Heroes 3.10 - The Eclipse, Part One
*sigh*
I find I am not even taking pleasure in ripping this episode apart. When things become this easy, when writers obviously consider me this stupid, when they blatantly care this little for the show they're working on, it's difficult to drum up any kind of real anger or sorrow. Honestly, I'm not even feeling disappointment. No, it's more a general emotion of... awe.
I really didn't believe it was possible for people to so utterly and completely disassemble the very universe they created...
I don’t even know where to begin with last night’s ridiculous episode.
I’ll start positive. The things I liked (and they were very brief):
- The moment between Peter and Nathan on the Lost islandin the jungle when they were having a brotherly spat, accusing each other of this and that, and well… behaving like brothers. There were mentions of the past and obvious hurt feelings and it was all sorts of awesome. As was their flight through the air and subsequent crash into the river (I hope that was a really deep river!). I really didn’t catch on to what else was happening other than they caught up with the Haitian and his brother apparently works for Arthur. (Does anyone remember the Haitian having a brother in the online comic?? I bet they’re Petrelli’s, too!)
- The Matt/Hiro/Ando/Daphne stuff didn’t disappoint. It didn’t thrill me and make me jump up and down in excitement (I still can’t accept the “Oh I love you!” crap after hardly knowing each other), but at least there weren't any moments that made me want to slam my head into a wall repeatedly. Even the fake cornfield was all right. It was all very Smallville-ish, and with how downhill Heroes has gone, it made me nostalgic for at least sub par writing. The Hiro-as-a-ten-year-old storyline got old five minutes into it last week, there is absolutely no character development there, and I feel sorry for poor Masi being stuck doing it, but Masi and James continue to work it, and Greg was fricken hilarious when he was trying to use his Jedi mind trick on Daphne’s father and it wasn’t working. When he kept tilting his head and squinting, I thought I was going to die. And Hiro throwing the corn at Matt was pretty much for the win as well.
- The HRG and Claire bits were great. The father/daughter scenes with him forcing her to get her anger out, and her letting it fly on what she has been resenting him for were wonderfully done, and touching and filled with character development, hearkening back to season one. In fact, just like the Peter and Nathan moments, they stood out kind of glaringly as not fitting in to the majority of this season at all. They would have made it the whole way through if HRG hadn’t gotten stupid and unsympathetic and for the lose at the end, but I’ll get into that in a moment.
- Mohinder naked. I really don’t need to say much more than that. I mean, I was all “Ewwww!” at him in the cocoon, and then he fell out and I was all “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” along with, “Where is Sylar when you need him?!?!” So yeah, Mohinder naked actually threw me off my game for a bit…
And then there were the losers…
I’m going to say this for the Heroes production staff: When they want to fail, they do so on a MASSIVE and impressive scale. Like, they go so out of their way to throw everything they’ve written previously out the window (hell, we’re talking even three episodes previously as opposed to two seasons) that it literally left me in awe last night. There were moments I was left staring at the screen, wondering if I had simply imagined the episodes “Genesis” and “Six Months Ago”, as well as season two and parts of this season. I can only conclude they call people in from off the street, ask them if they have ever watched an episode of Heroes, and when they say “No”, they give them a quick run-down as to what it’s about, hand them a paper and pen, and tell them to write away!
Seriously, a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters would run circles around their complete and utter lack of continuity and sensicalness (I know… not a word. But Heroes these last four episodes or so is causing my intelligence to bleed out my ears).
In all seriousness, the character issues that occurred throughout this episode pale sso completely in comparison to the bigger issues that I feel a little silly bringing them up but… well, one can’t really make the fire any worse than it already is. Seriously, the rats are jumping ship. Time to pull out the life preservers…
My one complaint with HRG from this episode is that one moment we’re given this awesome father/daughter stuff, and the next he leaves his daughter, bleeding and dying on her bed with a bullet wound in her shoulder, and runs off to exact his revenge over some ridiculous and overblown obsession he has with Sylar. I mean, seriously? You don’t, I don’t know, take your daughter to the hospital?? All of HRG’s “I do this all for Claire to keep her safe!” is tossed out the window the moment he leaves her bleeding to death in her bedroom. I knew that Mohinder let his obsession often cloud his judgment, but I had always believed they showed us that HRG could see past that when it was important. Apparently I was wrong.
