - not that Captain Cold should be anything other than a quick collar for Flash.   

The second episode was pretty terrible. "We need to rescue Molly Walker. We found you! YAY! Wait, don't go! Oh no, she walked around a corner and got nicked but we will stay around in the building while Pudge here bleeds all over the place to see their secret evil plan that totally uses Molly Walker. We must rescue Molly Walker, you know, the chick we totally had rescued like ten minutes ago."

... THE FUCK?