The Show

Poor Heroes. After a critically acclaimed and massively popular first season, the show unexpectedly stumbled out of the gate with a second season that has been variously described as unfocused, dull, and inconsistent. It certainly didn’t help that only 11 out of the 24 planned episodes were produced because of the writers' strike.

So is Heroes a television juggernaut that just needs to find its footing again or an overblown mess that blew whatever potential it once had? The third season seems to suggest a little of both. At times it’s incredibly entertaining and it sucks you right in, but it frequently ruins that momentum with unnecessary subplots and a wealth of dialogue that should’ve been sent straight back to the crap factory where it originated from.

There are a lot of great effects in Heroes’ third season, but what really has to be solid to set a show like this apart are the storylines and the characters. Heroes attempts to weave together plenty of plotlines and a vast assortment of characters a la ABC’s Lost. But make no mistake — by this point, it’s pretty clear Heroes is no Lost. Even at its most inscrutable, Lost has never been this messy.

Just in this season alone, characters’ personalities are often inconsistent, and it’s hard not to get the sense that the writers are just tossing out ideas as they go along, more concerned with creating some type of temporary conflict to maintain interest than advancing the overall story.

All that said, Heroes still has enough positives in its corner to convince me that the show might go on to greatness. There are far too many uninteresting characters, but the ones that do click — the evil, yet conflicted Sylar (Zachary Quinto), sympathetic mind-reader Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg), and hilarious duo Hiro and Ando (Masi Oka, James Kyson Lee) — make you root for their sequences to come on the screen next.

The third season also feels like it gains traction in its second half, a segment titled “Fugitives” in which government agents seek to track down and imprison people with abilities, whether they use them for evil or not. This prolonged story arc gives the show some direction compared to its rather aimless first half, while still allowing room for subplots that don’t derail the main story.

Article Author: Dusty Somers

Dusty Somers hails from Seattle, and is a journalism student at the University of Oklahoma. He enjoys spending time and watching films with his wife, and looks forward to their imminent return to the great Northwest.

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