Sylar and Elle… *hands in air* I am honestly getting whiplash over their characters throughout this season. One moment, Elle is sympathetic and sorry for what’s she done in the past and wants just to be loved. And then the next, she’s back to the sociopathic bitch with little regard for life we were originally introduced to back in season two. You know, the one who was labeled a sociopath before she hit puberty. The one who was locked up by her own father to protect the rest of the world. Who was then, a couple of episodes ago, shown to us as having remorse and guilt for doing what they did to Gabriel while her partner, HRG, the one who is supposed to be somewhat sympathetic and gray to us, was all cackling with glee. Poor Elle, who was filled with rage and just needed to forgive herself last week, right back to sociopathic-on-the-highway-to-hell-bitch-with-a-‘tude this week, who really just wants Sylar to be the badass he is until - wait! Their powers are gone! Now she’s all remorseful for turning him into a monster again -
Wait. What?
And Sylar was right there with her. Zachary had to have whiplash when he went from psychotic out-to-kill-everybody-fresh-off-his-kill-of-the-rental-car-guy, to “Oh, the Hunger is gone! I’m human again and… and… I don’t want to kill... I WANT SEX!” dude. And I won't even go into the fact that this *isn't* the first time Sylar has lost his powers. He lost them in season two and was still all "Ra-ra! I wanna kill people!" and now he's all "Oh, well. Lost my powers. Now I get to be normal! Yay!!" *headdesk*
Hell, even Lex Luthor’s head-spinning character assassinations through seasons 4-5 made a little more sense. At least, they were needed for certain storylines. How a writing staff can take the simplest, most carefully constructed characters as ones like Sylar and HRG had been created in season one, and turn them into this mass of writhing, inexplicable junk is positively beyond me.
And now for the stuff that made this episode go from “Wow, they are really having some character writing issues over in that office” to “My head is going to explode from the sheer and utter stupidity that is flailing all over my television screen in an uncontrollable and epic fail manner!”
First off, let’s discuss the simplest and most basic of science, shall we Heroes writing staff?? Are you honestly trying to convince me that a total solar eclipse happens every six months and is seen from the exact same vantage point from anywhere in the world? I mean, really? I’m not asking you to try to explain paradoxes and the space/time continuum or anything normally found in a Star Trek episode. I’m just asking you to go back to second grade science class because you obviously failed that one and you need a refresher course. Next you’re going to tell me the theory of gravity is… well, just a theory.
Science aside (and wow, it’s taking a LOT out of me to shove that one aside), let’s discuss the ramifications of said eclipse on your ‘verse. Or, the recent ramifications you’ve just pulled out of your increasingly prolific asses.
In “Genesis”, we saw an eclipse. It was a delightful little music sequence that I have always adored from the first-ever episode of Heroes. I actually have it kind of memorized: Hiro was on the rooftop of his father’s company, doing exercises with the rest of his coworkers. He was sad and depressed because his best friend didn’t believe he had control over the space/time continuum. He wanted action and adventure because life was just so boring and routine. Claire was looking up, wearing her cheerleading costume, singed, but not the worse for wear from running into a burning train. She was necessarily emo because she was a teenage girl who had been dealing with the fact that she could put herself through anything and heal. Earlier in the episode, she had been tossing herself off of bleachers on a video camera to show just how indestructible she was. This was not the first time she had done so, either. And there was Peter, sitting in the back of a cab, driven by the unsuspecting Mohinder, who didn’t realize that one of the very people his father had been researching for years, was sitting behind him, gazing up at the eclipse, also being emo because he was having visions that he could fly and that he was destined for something greater and no one would believe him. And Mohinder… well, see, he was driving this cab because he had come to New York to look for his father’s murderer. A man named Sylar who had been on a cross-country super-powered serial-killing spree for the last six months.
I’m saying all of this because, you see, Heroes, the events described above led up to the eclipse in the first episode. In fact, not ten episodes later, you gave us a stellar episode called “Six Months Ago”, in which you showed us many of these characters, as of the first episode of the series, have been dealing with these discoveries of their abilities for the last six months.
And then last night? You wiped it all away. You had Peter (a character occasionally known for having moments of stupidity but honestly, I’ve never heard him say anything stupid) actually utter the words “Hey, wasn’t the last eclipse the first time you flew?” to his brother, who stood there in similar stupidity and went “Yes.”
BWAH????
Just two episodes ago, in a ridiculously ret-conned type of “Six Months Ago” episode, you still showed us Nathan flying out of his car, leaving his wife to crash and lose the ability to use her legs, and told us it happened one year ago. Not the day of the last (and very frequent in your ‘verse) solar eclipse, but six months prior.
Seriously, this isn’t a case of having your cake and eating it too, but having the flour, sugar, eggs and vanilla, along with your cake and a full belly!
And I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around the older generations’ part in all of this because we know the Company has been around for decades, and yet Arthur was freaking out all over Mohinder about how he had to get their powers back. But wait, if the eclipse just gave you all your powers six months ago…
Oy, my head.
