Heroes Watch: The Squiggly Thingy of Death!

I liked the return except for the bit with Peter. I'm very worried that it's going to be a rehash of last season except this time they're looking for Peter instead of Peter looking for Claire.

The Company story line is interesting, I figured it would go under with Linderman but perhaps he wasn't the head of the snake after all.

One question, after Hiro's father was knocked off the roof did you notice a second corpse? I did not.

Wow, for a season premiere.....that was pretty terrible.

I mean, why jump ahead 4 months, if no one is in real peril (okay, except Mrs. Petrelli and Hiro's dad)? If no one is in a tense situation where we see them using their powers, or struggling with them, or, well, anything? And could Hiro's adventure in the past be any more boring so far? And could Claire's new future boyfriend be any more ridiculous ("So what are you? Alien or robot?")

One other question - wasn't Nathan elected to Congress? Didn't that happen? How/why is he getting drunk everyday and growing the Grizzly Adams beard (which, by the way, is the laziest way to show a character has "given up" in the hack script-writing instruction manual)?

Overall, this show has a LONG way to go to get back to the high point of last year (Company Man, which was probably the best episode of the show period.) And I recommend they focus on what made that episode work, which was mainly telling one primary story. Oh, and the fact that the show's best non-Hiro actor, Jack Coleman, was the focus.

Overall a pretty good show. Quite honestly it is nice to just have something to watch. But my big problem is this. If "limited commercial interuption" means taking a great song and ruining it, I'm for "extended no-song-killing" interuptions. Do they think playing 3 similar ads back to back during the breaks gets our attention? I actually would be less likely to buy a Nissan after that. I'm not so sure the Clash (if they had any hand in licensing this song to Nissan) wants to be in the same company as Bob Seger's "Like a Rock" or Mellencamp's "This is Our Country".

I was happy on one hand to see the commercials - I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the "Ro" was. Ahhhh... the ROGUE. Now it's clear. No, you don't need to tell me a second time. Or a third. Oh well. The show itself was good enough. As Todd said, just nice to have something to watch. The only thing I was left wanting was a little crossover advertising with some stacks of Dunder-Mifflin supplied paper in the copy shop.

I like Heroes a lot, but I can't help but compare it to Lost, and well, in those comparisons, it just doesn't hold up

Some of the acting performances are just sooooo bad. The scene where Mohinder slammed the dude from Groundhog Day against the wall....oh my god that was bad acting. And Claire + Noah and Claire + Nathan = creepy daughter/father/real father/incest vibe.

I will give NBC props for the Nissan advertising/sponsor deal. That was cool to have almost 53 minutes of actual show during the broadcast instead of incessant commercials.

p.s. Two thumbs up for Chuck. I'll go ahead and say it...the Sarah chick is smoking.

I loved the premiere! I thought it was awesome, that it hit the ground running (or at least walking very fast) and set up some really interesting storylines. I love Hiro in the past, the dynamics with his "hero" and my husband and I were delighted that our theory that Hiro was actually kensei (sp?) the hero from the stories seems to be coming to pass. I definitely missed Niki/Mikah/DL, and want to know what the heck is up with Peter. I do prefer episodes that are more focused, like this one, that doesn't have to necessarily check in with every single character every single time, so I will trust the Heroes writers that they will work folks in at a reasonable rate. . .

Yeah, so, what was up with Nathan's face in the mirror?

@Kevin_ATL: I agree - when Heroes gets compared to Lost, it suffers tremendously by comparison. Why is it that we compare these two shows? Besides having sprawling, large casts, it's not like they're all that similar - one is people trapped on a mysterious island, the other is about super-powered people.

I think the reason Lost works better than Heroes (beyond better actors and writers), is the structure the island brings to the show. Characters are not scattered all over the world (or all throughout time), and thus are forced to interact with each other, with the lone exception being flashbacks or flashforwards. There are no "just Jack" or "just Sawyer" stories - the characters are banded together in groups on adventures, and we see them interact and that makes all the plots in any one show more interesting because we see tension from multiple characters' perspectives.

In Heroes, everyone is off doing their own thing. In fact, it's little wonder that the strongest episode of the show (Company Man) occurred when a ton of main characters (The Bennetts, Matt Parkman, Ted the Nuclear-man, the Haitian, etc.) all converged together - for the first time, we saw the characters interacting, and that raised dramatic tensions a la Lost. And its no wonder that weak episodes (like last night's season premiere) suffer because the characters are flung far and wide and we see only one perspective at a time in a limited fashion.

