Innappropriate uses for shards of glass
I've watched through .07% and Five Years Gone, with a few minutes into The Hard Part, and I don't know, I'm in this constant tug of war between being frustrated and enthralled by this show. I keep breaking it down into the bad and the Sylar, so.
The bad: Candice. Oh, man, Candice. A girl who can use illusion to make you see whatever she wants, and so she uses it to become: Mrs. Bennett, Claire, and Niki, all to fuck with various men and give other men what they want. A woman who delights in being deceitful! Just what this show needed!
I also haven't mentioned the Haitian yet, but not for lack of caring about him. It's just that he needs a name. He really, really needs a name, and I was waiting for him to get one. Hasn't happened yet.
Also, nothing has changed about Niki/Jessica, united finally in protecting their son, because that's what women do, and, they don't mind being at the disposal of powerful men as long as they are able to protect their children. Seriously, this is not character depth.
The bad specific to Five Years Gone (as though that really matters): Flash forward five years into the future and your two main female characters are a waitress and a stripper in Vegas? Really? After a near-apocalyptic event that changes the country and the world, and this is the life you give these two special, powerful women?
The random: When Sylar paints the future, he paints it in his own Sylar painting style. I don't know why this amuses me, but I'm afraid if I spend too much time thinking about it, I'll get all angry about how ridiculous a power it is to PAINT THE FUTURE.
The glass shard WTF. So, great, Sylar kills Peter temporarily with a shard of glass, much like how Claire was killed temporarily by the giant stick. Claire, of course, is the one to remove the shard of glass from Peter's head, bringing him back to life. Peter then carries the shard of glass around for two more scenes, like some freaky symbol, and asks Nathan what to do with the thing that killed you. And if that wasn't weird enough, then Nathan has the shard of glass, still bloody, hanging out on his desk, and then he uses it to cut open the wrapping of the painting Linderman sent him home with, the one where he's President. I don't care if you're going to become President by letting your brother blow up, which, frankly, is a fucked up enough plotline, there is NO NEED to use the thing that killed your brother the first time as a substitute letter opener.
The good/the Sylar: Well, see, I loved Five Years Gone because it was dark and because there was a secret. It was complex and interesting to see how (most of) the characters transformed from they used to be before the bomb into what they are now - harder, more desperate, more careless, more powerful. I love how the show used the previous character interactions to show us that there was something off about Mohinder being a close friend and adviser to Nathan Petrelli - and that there was something off about Nathan. The moment when Sylar touches Mohinder and you suspect something else is happening right there - and then it's when Nathan says, "I understand how things work" that you know. Adrian Pasdar does a wonderful job using Sylar's language in the scene with Claire to show us Nathan isn't Nathan at all.
Overall, I found the whole world created in Five Years Gone to be fascinatingly complex in a way that the world in the present story has been lacking - but I think that's often the way when you push a bunch of your do-gooder characters over into desperation - they get exponentially more interesting.
That being said, I don't understand how the future works in this show. I keep expecting there to be some twist, some inevitable pull of fate. But characters like Mohinder make complicated moral choices because of what they see themselves doing in a prophetic comic book? That's not how prophesy is supposed to work in a story - the whole interesting thing is the mutability of a set of actions - or, contrarily, how a change in the expected series of events changes the outcome. It does not make any sense to me that Hiro and Mohinder (and even Sylar now, as he paints Ted decide to go find him) do the thing they saw in the prophetic art because it was in the prophetic art. It's not like there was some choice for them to make, and they were able to see both outcomes and choose accordingly - Mohinder lets Hiro go because, oh, look, the comic says I do, regardless of the fact that is a complicated issue that has to do with my previous plot with our creepy President Petrelli who seems strangely, creepily familiar....
And I remain confused about why we already know that Peter's the one to explode. About half of the characters still believe Sylar will explode - including Sylar! - so, where's the surprise since we already know Peter will. Is that supposed to be the twist - which one is it? Because, it's obviously going to be Peter. Even Peter is sure it's going to be him, so why have this whole subplot about Hiro having to kill Sylar to stop the bomb? I just don't see how it's suspenseful if we as the audience already know that's not going to work.
At least Sylar goes through some sort of (albeit fucked up) process of deciding his fate according to his painting - he sees that if he goes to find Ted, he'll blow up New York, so he has a freak-out about it and tries to reconcile who he has become with what that means for his future. He doesn't just see it in the painting, have a moment of moral dilemma, and take off to do it anyway. What Sylar does, actually, is call Mohinder. You know you're friends with a serial killer when he calls you to ask for your help because he's freaked out he's going to hurt even more people. Mohinder, for his part, handles the call rather badly, but I guess I'm not really sure what he could have been expected to do. Sylar calling to tell you he's going to kill people is not exactly information that should surprise you or give you very much to work with. "Ok, Sylar, yeah, that's kind of what you do, isn't it? Thanks for the chat, love you, bye."
