The Rabbit Hole

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.

I stayed up way too late when I was already tired last night to finish both discs I got from Netflix.

( The 4400 - No spoilers, just some thoughts, read if you might be interested in watching the series. )

( This is a tiny rant with some spoilers about the show's less-than-latent turn for the sexist. )

In other news, feiran was subjected to some Smallville last night and scared the crap out of me with the face she made when I said Green Arrow was hot. She agreed, in a scary, scary way. That said, I still like him. I like the look of arrogance and disgust and dismissal he has when Lois came to see him. He's going to be a prick, and an entitled one at that (so, basically, Lex without a conscience, which, I SWEAR, makes sense in my head even though it looks stupid to say). Plus, hey, another trim guy with his shirt off. I don't mind that at all, especially since Tom Welling hasn't lost his in a while (prompting me to be catty and say he's probably gotten too fat to look good without a shirt on any more). Go go green vigilante!