And Mohinder. Oh, god. Mohinder. Unlike most of the others we watched panic throughout the episode over losing their powers, he was happy because he suddenly wasn’t molting lizard/fly/cockroach guy anymore. Yay for being pretty again!
But, ummm… he gave *himself* the friggin powers through an injection!!! So how in all that is holy in your weird ‘solar eclipses happen frequently in our ‘verse’ verse would the eclipse take them away?!?!?!?! How, Heroes?? HOW?!?!?
*beats Heroes writing staff with a rubber hose*
My mind is blown. Literally and utterly blown away. This isn’t something as in-depth as sitting down and figuring out how much time it takes to get from Costa Verde to Odessa, Texas or India to New York, or some other silly timing thing that takes a slide rule and calculator and flight times from American Airlines for some bored as hell geek to sit and bitch about. This is surface stuff. This is based on the very facts and canon laid out to us for the last two and a half seasons, by your writing staff, some of which was only reiterated a couple of episodes ago, and you can’t even keep track of it.
The sad part is, I am going to continue to watch. Not because I am necessarily entertained anymore, but because this is the most amazing train wreck I’ve ever seen. You took this brilliant, amazing, character-driven show that constantly had moments of absolute riveting television sprinkled throughout, fueled by this incredible cast loved by the world over, and you’re cranking out drivel that I wouldn’t set on the shelf next to my Smallville seasons 4-5 or Lost seasons 2-3 because of the fear of ruining their credibility. I’ve read incredibly badly written fanfic that made more sense than this. Hell, I’m tempted to pick up the Twilight books just to wash away the bad taste you are leaving in my mouth over the last few weeks.
The first few episodes of this season, I thought you were back on track. You had a good thing going. The plot had such potential, and characters were beginning to seem like themselves (all except Peter who has been the only one true to form in these last few episodes, and that is just sad), and the effects were awesome, and I was so excited because it was making all of season two go away. Now? I really wish season two were back.
I’m actually too stupefied to be angry or upset or anything. It’s become completely apparent to me that you don’t care, so why should I? I’ll keep watching because I’m human, and the desire to witness disasters first-hand is part of our nature.
And you, Heroes? Have become a disaster of epic proportions.
Be proud. It takes real talent to destroy something so good, so quickly.
I find I am not even taking pleasure in ripping this episode apart. When things become this easy, when writers obviously consider me this stupid, when they blatantly care this little for the show they're working on, it's difficult to drum up any kind of real anger or sorrow. Honestly, I'm not even feeling disappointment. No, it's more a general emotion of... awe.
I really didn't believe it was possible for people to so utterly and completely disassemble the very universe they created...
I don’t even know where to begin with last night’s ridiculous episode.
I’ll start positive. The things I liked (and they were very brief):
- The moment between Peter and Nathan on the Lost islandin the jungle when they were having a brotherly spat, accusing each other of this and that, and well… behaving like brothers. There were mentions of the past and obvious hurt feelings and it was all sorts of awesome. As was their flight through the air and subsequent crash into the river (I hope that was a really deep river!). I really didn’t catch on to what else was happening other than they caught up with the Haitian and his brother apparently works for Arthur. (Does anyone remember the Haitian having a brother in the online comic?? I bet they’re Petrelli’s, too!)
- The Matt/Hiro/Ando/Daphne stuff didn’t disappoint. It didn’t thrill me and make me jump up and down in excitement (I still can’t accept the “Oh I love you!” crap after hardly knowing each other), but at least there weren't any moments that made me want to slam my head into a wall repeatedly. Even the fake cornfield was all right. It was all very Smallville-ish, and with how downhill Heroes has gone, it made me nostalgic for at least sub par writing. The Hiro-as-a-ten-year-old storyline got old five minutes into it last week, there is absolutely no character development there, and I feel sorry for poor Masi being stuck doing it, but Masi and James continue to work it, and Greg was fricken hilarious when he was trying to use his Jedi mind trick on Daphne’s father and it wasn’t working. When he kept tilting his head and squinting, I thought I was going to die. And Hiro throwing the corn at Matt was pretty much for the win as well.
- The HRG and Claire bits were great. The father/daughter scenes with him forcing her to get her anger out, and her letting it fly on what she has been resenting him for were wonderfully done, and touching and filled with character development, hearkening back to season one. In fact, just like the Peter and Nathan moments, they stood out kind of glaringly as not fitting in to the majority of this season at all. They would have made it the whole way through if HRG hadn’t gotten stupid and unsympathetic and for the lose at the end, but I’ll get into that in a moment.
