For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

The second season of Heroes catches a lot of shit for, well, being the second season. As far as I can tell, people seem to hold the Writer's Strike against it, and far be it from the guy who holds a grudge against Paul Newman for being dead to tell you that's unfair.

But I didn't think it was bad. In fact, I thought it was roughly as good as the first season, with some cool plot twists stuffed in along the way. Most people seem to think that the first season was some rip-roaring adventure tale, full of excitement and peril, but I never really felt that way. The writers of the show never seemed to figure out how to pace the show well. Episode-to-episode, the show was paced very well, but scene-to-scene the show displayed an amateurish knowledge of what makes things suspenseful, often undercutting its own hard work with stupid sentimentality.


The exception to the rule, though, is the abso-fucking-lutely fantastic episode "Homecoming". I'm only through the second season, but I have my doubts that the show will ever be able to top its excellent work there, where all the problems I have with the show were temporarily caged in favor of kicking ass. As much as I love Zachary Quinto in this show (and I fucking love Zachary Quinto in this show), his character was a lot more fun when he just stood in the shadows, making things fly around and taking peoples' brains in the most spectacularly violent method possible. And I miss the whole Isaac Mendes premonition business.

People also seem to hold the last episode in high regard. The final showdown between Sylar and Peter seemed very small-scale and anti-climactic, although they only made it worse with Nathan's fucking monologue that did nothing but sap any suspense out of the scene.

The second season resolved a lot of problems and introduced a host of new ones.

First problem they introduced. Where the fuck did Sylar go? I couldn't help but feel like his line was artificially lengthened by sending him on a road trip with some Nikki and Paulo.

And something that has been an issue from the beginning is that we are never given a clear indication of the lengths and limits of the characters' abilities. For example, at the beginning of the second season, Sylar kills the chick who makes illusions, and then freaks out when he doesn't absorb her ability. The whole fucking first season he's been snatching up brains, and now he doesn't and all of a sudden he's shitting himself over how he lost his powers. In any case, the whole brain-snatching thing doesn't make tons of sense. Is he eating them? Rubbing them on his skin? Making a necklace? Putting googly eyes on them? How does he absorb abilities that aren't necessarily mental through the brain? Does the brain tell your body to have super strength? If so, shouldn't he be able to develop powers by sheer force of will?

One of the nice things about this season was that Nikki-Line was pretty much shoved to the back, so I didn't have to watch more characters fawn over how beautiful Ali Larter is just because she's banging the producers. Unfortunately, Micah-Line is just as bad as it was the first season, and we pretty much have to watch Claire go through the exact same arc, except this time with some flying loser nerding all over the place and babbling high school cliches about how being different really is good. Maybe all the middle-aged housewives that are watching this show will give up football tryouts and join the math league now.

The plus side of Claire-Line is that Jack Coleman really gets a chance to stretch, and he has been one of the best parts about the show (even if they won't shut up about his glasses).

And Peter's line continues to be really boring, ever since they retconned his power to "taking off his shirt". This time he doesn't even have the more-interesting Nathan character there to boost that lamewad story.

But the real crime in this season is Hiro-Line. I get that making Kensei the villain in present day is pretty inspired, but there's no reason in the cosmos to make the ancient Japan story go on for so long. It had all the aesthetic pleasures of an episode of Reading Rainbow, the thematic value of one of their featured books and the breeziness of Ayn Rand.

But it wasn't a monstrosity like everyone made it out to be. It about evened out with the vastly overrated first season. It's still a pretty good show, but it has been, and always will be, the over-eager but well-meaning little brother of Lost.