For some superficial reason, people who are supposed to know about fiction and narrative and what makes good storytelling have trouble taking comic books seriously. As recently as 1999, when I was President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, comic book writing was not deemed a satisfactory qualification for membership. That's still the case. I never understood the problem — do pictures along with text somehow render the text invalid?
Heroes comes from the comic book tradition. In fact, a comic book, based on the visions of a character who can paint the future, animates the NBC series. Monday night's episode, "Five Years Gone," is about as fine a time-travel story as I've ever seen on television. Well, ok, maybe it's not quite as good as Harlan Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever" in the original Star Trek series, or "Yesterday's Enterprise" from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But it's pretty close, and unlike those standalone episodes, it weaves in elements of Heroes that we have been seeing almost from the beginning of the series.
Time travel's no easy cookie. If you do it right — if you respect the paradoxes of time travel as really happening — you're asking your readers or audience almost immediately to enter a realm in which headaches come along with the thrills, as people in your story meet their future selves, and your audience must struggle to understand how the future self isn't changed by the very meeting with the past self...
And that's just the beginning — especially for Heroes, which not only has a time-traveling Hiro, but heroes with all kinds of other fantastic powers, like adopting the looks of others, reading minds, and, the most powerful of all, adopting all the powers of the other superheroes.
"Five Years Gone" dished out then dealt with these problems wonderfully, positing a world gone wrong, and all-too-humanly flawed heroes struggling against all odds to pull time and the world inside-out and perhaps put it back on track again.
If there were one or two tin notes — like a thread of this story a little too close to X-Men — that's ok, because the overall effect, and so many characters and plot twists, were so good.
And Heroes made good on some of its crucial implications from earlier in the year. That's not only good television, and all too rare in a TV world in which series seem to spin irredeemably beyond control, but good time-travel telling — in books, short stories, movies, comic books, or any narrative realm.
Article comments
1 - TV and Film Guy
Congratulations! This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States.
2 - Stac
check out this article on the men of Heroes... hiro is such a hottie with a brain
3 - Robin Kavanagh
This episode was easily the best in the series.
4 - Paul Levinson
TV and Film Guy: Delighted!
Stac: Masi Oka put in a great performance as Hiro in this episode.
Robin: Agree. And, as I said in the review, the episode gets special creds in my book for the style and logical rigor with which it presented the time-travel story. No easy task. It took me three times longer to write my novel The Plot to Save Socrates than any of my other novels. Time travel's the toughest genre to get right, and "Five Years Gone" did it beautifully.
5 - Baronius
If anything, I think Robin underestimates this episode. It was one of the tightest, most thrilling, and most cinematic things I've ever seen on television. They were smart enough to leave some aspects of time travel undefined. They left a lot of things open-ended, resisting the impulse to explain everything that every character did over five years.
Yeah, they borrowed from X-Men, but there are only so many things you can do with mutants. Good mutants, bad mutants, people who hate mutants, mutants who hate people. This episode nodded to everything from WWII to The Matrix. And like Paul said, it fit perfectly into the series. Really amazing.
6 - Alec
Paul - a very fine piece of wrting. I fully agree that "Five Years Gone" is about as good as it gets. I particularly liked that the future universe was not simplistically presented as an alternate universe or a parallel history, but was ultimately part of the heroes' task of finding a way to stop Sylar (and perhaps other baddies to come). In a way, it is marvelously creative, and internally coherent, to have Hiro travel not only through space, but also to the past and the future, as he attempts to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
On the other hand, I think that it is more the case that Heroes is in part inspired by comics than that it comes from the comic book tradition. This is not damning with faint praise; but what annoys me is the extent to which some of the most vociferous fans of the show demonstrate that they don't know anything but comic books and anime, and seem to view the show as little more than a gloss on X-Men. So, for example, rather than appreciating the intricate originality of this episode, the worst best fans see it as little more than a disguised version of the X-Men comic series "Days of Future Past," and insist on mis-reading various Heroes characters as disguised versions of their favorite X-Men character.
As Baronius notes in another reply, Heroes is more than just borrowings from X-Men. It is also more than a vindication of comic books or even sci fi in general.
7 - Paul Levinson
Baronius - excelllent points, agreed.
Alex - many thanks - and excellent points - which I almost completely, or maybe do completely, agree with.
The point of possible disagreement is about X-Men: although I think looking for X-Men characters in Heroes is a superficial exercise, as you say, I do think Heroes clearly owes a general debt to X-Men (but you may think this, too).
By the way - nice phrase - "worst best fans" ...
8 - Nicolas
In one of the first episodes Hiro tells Ando about a X-Men comic and time travelling. He only said the issue number of the comic, isn't it "Days of Future Past" the comic he mentioned?.
I think the same way than Paul. So many times I can't understand people with bad concept about comics. They read the worst book ever they can find and then say that is better than a comic.