Heroes
I recently watched the first season of the show Heroes, after hearing it so much acclaimed over the past year.
Probably the thing that struck me the most about Heroes (at least the first season) is how derivative a work of fiction it is. This is actually less of a point of criticism than it sounds, since much of the comic-book stuff it derives from is the sort of thing that you rarely see in live-action television programs, and it is very entertaining to see acted out. The biggest comic-book influences are the X-Men series and Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, but it also seems to be very strongly influenced by the TV program Lost.
Discussing this last, perhaps least obvious comparison first, I should note that one of Lost’s most frequent tropes is the surprise revelation - usually at the end of an episode - that two of the characters stranded on the mysterious island had actually crossed paths or somehow otherwise interacted before they boarded the ill-fated flight from Sydney to L.A. This sort of twist ending is one that rapidly becomes contrived if used more than a couple of times, but it’s more forgivable on Lost because, simply put, Lost isn’t really a science-fiction story with a cohesive plot. Instead, it’s basically a modern version of the medieval religious morality play. Most episodes involve the island (standing in for God) forcing characters to confront some challenge stemming from a personal failing (a criminal past, drug addiction, etc.), with the revelation that the castaways are connected coming after the characters either overcome their weakness or die.
Heroes also piles on revelation after revelation about characters’ being mysteriously connected, and often does so as part of an episode that mainly focuses on the trials and tribulations of one particular character. But instead of serving as a morality play like Lost, the character connexions are inspired by the hokey plot twists of Silver Age comic books. In keeping with the comic book-inspired nature of the show, the stories are heavily serialized, with a plot that definitely knows where it’s going. And unlike Lost, whose “antagonists” are quite nebulous (black smoke that hides an invisible monster, a stealthy clan of hostile nomads elsewhere on the island), the threats in Heroes are concrete and real, coming in the form of super-powered serial killer Gabriel Sylar, who gains the powers of every superhuman whose brain he consumes, and the looming threat of the destruction of New York City in a nuclear explosion, as foretold by a precognitive painter and a time-traveler from the future. Of course, even with this, the surprise connexions between characters do still seem pretty corny at times. But then again, so did Silver Age comics.
Speaking of comic-book influences, the obvious one is X-Men. Certain people (there isn’t a general descriptor like “mutants” or “metahumans” for superpeople in Heroes) have wacky powers, and whether you should have said wacky powers is predicted by whether you have a certain gene, just like the “X-factor.” And just as in X-Men, a shadowy maybe-governmental group (eventually referred to as “The Company”) is tracking and exploiting superhumans for their own nefarious eventual ends. A more subtle element from X-Men that Heroes borrows is the idea that superpowers can be a curse. Niki Sanders has inhuman strength, but also a murderous split personality. Isaac Mendez can see the future, and is driven to heroin addiction by the horrible things he sees. And Ted Sprague can control nuclear energy (in formidable fasion: think Blight from Batman Beyond, without the monstrous appearance), but the low-level radiation he can’t help emitting gave his wife the cancer that killed her.
Of course, the clearest nod to X-Men is in episode 20, “Five Years Gone,” in which time-traveler Hiro Nakamura sees a future after New York is destroyed, a future in which superpeople are hunted down and imprisoned or slaughtered by the government. This is very similar to the classic X-Men story “Days of Future Past,” involving a potential future of genocide against mutants after Mystique’s Mutant Brotherhood assassinates Senator Kelly, an anti-mutant demagogue. The difference here is that the word “terrorism” is thrown about, making the Heroes episode an allegory about post-9/11 abuses of civil liberties. It’s a message which I applaud, though I think the revamped Ultimate X-Men comic book series did this allegory much better.
The connexion to Watchmen may not be immediately apparent, and it may well be that it wasn’t intentional on the part of Heroes’ creators, but it deserves mention in any case. Recall that in Watchmen, the master plan of ambiguous villain Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt is to devastate New York - killing roughly half the city’s residents - in an apparent attack by aliens, which will cause the US and USSR to move away from the brink of war and join together against the extraterrestrial menace that isn’t there. In Heroes, it turns out that William Linderman, head of the Company, and his cohorts know about Mendez’ horrible visions, but plan to let New York get nuked, in order to “bring people together.” In each case, a plan of wholesale slaughter is justified in the minds of its architects by a desire for a certain kind of popular harmony.