- Mohinder naked. I really don’t need to say much more than that. I mean, I was all “Ewwww!” at him in the cocoon, and then he fell out and I was all “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” along with, “Where is Sylar when you need him?!?!” So yeah, Mohinder naked actually threw me off my game for a bit…
And then there were the losers…
I’m going to say this for the Heroes production staff: When they want to fail, they do so on a MASSIVE and impressive scale. Like, they go so out of their way to throw everything they’ve written previously out the window (hell, we’re talking even three episodes previously as opposed to two seasons) that it literally left me in awe last night. There were moments I was left staring at the screen, wondering if I had simply imagined the episodes “Genesis” and “Six Months Ago”, as well as season two and parts of this season. I can only conclude they call people in from off the street, ask them if they have ever watched an episode of Heroes, and when they say “No”, they give them a quick run-down as to what it’s about, hand them a paper and pen, and tell them to write away!
Seriously, a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters would run circles around their complete and utter lack of continuity and sensicalness (I know… not a word. But Heroes these last four episodes or so is causing my intelligence to bleed out my ears).
In all seriousness, the character issues that occurred throughout this episode pale sso completely in comparison to the bigger issues that I feel a little silly bringing them up but… well, one can’t really make the fire any worse than it already is. Seriously, the rats are jumping ship. Time to pull out the life preservers…
My one complaint with HRG from this episode is that one moment we’re given this awesome father/daughter stuff, and the next he leaves his daughter, bleeding and dying on her bed with a bullet wound in her shoulder, and runs off to exact his revenge over some ridiculous and overblown obsession he has with Sylar. I mean, seriously? You don’t, I don’t know, take your daughter to the hospital?? All of HRG’s “I do this all for Claire to keep her safe!” is tossed out the window the moment he leaves her bleeding to death in her bedroom. I knew that Mohinder let his obsession often cloud his judgment, but I had always believed they showed us that HRG could see past that when it was important. Apparently I was wrong.
Sylar and Elle… *hands in air* I am honestly getting whiplash over their characters throughout this season. One moment, Elle is sympathetic and sorry for what’s she done in the past and wants just to be loved. And then the next, she’s back to the sociopathic bitch with little regard for life we were originally introduced to back in season two. You know, the one who was labeled a sociopath before she hit puberty. The one who was locked up by her own father to protect the rest of the world. Who was then, a couple of episodes ago, shown to us as having remorse and guilt for doing what they did to Gabriel while her partner, HRG, the one who is supposed to be somewhat sympathetic and gray to us, was all cackling with glee. Poor Elle, who was filled with rage and just needed to forgive herself last week, right back to sociopathic-on-the-highway-to-hell-bitch-with-a-‘tude this week, who really just wants Sylar to be the badass he is until - wait! Their powers are gone! Now she’s all remorseful for turning him into a monster again -
Wait. What?
And Sylar was right there with her. Zachary had to have whiplash when he went from psychotic out-to-kill-everybody-fresh-off-his-kill-of-the-rental-car-guy, to “Oh, the Hunger is gone! I’m human again and… and… I don’t want to kill... I WANT SEX!” dude. And I won't even go into the fact that this *isn't* the first time Sylar has lost his powers. He lost them in season two and was still all "Ra-ra! I wanna kill people!" and now he's all "Oh, well. Lost my powers. Now I get to be normal! Yay!!" *headdesk*
Hell, even Lex Luthor’s head-spinning character assassinations through seasons 4-5 made a little more sense. At least, they were needed for certain storylines. How a writing staff can take the simplest, most carefully constructed characters as ones like Sylar and HRG had been created in season one, and turn them into this mass of writhing, inexplicable junk is positively beyond me.
And now for the stuff that made this episode go from “Wow, they are really having some character writing issues over in that office” to “My head is going to explode from the sheer and utter stupidity that is flailing all over my television screen in an uncontrollable and epic fail manner!”
First off, let’s discuss the simplest and most basic of science, shall we Heroes writing staff?? Are you honestly trying to convince me that a total solar eclipse happens every six months and is seen from the exact same vantage point from anywhere in the world? I mean, really? I’m not asking you to try to explain paradoxes and the space/time continuum or anything normally found in a Star Trek episode. I’m just asking you to go back to second grade science class because you obviously failed that one and you need a refresher course. Next you’re going to tell me the theory of gravity is… well, just a theory.
Science aside (and wow, it’s taking a LOT out of me to shove that one aside), let’s discuss the ramifications of said eclipse on your ‘verse. Or, the recent ramifications you’ve just pulled out of your increasingly prolific asses.
