i think that i've had just about enough of "heroes"

[rone]

"Heroes" is a comic book title on the TV screen, and it carries all of the dreadful drawbacks that you'd expect from your typical comic book:

• The plotting is twisty and leaky: a lot of it springs from the heavy reliance on time travel and precognition, which are being handled with a ham-handed grace.  As for the stuff that doesn't, here's one: how did Bob know Peter would be flying Nathan back to that specific hospital and walking down that specific corridor so Elle could zap him?  And my biggest complaint: why didn't Peter absorb Sylar's "instant comprehension" power?
• The characters are not interesting except for their powers: leaving aside the really dumb but insignificant things, such as various characters looking directly at the solar eclipse, the characters alternate between being railroaded into being dull and predictable, and doing crazy, nonsensical things just to move the story along (why was Candice all alone taking care of a complete psycho like Sylar? why did Bob put Peter in the cell next to the extremely dangerous Adam, through which they could speak?).  To say the characters are two-dimensional is rather generous in at least half the cases.
• Women and Blacks fare poorly: Charles Deveaux: dead.  D. L. Hawkins: dead.  Monica Dawson: nearly injected with lethal virus.  Simone Deveaux: dead.  Micah Hawkins: alive, but his dad was killed and his mom's crazy and irresponsible (also, he's only half-black and not a woman and just a kid).  The Haitian: almost died from Shanti virus.  Eden McCain: dead.  Angela Petrelli: scheming, manipulative, untrustworthy.  Maya Herrera: toxic crybaby who's developing a taste for killing.  Candice Wilmer: dead (didja notice she was a fatty?  god forbid an overweight girl pretending she's thin!  kill her!)  Niki Sanders: dissociative, and of course all her alternate personae are indecent and unscrupulous, oh, and she's infected with a lethal virus.  Molly Walker: her parents were gruesomely murdered by a serial killer and she was trapped in a nightmare.  Elle Bishop: way-over-the-top clichéd crazy.  Claire Bennet: teenage angst out the ass.  Sandra Bennet: she talks to her Pomeranian and was a bit dotty even before she got repeatedly mind-wiped.  Audrey Hanson: promising, and therefore written out.  Caitlin McKenna: stuck in the grim meathook future.  Janice Parkman: cheated on Matt, no explanation whatsoever.  Heidi Petrelli: stuck in a wheelchair after horrific accident, but at least Linderman healed her.  Yaeko: she's without the man she loves.  Jackie the Other Cheerleader: dead.  Charlie Andrews: dead.  Virginia Gray: dead.  Who does that leave?  Oh, right, Nana Dawson, but she's barely appeared.

Sure, i'm curious to see what happens next, but if "Heroes" were a comic book, i'd tell wacky_hijinx to drop my subscription.  How does a TV network pick up mediocrity like "Heroes" but not "Global Frequency"?  Oh, right, "TV network".

This ought to segue into my oft-promised rant about the dismal world of DC & Marvel, but i've had a migraine all day and i'm feeling a little drained now.

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

And then there's the badness that is, say, the last few episodes of season 1.

There's the dumbness of the Exploding Man thing, and that's bad, but the worst part was how *lame* Sylar was. He can STOP BULLETS midflight that he didn't see coming, but he can't stop Hiro when Hiro shows up, poses, screams, then runs across the distance to stab him - and doesn't stop time?

Bullshit. The entire fight with Sylar was bad. Badly written, badly scripted, inconsistent, and all kinds of other badness. It pissed me off so much that it ruined just about all the goodwill I had from the rest of season 1.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, i knew i was forgetting something. He couldn't even HEAR the bullets because they're frickin' supersonic. And why are his powers dampened when he's not on any "Haitian drugs" and didn't suffer any head trauma? And why take him to Buttfucko del Este, Mexico?

Why didn't Peter fly off all by himself? Why did he need the tow from his brother? Speaking of which, why didn't the Haitian suppress Nathan's flight back when they pulled him out of bed? And why did they have the twins take the long way around from the DR to Venezuela, then through Central America and Mexico into the US? It defies belief that they'd be wanted for homicide in Guatemala and Mexico for a crime committed in the DR. OK, i think i'm done.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yup, all those, and I'm sure there are more, too.

Heroes sucks. It had promise, but they didn't bother even *trying* to keep things consistent, they made things up as they went along without worrying about previously established facts, and they simply assumed that the audience of a superhero story wouldn't care about little details like consistency.

Heroes is probably the best comic-book TV show ever.

And it's insulting to the intelligence and totally ass-tastic and worthless.

Because "best superhero TV show ever" means NOTHING in terms of good TV.

[khrister.livejournal.com]

"Why didn't Peter fly off all by himself? Why did he need the tow from his brother?"

Actually, this one they actually explained in the dialogue (in a flashback, but still). Peter was concentrating on not exploding and couldn't really do anything else.

Most of the rest, I agree about. I just think it's fun enough to work even without the consistency.