This episode of Heroes was disappointing PRECISELY because it reminded me about how strong Lost finished last year by comparison, and how much longer we have to wait until the new episodes return.

@Chaddogg: "When Heroes gets compared to Lost, it suffers tremendously by comparison. Why is it that we compare these two shows?"

I'm trying to observe an informal no-more-comparing-Lost-and-Heroes policy in my posts, because I did enough of it last season. But--you asked, so I have an excuse to answer!

Heroes invites the comparison, maybe not because its essential premise is similar, maybe not because the producers want the comparison, but because clearly so much of its design and execution is transparently based on one principle: Make sure that our show addresses every complaint people have ever had about Lost.

You want closure? We'll give you closure! You don't like it when Lost drops your favorite characters for too many episodes? We'll do our damndest to cram as many characters as possible into every episode!

The result: Heroes is a very entertaining show, but a limited and less ambitious one. By eliminating so much of Lost's downside risk, the upside payoff becomes impossible. I would argue that you could not have a great finale like Through the Looking Glass without setting it up with the very kinds of episodes that Lost fans complain about--the slow starts to the new season, the dangling threads that hang out there for months, etc. (OK, you didn't need Nikki and Paolo to have Through the Looking Glass--but you get the point.)

Bottom line, the comparison shows that giving the viewer exactly what they want in the short term is not always best in the long term.

heroes rock

I have a feeling that Heores will always struggle at the beginning and end of every season. The main reason being that the producers try to bring all the characters, spread out across the world (and time), together in the same storyline. I hated the Heroes pilot episode a year ago and wasn't interested in watching the show again. But then Sci Fi had a mini marathon a month later and I noticed that it was getting good. So this premier felt almost like a pilot episode for a new show. Maybe Kristen Bell can put some new life into the show or I'll probably be saying farewell to Heroes.

QUESTION: Did they explain how Nathan lived the explosion or do they plan on explaining it? Bascially this episode made the finale look even worse, which I thought was impossible.

@James - interesting thought. The extension of this analysis, though, is basically anti-TV Watch: serial shows like Lost and Heroes cannot be judged on an episode-by-episode basis, because doing so robs them of the one goal ALL serial programs have - to build and tell a story that can be judged comprehensively, not in episode sized segments. Hence the (sometimes) disappointing buildup episodes in Lost that lead to the transcendant Through the Looking Glass, which when that final piece/episode came into place made the ENTIRE season look remarkably well-done.

And that's where Heroes fails - it strives to achieve in a serial format acceptance on an episode-by-episode basis. And it cannot be done - you may occasionally get lucky (Company Man) but in the end your finales lack punch and episodes like the premiere struggle under the weight of trying to keep all these storylines/characters afloat.

@ChrisKw - If Captain Awesome herself, Kristen Bell, cannot resuscitate Heroes, nothing can.

@chaddogg:"The extension of this analysis, though, is basically anti-TV Watch..."

I think that's largely true. Especially with HBO dramas, etc., to judge them on an individual-episode basis misses the point. I think I mentioned this, e.g., when I did that Top 10 Sopranos episodes list before the final season: episodes like College and Pine Barrens always lead lists like this, but do they really capture what's best about the show?

It's better to think of Watches as a kind of notebook, where you're tracking the development of the show and its themes over time--but I definitely fall into the trap of "this episode rocked/sucked" sometimes.

@James - I'm definitely not recommending cutting the Watches - far from it. I agree that they can be a valuable way to look at the story's arc and discuss/guess about the future, etc. I mean, just look at the fun we (okay, I) had in the LostWatches last year.

And while I definitely may seem to be falling into the "this episode sucked" theme after the premier of Heroes, I think my criticism isn't so much about the episode itself, but rather where this episode fits. Why jump ahead 4 months? What are the writers trying to set up with this time shift on the show? Particularly when the "changes" over those 4 months seem so minimal - Matt divorced and caring for Molly, the Bennetts the same albeit in a new city, Suresh still on his quest to complete his father's work (although also going undercover against the Company), and Nathan (arguably the most changed) a drunk who is despondent over the death of his brother. I mean, Ando and Hiro's dad were LITERALLY in the same place 4 months later.