Now to watch the rest of The Hard Part, which, I know, has Sylar accidentally killing his mother. Fascinating as a part of Sylar's character arc, but in terms of the show's already shoddy record with female characters, I remain unimpressed.
The bad: Candice. Oh, man, Candice. A girl who can use illusion to make you see whatever she wants, and so she uses it to become: Mrs. Bennett, Claire, and Niki, all to fuck with various men and give other men what they want. A woman who delights in being deceitful! Just what this show needed!
I also haven't mentioned the Haitian yet, but not for lack of caring about him. It's just that he needs a name. He really, really needs a name, and I was waiting for him to get one. Hasn't happened yet.
Also, nothing has changed about Niki/Jessica, united finally in protecting their son, because that's what women do, and, they don't mind being at the disposal of powerful men as long as they are able to protect their children. Seriously, this is not character depth.
The bad specific to Five Years Gone (as though that really matters): Flash forward five years into the future and your two main female characters are a waitress and a stripper in Vegas? Really? After a near-apocalyptic event that changes the country and the world, and this is the life you give these two special, powerful women?
The random: When Sylar paints the future, he paints it in his own Sylar painting style. I don't know why this amuses me, but I'm afraid if I spend too much time thinking about it, I'll get all angry about how ridiculous a power it is to PAINT THE FUTURE.
The glass shard WTF. So, great, Sylar kills Peter temporarily with a shard of glass, much like how Claire was killed temporarily by the giant stick. Claire, of course, is the one to remove the shard of glass from Peter's head, bringing him back to life. Peter then carries the shard of glass around for two more scenes, like some freaky symbol, and asks Nathan what to do with the thing that killed you. And if that wasn't weird enough, then Nathan has the shard of glass, still bloody, hanging out on his desk, and then he uses it to cut open the wrapping of the painting Linderman sent him home with, the one where he's President. I don't care if you're going to become President by letting your brother blow up, which, frankly, is a fucked up enough plotline, there is NO NEED to use the thing that killed your brother the first time as a substitute letter opener.
The good/the Sylar: Well, see, I loved Five Years Gone because it was dark and because there was a secret. It was complex and interesting to see how (most of) the characters transformed from they used to be before the bomb into what they are now - harder, more desperate, more careless, more powerful. I love how the show used the previous character interactions to show us that there was something off about Mohinder being a close friend and adviser to Nathan Petrelli - and that there was something off about Nathan. The moment when Sylar touches Mohinder and you suspect something else is happening right there - and then it's when Nathan says, "I understand how things work" that you know. Adrian Pasdar does a wonderful job using Sylar's language in the scene with Claire to show us Nathan isn't Nathan at all.
Overall, I found the whole world created in Five Years Gone to be fascinatingly complex in a way that the world in the present story has been lacking - but I think that's often the way when you push a bunch of your do-gooder characters over into desperation - they get exponentially more interesting.
That being said, I don't understand how the future works in this show. I keep expecting there to be some twist, some inevitable pull of fate. But characters like Mohinder make complicated moral choices because of what they see themselves doing in a prophetic comic book? That's not how prophesy is supposed to work in a story - the whole interesting thing is the mutability of a set of actions - or, contrarily, how a change in the expected series of events changes the outcome. It does not make any sense to me that Hiro and Mohinder (and even Sylar now, as he paints Ted decide to go find him) do the thing they saw in the prophetic art because it was in the prophetic art. It's not like there was some choice for them to make, and they were able to see both outcomes and choose accordingly - Mohinder lets Hiro go because, oh, look, the comic says I do, regardless of the fact that is a complicated issue that has to do with my previous plot with our creepy President Petrelli who seems strangely, creepily familiar....
And I remain confused about why we already know that Peter's the one to explode. About half of the characters still believe Sylar will explode - including Sylar! - so, where's the surprise since we already know Peter will. Is that supposed to be the twist - which one is it? Because, it's obviously going to be Peter. Even Peter is sure it's going to be him, so why have this whole subplot about Hiro having to kill Sylar to stop the bomb? I just don't see how it's suspenseful if we as the audience already know that's not going to work.
At least Sylar goes through some sort of (albeit fucked up) process of deciding his fate according to his painting - he sees that if he goes to find Ted, he'll blow up New York, so he has a freak-out about it and tries to reconcile who he has become with what that means for his future. He doesn't just see it in the painting, have a moment of moral dilemma, and take off to do it anyway. What Sylar does, actually, is call Mohinder. You know you're friends with a serial killer when he calls you to ask for your help because he's freaked out he's going to hurt even more people. Mohinder, for his part, handles the call rather badly, but I guess I'm not really sure what he could have been expected to do. Sylar calling to tell you he's going to kill people is not exactly information that should surprise you or give you very much to work with. "Ok, Sylar, yeah, that's kind of what you do, isn't it? Thanks for the chat, love you, bye."
Now to watch the rest of The Hard Part, which, I know, has Sylar accidentally killing his mother. Fascinating as a part of Sylar's character arc, but in terms of the show's already shoddy record with female characters, I remain unimpressed.