In “Genesis”, we saw an eclipse. It was a delightful little music sequence that I have always adored from the first-ever episode of Heroes. I actually have it kind of memorized: Hiro was on the rooftop of his father’s company, doing exercises with the rest of his coworkers. He was sad and depressed because his best friend didn’t believe he had control over the space/time continuum. He wanted action and adventure because life was just so boring and routine. Claire was looking up, wearing her cheerleading costume, singed, but not the worse for wear from running into a burning train. She was necessarily emo because she was a teenage girl who had been dealing with the fact that she could put herself through anything and heal. Earlier in the episode, she had been tossing herself off of bleachers on a video camera to show just how indestructible she was. This was not the first time she had done so, either. And there was Peter, sitting in the back of a cab, driven by the unsuspecting Mohinder, who didn’t realize that one of the very people his father had been researching for years, was sitting behind him, gazing up at the eclipse, also being emo because he was having visions that he could fly and that he was destined for something greater and no one would believe him. And Mohinder… well, see, he was driving this cab because he had come to New York to look for his father’s murderer. A man named Sylar who had been on a cross-country super-powered serial-killing spree for the last six months.
I’m saying all of this because, you see, Heroes, the events described above led up to the eclipse in the first episode. In fact, not ten episodes later, you gave us a stellar episode called “Six Months Ago”, in which you showed us many of these characters, as of the first episode of the series, have been dealing with these discoveries of their abilities for the last six months.
And then last night? You wiped it all away. You had Peter (a character occasionally known for having moments of stupidity but honestly, I’ve never heard him say anything stupid) actually utter the words “Hey, wasn’t the last eclipse the first time you flew?” to his brother, who stood there in similar stupidity and went “Yes.”
BWAH????
Just two episodes ago, in a ridiculously ret-conned type of “Six Months Ago” episode, you still showed us Nathan flying out of his car, leaving his wife to crash and lose the ability to use her legs, and told us it happened one year ago. Not the day of the last (and very frequent in your ‘verse) solar eclipse, but six months prior.
Seriously, this isn’t a case of having your cake and eating it too, but having the flour, sugar, eggs and vanilla, along with your cake and a full belly!
And I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around the older generations’ part in all of this because we know the Company has been around for decades, and yet Arthur was freaking out all over Mohinder about how he had to get their powers back. But wait, if the eclipse just gave you all your powers six months ago…
Oy, my head.
And Mohinder. Oh, god. Mohinder. Unlike most of the others we watched panic throughout the episode over losing their powers, he was happy because he suddenly wasn’t molting lizard/fly/cockroach guy anymore. Yay for being pretty again!
But, ummm… he gave *himself* the friggin powers through an injection!!! So how in all that is holy in your weird ‘solar eclipses happen frequently in our ‘verse’ verse would the eclipse take them away?!?!?!?! How, Heroes?? HOW?!?!?
*beats Heroes writing staff with a rubber hose*
My mind is blown. Literally and utterly blown away. This isn’t something as in-depth as sitting down and figuring out how much time it takes to get from Costa Verde to Odessa, Texas or India to New York, or some other silly timing thing that takes a slide rule and calculator and flight times from American Airlines for some bored as hell geek to sit and bitch about. This is surface stuff. This is based on the very facts and canon laid out to us for the last two and a half seasons, by your writing staff, some of which was only reiterated a couple of episodes ago, and you can’t even keep track of it.
The sad part is, I am going to continue to watch. Not because I am necessarily entertained anymore, but because this is the most amazing train wreck I’ve ever seen. You took this brilliant, amazing, character-driven show that constantly had moments of absolute riveting television sprinkled throughout, fueled by this incredible cast loved by the world over, and you’re cranking out drivel that I wouldn’t set on the shelf next to my Smallville seasons 4-5 or Lost seasons 2-3 because of the fear of ruining their credibility. I’ve read incredibly badly written fanfic that made more sense than this. Hell, I’m tempted to pick up the Twilight books just to wash away the bad taste you are leaving in my mouth over the last few weeks.
The first few episodes of this season, I thought you were back on track. You had a good thing going. The plot had such potential, and characters were beginning to seem like themselves (all except Peter who has been the only one true to form in these last few episodes, and that is just sad), and the effects were awesome, and I was so excited because it was making all of season two go away. Now? I really wish season two were back.
I’m actually too stupefied to be angry or upset or anything. It’s become completely apparent to me that you don’t care, so why should I? I’ll keep watching because I’m human, and the desire to witness disasters first-hand is part of our nature.
And you, Heroes? Have become a disaster of epic proportions.
Be proud. It takes real talent to destroy something so good, so quickly.