Heroes, or How the X-Men have coloured my superhero opinions.
DISCLAIMER: I don't call myself an X-Men expert, but I do know the main 616 canon pretty well. Feel free to correct me if you spot any errors, not only with the X-Men part, but also with the Heroes part and anything else that I might've gotten wrong.
Who on the flist is watching Heroes? *raises hand*
I'm finally all caught up with the episodes, and I have to say that I cannot wait for the rest of the season to unfold. There's been a lot of talk about the pilot and the subsequent episodes being too disjointed owing to the big ensemble cast, but to me it was more like a filmed graphic novel, dyou know what I mean? I found no problem whatsoever following up on the different plotlines, and I love watching out for hints that they might know each other in very subtle ways. The only parallel I can think of at the moment is looking out for shoutouts to other aspects of the X-Men comicverse in the animated series and the movies. Which is going to bring me to the bulk of this post, where I'm going to make wild predictions and analysis with a heavy slant towards the X-Men, specifically the mainstream 616 canon (or the universe that most of the animated series took place in).
I started off watching Heroes because alrischa, my partner in X-Men fangirling, told me that the premise for Heroes was "imagine if the X-Men were real people".
And to some extent, I think this was the third movie that I really wanted out of the movie franchise instead of X3: The Last Stand, or as I call it, "that lousy excuse for a superhero movie I HATE YOU BRETT RATNER OMG". When X3 opened up with the Danger Room sequence that looked exactly like the ruins we've seen before in Uncanny X-Men #141, and the Sentinel? I thought we'd FINALLY get the Days of Future Past storyline. It might have started the entire insanity that was the hallmark of a Chris Claremont plot, but it's still one of the best storylines in X-Men history, which is why they still keep on inserting references to it today.
And now we have an entire new series about the possibility of a Days of Future Past scenario, except with a more apocalyptic event in the short run. Days of Future Past had Kitty Pryde (the girl in the movies that could walk through walls) travelling back in time from a future where mutants were being hunted down and an underground resistance had formed to try and stop it. They believed that if Senator Robert Kelly hadn't been assasinated in the 90s, that it would've stopped the bloodshed in the future. Likewise, you have "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" tagline from Heroes. At this point, Hiro is kind of like Kitty in that he is the only one that sees firsthand the devastation of the bomb. Isaac isn't really counted, really, because at this point he still isn't lucid enough when he's high to know anything about his paintings.
(Just so you know, the X-Men #143 reference that Hiro makes during karaoke in 1x02 is wrong. The Days of Future Past storyline was in Uncanny X-Men #141 and Uncanny X-Men #142. #143 has Kitty alone in the mansion battling a demon.)
I know Tim Kring has said before that he didn't really read any comics and was just surprised to find that his ideas had already been done before, but it's astonishing how similar the plot of Heroes and the plot of Days of Future Past and its subsequent story arc spin-offs are. I'm not saying there's any copying going on, but if this goes on I have a pretty good idea about how season 1 might end and how season 2 might open up.
OK, you know what? This might go better if I went character by character.
Hiro: He's undoubtedly the life of the show. Without him a lot of people (including me) wouldn't be watching. He's so compelling because he's the everyday man, except for the fact that he knows what's going to happen, but like Isaac people don't really believe him, which is exacerbated by the fact that present-Hiro's English isn't very good at all. He's a geek, a Trekkie, a fanboy, reads everything from Japanese manga to X-Men and plays all the good video games. It's no wonder fandom loves him, he's our representative in the series. Even better, he's the one with The One Truth, and has a handy sidekick friend (who doubles as his interpreter and link to Nikki) to drag along with in his adventures.
At first I thought he was just the Japanese Nightcrawler, but after watching the episodes it's quite obvious with the difference in powers. Nightcrawler teleported from place to place, but couldn't do much with bending time and space. He did have a wormhole or another dimension that he could enter when he teleported, making him seem to teleport instantaneously within our own dimension. Hiro however, just stops time, does his stuff, and then starts up time again, in other words, he bends the space/time continuum. :)
What I'd like to see now is if he can freeze time while allowing someone else to move within the wormhole he creates around himself so that they move in real time with him. Like how future-Hiro does with Peter on the subway, freezing everything else except for him and Peter so that they can talk. Right now all Hiro seems to be able to do is freeze time, move people away from trucks/burning cars, and transport himself into the future, but there has to be more to that, I think. Also, I think he has to be the one to save Claire, solely because he's on a personal mission to save people from danger, and because geographically he's the nearest to Texas at the moment.
Isaac: Best. Tortured. Artist. EVER. From a purely fannish standpoint, he's the best angst figure I've seen in a long time. Artist struggling to make ends meet, lost his girlfriend on account of him being a junkie, able to paint paintings of the future (but only when he's high, which makes his junkie habit worse), loses his girlfriend to another guy that has special powers like him, and all the while he's in a drug-induced stupor or almost ODing. It's like RENT combined with X-Men, almost.