I guess my problem is that I can't see what the four month jump accomplishes, in the story's arc. Maybe the writers will surprise me with twists that show astonishing things happened in that 4 month interval. But I'm not holding my breath - it just seemed like a gimmick to break and scatter all the characters so that we can spend all season getting them together again. And for what?

So in that larger, season-wide view, the premiere "sucked", or at least failed to live up to expectations.

Well without the 4 month thing they'd have to explain the process Matt went through to adopt Molly, what Hiro's father and Ando have been doing all this time. How Nathan grew a beard so quickly. What process Mohinder and Jonah have been going through in order to locate the Company.

The 4 month skip allows them to say "these things happaned, now here's the action." I personally feel it would have been a little odd too if immediately after "defeating" Sylar a new enemy reared his ugly head. That time jump allows them all to be lulled back into a false sense of security or insecurity in some cases.

Also(and this is the most likely reason), it allows for Peter to return to the show without a significant absence from the narrative and also allows him to have lost his memory.

Reasons why I hated the "Heroes" premiere:

-- "Are you an alien or a robot?" Who talks like that?

-- Did you know the Honduran woman's name was Maya? Because her brother didn't repeat it 7500 times or anything!

-- It ended with a cryptic shot of Peter ... didn't see that coming at all.

-- If HRG wants to be as anonymous as possible, why does he work at a paper place? Again!

-- Can anyone honestly say any scene didn't go exactly how you would have guessed?

I never thought anything could make last year's finale seem good by comparison. If Kristen Bell wasn't joining the cast, this would have been the last episode of "Heroes" for me.

You guys are beating this show down a little too quickly I think. "the last show for me". There was a long string of episodes of Lost (the only other show I watch, sorry for the comparison again) but I never contemplated leaving the show. Granted, I'm nowhere near as intrigued by the guy or gal who killed Hiro's dad as I am about the Others or the black smoke but I'd still like to know.

I'm probably just too naive, I don't have much experience with television so every show seems good to me. I'm that way with movies though, I've never seen a bad movie.

Re: Lost vs. Heroes
I understand that Lost has better production values and acting than Heroes does. Lost *may* have better writing - probably yes on an episode-by-episode basis, but I'll have to reserve judgment until the whole story is done.
Why? JJ Abrams and Alias is why.
Alias started off great, just like Lost. It developed a cool, crazy mythology, just like Lost, and then it denigrated into a really lame show that made little attempt to tie up the many loose ends introduced over the years.
I realize that Abrams isn't as involved in Lost as he was in Alias, and I am hoping along with all of you that Lost has a fulfilling resolution, but say what you want about Heroes, so far the show has managed to tell a compelling serial story without constantly dangling the lone, gigantic carrot of "what does it all mean?" in front of the audience.
Shows like Alias dropped the ball miserably, IMO. Heroes so far hasn't, and that's a big part of why I'm willing to put up with the shortcomings that drive so many of you crazy.
Yes, I'd rather have a show like Heroes that sets the bar lower and delivers than a dozen shows like Alias that set the bar high and fail.
If Heroes ended today it would still stand as an interesting, fulfilling story IMO. I can't say the same thing about any single season of Lost.

I don't want to continue adding fuel to the fire, but to reply to Chris, Heroes can't drop the ball because it never picked it up.

"Meek" describes Heroes to its very core. It wasn't daring to kill off a cluster of characters that hadn't have much screen time anyway (not that the 'deaths' of main characters evoked much emotion from me). Heroes borrows heavily from other graphic novels, but at the end of season one, they could have blown up NY and opened up so many doors, such as questioning the meaning of being a hero if you don't actually succeed. But no, they went about as safe as you can go, shying away from questions that we actually want to know the answers to. (Incidentally, they're borrowing heavily from the Watchmen again this season, although I'll reserve judgment on such stuff until they prove they can't do much more than copy).

Honestly, I don't want to see the show fail. I just want them earn their success, instead of riding on the success of not making the same 'mistakes' as Lost. I want Milo Ventimiglia to be spending every free hour doing acting workshops instead of touring the planet, because he needs the practice, and I mean that as sincere constructive criticism. The writers should take a cue from Lost, and start really asking questions about what it means to be a hero in today's world, instead of throwing cliches at us about evolution or finding the courage within ourselves.

@ Eric
:shrug:
Heroes left me a happy viewer after pretty much every episode last year. That's good enough for me.
I don't have a problem with a "safe" show, and I don't think being "edgy," "original," or "shocking" are ends in themselves.
Telling a good, engaging story is paramount to me, and when it happens, I'm happy. Even if does all end up neatly tied in a bow.

