In 2006 NBC debuted Heroes. The premise of the series involves ordinary individuals who discover that they have superhuman abilities. It was a smash hit and fans of the series (this reviewer included) were eagerly awaiting season two, especially since season one ended on a cliffhanger.
Heroes Season Two picks up four months after the events of Kirby Plaza. Sylar is powerless, Peter has amnesia, Nathan was injured helping Peter, and Hiro was transported back to 16th century feudal Japan! We slowly meet up with everyone and are introduced to several new characters. This is where many fans have a problem with the season; they felt that it was too soon to introduce new characters and they took time away from the established characters. Not only that, but Hiro’s story, while interesting, took a little too long to unfold and kept him out of action for the majority of this volume. It took until the eighth episode to finally learn what happened immediately following the events of Kirby Plaza.
Series always have to be careful not to fall into the “sophomore slump” (this is where a sophomore effort fails to live up to the standards of the first season). Heroes does slightly veer into the slump and series creator Tim Kring has publicly acknowledged and apologized for slightly detouring away from what made season one so great.
Heroes can be viewed as a live action comic book and successfully was for season one, but like some story arcs in comics, plots took too long (Maya and Alejandro), didn’t really advance the plot, were unnecessary or just didn’t go anywhere. Many of the subplots did eventually converge in the final four episodes or so and is where the series regained much of its season one glory.
Many series suffered from the writers' strike that lasted over 100 days; Heroes was one of the series that suffered the most. Many shows did come back after the strike, but because of its episodic nature, it was decided that Heroes' eleven episodes would be the only episodes of the 2007-2008 season. There were supposed to be 24 episodes in total with three volumes, but because of the strike the last episode ended very differently than was planned. If you listen to the alternate ending featurette you learn that “Generations” was just the starting point for this season and would have set up the rest of the season; this is partially why the volume isn’t as strong as season one. Season one was one long arc over 23 episodes, season two was planned to be three arcs over 23 episodes. Since it was undetermined if/when Heroes would return during season two writers decided to wrap up the volume rather than have it end on a cliffhanger.
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