Seriously though, I can't see how Isaac would develop more as a character beyond his pre-cog abilities. Although if this were Marvel they'd put Wolverine with him as a bodyguard of sorts, because he's got one of the rarest and most important abilities. Pre-cogs are very, very valuable.
Matt: Oh Matt. I really like you. I love how he really wants his marriage to work, and how he's so damn intent on making it to detective. And all of a sudden with his telepathic powers he's got everything he ever wanted, even if it was for a day or two before he found out his friend was sleeping with his wife. He's got the usual Jean Grey complaints: hearing too many voices and not being able to control his powers, finding out things that he was better off not knowing, really bad headaches, etc. What I'm worried about now is that he'll do a Wolverine where even though his mind's been cleaned of the encounter he had with Mystery Guy With DNA Necklace (MGWDN) and Mr. Bennet, if the memory blocks collapse and he suddenly remembers what happened, or if they keep on cleaning his mind out (like how they did with Wolverine in the Weapon X program), that he'll get confused as to what really happened and what didn't.
Niki: Really compelling story, but with her it's more a case of dissociative disorder/ multiple personality disorder than any sort of supernatural power. It's more like the difference between Phoenix and Dark Phoenix rather than the difference between a normal woman and Jean Grey, if you get what I mean. There's a lot of parallels with Niki and Jessica with Jean Grey and the Phoenix, with the biggest similarity in the fact that they all exist as separate and individual entities all on their own.
DL: He's got the same power as Kitty Pryde, which brings up a lot of comparisons with the two of them. In Days of Future Past she's the one that knows what happens, but since we have Hiro knowing the future already, the only thing left with DL is the Truth of the nature of his crimes that put him on the run. The one thing we haven't seen yet that might happen is how his powers affect electronics, since in the comics Kitty ruins electronics when she phases through them, and the one thing she can't phase through is adamantium (the metal that covers Wolverine's bones).
Also, Kitty Pryde at the time of the Days of Future past storyline was a teenaged girl, a genius at school, an aspiring dancer, goody-two shoes (with a mischievious streak), white, Jewish, and semi-scared of Nightcrawler. It's nice to see the complete mirroring and flipping of the denominators with DL, who's an African-American man (dark as night, which makes his hiding abilities that much better), a criminal on the run (who might've been framed), and who basically walks on the wrong side of the tracks. And he has a run-in with Hero/"Nightcrawler".
Micah: I always suspected that Micah had to have inherited the mutant gene, because even in Marvel, even if only one parent is a mutant, the child will more often than not be a mutant as well. If you have two mutants having children together (ie, Jean Grey and Scott Summers), the child is definitely a mutant. Micah is like Forge! (ETA: alrischa pointed out to me that in the Marvelverse you have Graydon Creed, a homo sapien child whose parents are Sabretooth and Mystique, two of the more powerful mutants in the 'verse.)
Nathan: With all the ambition, he screams more Robert Kelly to me than say, Angel. He seems ruthless, and I haven't had many thoughts about him other than the fact that he and Peter both seem to be poised at a position where it's entirely possible that they will go over to the Dark Side in one way or another. He'll do it just to win the election.
Peter: With that hair and the constant air of being lost, he reminds me more of a young Neo (from the Matrix) than anything. Add that to his Rogue-like abilities (with the nifty catch of not draining anyone of their energy whenever he touches them), and you've got a character that I'm completely ambivalent about. One moment I like him, the next I hate him for having no spine. But is that deliberate? Especially considering his power, his personality might be shaped by that, or rather, that he is more a medium for other people than he is a person. He does seem to be the "lead protagonist" in this series, the one that's trying to find the truth, blahblahblah. Or as cals82 would say, he's the Confused Pawn of Destiny. Which I first misread as Confused Prawn of Destiny, which actually fits him better since he seems to spend a lot of his time wangsting in the rain. Also, that scene with Nathan on the rooftop. Superman Returns much? And with that red hoody Peter's wearing when he jumps off the building, he's only a few feet of cloth away from a red cape, sheesh. Saving one person at a time? Suuuuuuperman. *rolls eyes*
Claire: Or as I call her, Wolverina. Like the inversion of Kitty into DL, you've got yet another interesting inversion here. Wolverine: short, runty indestructible man with so many memory blocks put into his brain that he doesn't know his own past, very dodgy dealings with the Japanese mobsters, general tussles with every bad guy he meets, and a revenge streak a mile wide. Then you have Claire, a cute, dainty, blonde cheerleader from a small town in Texas, an orphan who doesn't know where she comes from, and is shown to have a taste for revenge (even if she apologises to Brody later) and for pushing/killing herself multiple times to see how far she can go. And all the time she wishes she were normal, and wants to find out about her past. Oh yeah.
