Heroes And The Magic Turtle, or why I’m not watching anymore
By fred | October 7, 2008
So here’s the thing, despite all I’ve said in the past I still ended up recording the latest episode of Heroes last night, and today I did press “Play” and went on to watch said episode. I did all of that willingly, no really no one was forcing me, and I even planned on reviewing the episode after wards. But then I change my mind, because I actually watch the freaking thing.
And something has become clear, as I’ve been saying all along : this show is not going anywhere. Remember how this is how it felt with Lost before last season ? That sense that it was all confused and mysterious, but you had no idea what the frick was going on, and more importantly it really felt as if the writers themselves did not had any answers to those questions they kept throwing at us ?
With Heroes we’re pretty much in the same place right now, only worse.
Worse, because it doesn’t feel like the writers don’t have the answers, it feels like they don’t even have the questions ! When you watch Heroes you don’t get under the impression that they do not know where the show is going, what they want to do with it or where they want to bring all those characters, no what you feel is that they’re not even asking themselves those questions, they don’t even care!
Let me ask you a couple of questions :
What is Heroes ?
“It’s a show about people who develop abilities, or super-powers.”
Yeah, okay, but besides that, what’s it about ? What’s the story ?
“uuuhhh……”
Don’t bother, there’s no answer for that one, because I’m now convinced that the writers don’t even ask themselves that question. Sure, at first Lost was about a group of people on a mysterious Island. But even before last season, even when we were losing faith about the show, there was a story. There were groups of characters with motivations and goals, acting on them and reacting to others. We might not have had any idea of what all those were, of the bigger picture at play, but at least some things were defined.
On Heroes, it’s just people with abilities, and so they have them, they use them, and so it goes, over & over again. They keep redoing the same crap (Hell they even re-air scenes from previous episodes within new episodes now to fill time!), so Nathan is going into politics, again, and he’ll become President of the USA, again, and whats-her-name is by his side, again, and Peter wants to save the world, again, and there’s an explosion, again, and… and it just goes on and on.
Because they’re too scared they never kill any character off, but they keep bringing on new ones (who soon are trapped into boring fillers or get married to an old characters so they can make babies, even though they were probably siblings to begin with…) to add what they think is “complexity”, but it’s more boredom and a good way to have us not care about any of them, and they also keep adding new timelines, just so that it makes less and less sense every time.
The good guys become villains, the villains become heroes, it’s all supposed to look complicated but it’s not, it’s just boring. Plus, everyone is an idiot, like Peter who could freeze time but rather let Sylar’s kid die so he can explode…
But the problem isn’t there, it’s not that characters are stupid or that we don’t care about any of them at this point (BTW where’s Elle?), the problem of Heroes is that it is unable to tell a story, because it doesn’t even have one. And the more it goes, the more obvious it is to me that they’re not even trying to have one, they just want to add episodes after episodes…
Does anyone really still care anymore, when we don’t know what’s the story behind all this ? when we don’t have any of the characters’ motivations ? when they keep forgetting about what happened or was said in past seasons, or epsiodes ? when there’s so many characters it’s hard to keep track of everyone of them, and yet they’re pretty much all stuck in stupid filler crap ??
And when Parkman was dumb enough this week to think his path was actually to follow a turtle, because I’m sure that turtle will get out of Africa and bring him back to wherever he needs to go, of course, it hit me : writers have no clue where this show is going, at all, and they’re not even trying to figure it out, they don’t even bother pretending. They don’t bother with those questions, or continuity with past episodes/seasons, they don’t even try to make sense, they simply keep following their own magic turtle…
Word.
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