Of course, the most obvious difference between these two properties is that Linderman fails where Ozymandias succeeded; the destruction of New York is averted in Heroes (save for the aforementioned possible future in one episode). This isn’t all that surprising: for a post-9/11 TV show to show New York getting nuked would probably lead to NBC taking far more shit than they’d want. The more interesting difference is that in Watchmen, Ozymandias is right: his act of mass murder does, in fact, prevent an imminent nuclear war. Even if you quickly decide that he’s still the villain of the piece, that no ends justify his means, the fact that the reader considers, even for a moment, that maybe destroying a city was the right option is one of the most disturbing things about the story.
In contrast, Heroes prevents no gray area whatsoever. Linderman’s plan to “bring people together” isn’t in response to any imminent, even larger tragedy; he merely asserts that “the world is sick” and that a big enough tragedy will (somehow) lead to peace and brotherhood throughout the land. He dismisses any question of his plan’s ethics with the blithe observation that he’ll only be killing 0.067% of the Earth’s population, a trifling thing in his mind. In short, he’s pretty much your average comic-book madman whose Insane Plan Must Be Stopped.
And he behaves like one, too. One of the reasons Watchmen was so morally troubling is that Ozymandias was really the golden boy before launching his destructive plan: as a costumed adventurer, he was always humane and opposed to more brutal vigilantes like the homicidal Rorschach, as a businessman he was a genuine philanthropist, and he seems in general to be genuinely concerned with the fate of humanity at large, rather than being out for any personal power. Linderman, on the other hand, is a Las Vegas mobster played by consummate villain actor Malcolm McDowell. It seems inconceivable to ascribe to him any motives other than the most cynical and self-serving ones. And this sort of characterization is what makes Heroes’ plot far less intellectually engaging than Watchmen’s, as potentially multilayered characters become far more black and white.
Overall, Heroes is a tremendously entertaining show, and deserves significant credit for succeeding in telling a comic-book style story on television. But as mentioned before, it lacks the complexity or sophistication of the best-written comics. One could argue that this reflects a difference between media - that a book can be more cerebral and philosophical, since the reader can always pause to think, while a TV show can’t simply stop and let the viewer digest things. And yet, series like The X-Files and 24 show that it is possible to tell complex, multilayered, and even potentially confusing plots on serialized television. Heroes does not do this, but if one views its job as merely to entertain in the moment, it succeeds admirably. I’d give it (the 1st season, anyway) 8/10.
Probably the thing that struck me the most about Heroes (at least the first season) is how derivative a work of fiction it is. This is actually less of a point of criticism than it sounds, since much of the comic-book stuff it derives from is the sort of thing that you rarely see in live-action television programs, and it is very entertaining to see acted out. The biggest comic-book influences are the X-Men series and Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, but it also seems to be very strongly influenced by the TV program Lost.
Discussing this last, perhaps least obvious comparison first, I should note that one of Lost’s most frequent tropes is the surprise revelation - usually at the end of an episode - that two of the characters stranded on the mysterious island had actually crossed paths or somehow otherwise interacted before they boarded the ill-fated flight from Sydney to L.A. This sort of twist ending is one that rapidly becomes contrived if used more than a couple of times, but it’s more forgivable on Lost because, simply put, Lost isn’t really a science-fiction story with a cohesive plot. Instead, it’s basically a modern version of the medieval religious morality play. Most episodes involve the island (standing in for God) forcing characters to confront some challenge stemming from a personal failing (a criminal past, drug addiction, etc.), with the revelation that the castaways are connected coming after the characters either overcome their weakness or die.
Heroes also piles on revelation after revelation about characters’ being mysteriously connected, and often does so as part of an episode that mainly focuses on the trials and tribulations of one particular character. But instead of serving as a morality play like Lost, the character connexions are inspired by the hokey plot twists of Silver Age comic books. In keeping with the comic book-inspired nature of the show, the stories are heavily serialized, with a plot that definitely knows where it’s going. And unlike Lost, whose “antagonists” are quite nebulous (black smoke that hides an invisible monster, a stealthy clan of hostile nomads elsewhere on the island), the threats in Heroes are concrete and real, coming in the form of super-powered serial killer Gabriel Sylar, who gains the powers of every superhuman whose brain he consumes, and the looming threat of the destruction of New York City in a nuclear explosion, as foretold by a precognitive painter and a time-traveler from the future. Of course, even with this, the surprise connexions between characters do still seem pretty corny at times. But then again, so did Silver Age comics.