Chris - Agreed with everything you just said! I get a little sad when I read so many negative posts about the Heroes premiere, it seems like people expect it to be something else now that it is this whole big phenomenon. I love the slow pacing, the way the stories unfold gradually like in a comic book, and the intertwining lives of the characters. I love getting to come home on Monday nights and have an hour of total escapism. I am probably one of the least "critical" viewers of this show for that reason - I just love to be told a good story, however the storytellers choose to tell it. I am really excited about this Heroes season, I see some awesome storylines being started here, but I am worried that people are looking to the show with unreasonable expectations, or at least with preconceived notions about how it should be handled. . . It would break my heart for something to happen to this show because fans are fickle.

@ Chaddog
Thank you. I thought that HS boy was a bit of a creepy emo d-bag. I wasn't sure if it's just that I'm finally "old" and have lost all touch with teenagers or if he just sucks. You've confirmed it for me. Plus, does being able to fly make watching the new girl in your class through her bedroom window any less creepy? Is it alarming only if it's difficult to get up the tree?

Tangentially, you talking in subtle cross-program references ala "Captain Awesome herself, Kristen Bell" is great. I'm glad I'm not the only one. Are you met with blank stares at work?

@ Lost vs. Heroes
I think James is on the right track with Heroes trying to fit alot into the plot. Their problem is the myriad of pathos they're trying to address. We've got high school outcast drama, we've got religious guilt drama, we've got troubled genius drama, we've got evil Big Brother corporation drama, we've got family drama, the list goes on and it becomes tiring quickly. If Brian from Top Chef can teach us anything it's that too much is often just that.

Plus, I f'in hate the VO from Mohinder in the beginning of each episode.

A beard and drowning your sorrows in a bar? That's what you do when you break up with your girlfriend (that's right, old timey inventor, I'm talking to you) not what you do after deciding not to commit massive genocide and instead fly your nuclear brother into the stratosphere.

So many problems with the season opener:

Maybe I spaced out in watching all of the first season in one week (thank you, Guy Who Created DVDs), but didn't Mohinder already work for the company as Molly's babysitter? At the very least, the Company already knows who he is, seeing that they killed his father and all (or is that too much of deduction?) and Claire's wooden dad followed found him when he was driving that taxi.

Anyone know why Mohinder thinks Sylar is dead? End of last season, the was bloody slug-trail leading to a manhole, so I'm guessing the body was never found. I suppose Heroes don't have the superhuman ability to ask if anyone found a body sporting a sword injury.

And it wasn't just the season opener, the acting has always been awful. But the scene where the Claire Fam were discussing their day? The worst example of comic relief I've ever seen.

Speaking of Claire, is it just me, or does anyone else think the only reason Claire has her Wolverine power is because she is China-doll fragile? Can't she do anything without suffering a compound fracture?

And who talks about Darwin in chemistry class?

I completely agree with you re: the Nissan ad. It made me throw up in my mouth a little. I blogged about it (See main URL... the permalink is probably not Time Inc. friendly).

Oh, I also meant to say, did anyone else think the show was ripping off Buffalo 66 considering how they shot the Bennett dinner scene from each characters perspective in rotation? Just me?

@Gerry - I'm pretty sure Sylar killed Mohinder's dad.

No Niki was a welcome relief. Although there were a lot of cliche scenarios, I want to see where they go with it all. I think Masi Oka can carry his cliche "help the anti-hero" storyline he has going on but I hope they throw some wrenches into the other arcs to keep us on our toes.

Hey,

I just had to do a Google search on the "Nissan Rogue" and "The Clash" after I just saw the commercial. My eyes actually teared up and a sick, empty feeling invaded my core as I listened to the song I blasted before every major test in undergrad and grad school being used in a sterile car commercial. I really didn't mind the recent commercial that used a song by The Who, as the content of the commercial fit with the music. And in some ways it's nice that our generation is now in charge of things and deciding the content of commercials, etc. But this, this is just a film of a small car being driven around. What does that have to do with the content and drive of a song that got me through school?!! Sometimes this mega-Capitalist world just leaves me feeling hollow...OK, back to Heroes for all of you. Sorry for the interruption.

I'm still trying to figure out the Rogue commercial. On one hand good for the Clash, why shouldn't they, on the other hand,
it's a long way from Rude Boy ....innit.