Remember when this show didn't suck?

[trinityvixen]

PR review of Heroes 3.03, "One of Us, One of Them" is up.

Season three has only just started, but I'm wondering which will prove to be worse: the pointlessness or season two or the deliberate plot-and-character torpedoing of season three? I think there's more room in a show like Heroes for boring episodes than episodes that destroy the rules of the world and the characters in it. It wants to have a mythology, but it keeps sabotaging it because things aren't "cool" enough.

It's agonizing exactly because, as I was saying to ivy03 and mithras03, things that are half good, half terrible get me more worked up than things that are all terrible. Because you can see where there were chances for the show/movie/etc. to be really awesome and go a really fun direction and the show just blows it. It's like watching the season premiere of Smallville each year: they might have had a half-way decent threat built up over the course of the previous season, but they squander everything in the first episode and then never revisit it.

And that's Heroes in a nutshell, only it doesn't have the routine established like Smallville does, so when they're done with something they lurch away from it and get to make all new and better, grander mistakes in the process of not-learning from the old ones. What really bugs me is that there are ideas that could be explored on Heroes that won't be, and now can never be. AU fanfic reads better than this show right now.

Also, pardon me, but The 4400 did a lot of this better. It wasn't perfect either but at least it enjoyed some internal consistency. Its worst failings didn't break the world the way Heroes' do.

Comments

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

I should finish up The 4400 one of these days. I liked the first season a lot, but I was at CW during the second season, and then I gave up cable and never bothered to download it.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I got as far as season three. I think, aside from one or two developments in season two, I loved it. Season three had more of a slide towards the needlessly ridiculous, though there was still a vague sense of inclusive oddity about it that it wasn't off-putting. Heroes is so wrapped up in its own incestuous drama at this point, it's almost the Twilight to The 4400's The Historian.

4400

[arcane-the-sage.livejournal.com]

Also, pardon me, but The 4400 did a lot of this better. It wasn't perfect either but at least it enjoyed some internal consistency. Its worst failings didn't break the world the way Heroes' do.

I don't know, the post-inhibitor "everyone has an ability" was a real world breaker for the 4400 series. The same can be said of the promicine (sp?) shot. But then both of those happened at the end of their seasons.

Re: 4400

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Shh! I only got to season three with them handing out the powers to people! If it's season four, I don't want to know!

Re: 4400

[arcane-the-sage.livejournal.com]

I've said nothing that would come from season 4 ^_^ Oh trust me, season 4 had a whole lot of Zingers in it. I expect a full post from you after you see season 4 now ^_^

Re: 4400

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I'll get to it when I get to it. It's on the Netflix queue.

[anirien.livejournal.com]

I dunno The 4400 stopped making much sense to me beginning with season 3. Sigh. I still miss it though. There were a lot of good things about that show.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It got muddled a bit towards the end, and I don't get why Diana couldn't keep dating the too-sweet-to-be-single geek guy from her office. I really hate the conceit that the future picked out mates for the two officers.