Speaking of comic-book influences, the obvious one is X-Men. Certain people (there isn’t a general descriptor like “mutants” or “metahumans” for superpeople in Heroes) have wacky powers, and whether you should have said wacky powers is predicted by whether you have a certain gene, just like the “X-factor.” And just as in X-Men, a shadowy maybe-governmental group (eventually referred to as “The Company”) is tracking and exploiting superhumans for their own nefarious eventual ends. A more subtle element from X-Men that Heroes borrows is the idea that superpowers can be a curse. Niki Sanders has inhuman strength, but also a murderous split personality. Isaac Mendez can see the future, and is driven to heroin addiction by the horrible things he sees. And Ted Sprague can control nuclear energy (in formidable fasion: think Blight from Batman Beyond, without the monstrous appearance), but the low-level radiation he can’t help emitting gave his wife the cancer that killed her.
Of course, the clearest nod to X-Men is in episode 20, “Five Years Gone,” in which time-traveler Hiro Nakamura sees a future after New York is destroyed, a future in which superpeople are hunted down and imprisoned or slaughtered by the government. This is very similar to the classic X-Men story “Days of Future Past,” involving a potential future of genocide against mutants after Mystique’s Mutant Brotherhood assassinates Senator Kelly, an anti-mutant demagogue. The difference here is that the word “terrorism” is thrown about, making the Heroes episode an allegory about post-9/11 abuses of civil liberties. It’s a message which I applaud, though I think the revamped Ultimate X-Men comic book series did this allegory much better.
The connexion to Watchmen may not be immediately apparent, and it may well be that it wasn’t intentional on the part of Heroes’ creators, but it deserves mention in any case. Recall that in Watchmen, the master plan of ambiguous villain Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt is to devastate New York - killing roughly half the city’s residents - in an apparent attack by aliens, which will cause the US and USSR to move away from the brink of war and join together against the extraterrestrial menace that isn’t there. In Heroes, it turns out that William Linderman, head of the Company, and his cohorts know about Mendez’ horrible visions, but plan to let New York get nuked, in order to “bring people together.” In each case, a plan of wholesale slaughter is justified in the minds of its architects by a desire for a certain kind of popular harmony.
Of course, the most obvious difference between these two properties is that Linderman fails where Ozymandias succeeded; the destruction of New York is averted in Heroes (save for the aforementioned possible future in one episode). This isn’t all that surprising: for a post-9/11 TV show to show New York getting nuked would probably lead to NBC taking far more shit than they’d want. The more interesting difference is that in Watchmen, Ozymandias is right: his act of mass murder does, in fact, prevent an imminent nuclear war. Even if you quickly decide that he’s still the villain of the piece, that no ends justify his means, the fact that the reader considers, even for a moment, that maybe destroying a city was the right option is one of the most disturbing things about the story.
In contrast, Heroes prevents no gray area whatsoever. Linderman’s plan to “bring people together” isn’t in response to any imminent, even larger tragedy; he merely asserts that “the world is sick” and that a big enough tragedy will (somehow) lead to peace and brotherhood throughout the land. He dismisses any question of his plan’s ethics with the blithe observation that he’ll only be killing 0.067% of the Earth’s population, a trifling thing in his mind. In short, he’s pretty much your average comic-book madman whose Insane Plan Must Be Stopped.
And he behaves like one, too. One of the reasons Watchmen was so morally troubling is that Ozymandias was really the golden boy before launching his destructive plan: as a costumed adventurer, he was always humane and opposed to more brutal vigilantes like the homicidal Rorschach, as a businessman he was a genuine philanthropist, and he seems in general to be genuinely concerned with the fate of humanity at large, rather than being out for any personal power. Linderman, on the other hand, is a Las Vegas mobster played by consummate villain actor Malcolm McDowell. It seems inconceivable to ascribe to him any motives other than the most cynical and self-serving ones. And this sort of characterization is what makes Heroes’ plot far less intellectually engaging than Watchmen’s, as potentially multilayered characters become far more black and white.
Overall, Heroes is a tremendously entertaining show, and deserves significant credit for succeeding in telling a comic-book style story on television. But as mentioned before, it lacks the complexity or sophistication of the best-written comics. One could argue that this reflects a difference between media - that a book can be more cerebral and philosophical, since the reader can always pause to think, while a TV show can’t simply stop and let the viewer digest things. And yet, series like The X-Files and 24 show that it is possible to tell complex, multilayered, and even potentially confusing plots on serialized television. Heroes does not do this, but if one views its job as merely to entertain in the moment, it succeeds admirably. I’d give it (the 1st season, anyway) 8/10.