MGWDN and Mr. Bennet: I don't know about you, but Mr Bennet stinks of movieverse William Stryker (from X2) to me. He is uber-protective of his daughter, and while it's unclear about whether he wants to find a cure for her like Stryker, you can bet that all of what he does is illegal. Baaaaaaaad guy. MGWDN for some reason is coming up as Emma Frost on my radar, which is yet another great inversion of race and gender (esp. since Emma Frost is the White Queen). They both use their psychic abilities for bad, yay, and I think that's about all the thoughts I have.
Conclusion
In the animated series, the Days of Future Past storyline had the X-Men finding out that preventing Senator Kelly's assasination didn't change the future, which means that it was some other event that triggered off the string of events that led to the bloody future. I'm really dreading the fact that this is actually very possible with Heroes. At this moment you've got the show dangling from one solitary string: Save the Cheerleader, Save the World. What happens if you don't save the cheerleader? What happens if you do save the cheerleader, but the bad guy escapes? Will Hiro be able to teleport everyone back to the past to try and stop the apocalypse from happening in New York? And is Ted Sprague the human radiator/bomb/whatever responsible for the nuclear disaster?
Who on the flist is watching Heroes? *raises hand*
I'm finally all caught up with the episodes, and I have to say that I cannot wait for the rest of the season to unfold. There's been a lot of talk about the pilot and the subsequent episodes being too disjointed owing to the big ensemble cast, but to me it was more like a filmed graphic novel, dyou know what I mean? I found no problem whatsoever following up on the different plotlines, and I love watching out for hints that they might know each other in very subtle ways. The only parallel I can think of at the moment is looking out for shoutouts to other aspects of the X-Men comicverse in the animated series and the movies. Which is going to bring me to the bulk of this post, where I'm going to make wild predictions and analysis with a heavy slant towards the X-Men, specifically the mainstream 616 canon (or the universe that most of the animated series took place in).
I started off watching Heroes because alrischa, my partner in X-Men fangirling, told me that the premise for Heroes was "imagine if the X-Men were real people".
And to some extent, I think this was the third movie that I really wanted out of the movie franchise instead of X3: The Last Stand, or as I call it, "that lousy excuse for a superhero movie I HATE YOU BRETT RATNER OMG". When X3 opened up with the Danger Room sequence that looked exactly like the ruins we've seen before in Uncanny X-Men #141, and the Sentinel? I thought we'd FINALLY get the Days of Future Past storyline. It might have started the entire insanity that was the hallmark of a Chris Claremont plot, but it's still one of the best storylines in X-Men history, which is why they still keep on inserting references to it today.
And now we have an entire new series about the possibility of a Days of Future Past scenario, except with a more apocalyptic event in the short run. Days of Future Past had Kitty Pryde (the girl in the movies that could walk through walls) travelling back in time from a future where mutants were being hunted down and an underground resistance had formed to try and stop it. They believed that if Senator Robert Kelly hadn't been assasinated in the 90s, that it would've stopped the bloodshed in the future. Likewise, you have "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" tagline from Heroes. At this point, Hiro is kind of like Kitty in that he is the only one that sees firsthand the devastation of the bomb. Isaac isn't really counted, really, because at this point he still isn't lucid enough when he's high to know anything about his paintings.
(Just so you know, the X-Men #143 reference that Hiro makes during karaoke in 1x02 is wrong. The Days of Future Past storyline was in Uncanny X-Men #141 and Uncanny X-Men #142. #143 has Kitty alone in the mansion battling a demon.)
I know Tim Kring has said before that he didn't really read any comics and was just surprised to find that his ideas had already been done before, but it's astonishing how similar the plot of Heroes and the plot of Days of Future Past and its subsequent story arc spin-offs are. I'm not saying there's any copying going on, but if this goes on I have a pretty good idea about how season 1 might end and how season 2 might open up.
OK, you know what? This might go better if I went character by character.
Hiro: He's undoubtedly the life of the show. Without him a lot of people (including me) wouldn't be watching. He's so compelling because he's the everyday man, except for the fact that he knows what's going to happen, but like Isaac people don't really believe him, which is exacerbated by the fact that present-Hiro's English isn't very good at all. He's a geek, a Trekkie, a fanboy, reads everything from Japanese manga to X-Men and plays all the good video games. It's no wonder fandom loves him, he's our representative in the series. Even better, he's the one with The One Truth, and has a handy sidekick friend (who doubles as his interpreter and link to Nikki) to drag along with in his adventures.
At first I thought he was just the Japanese Nightcrawler, but after watching the episodes it's quite obvious with the difference in powers. Nightcrawler teleported from place to place, but couldn't do much with bending time and space. He did have a wormhole or another dimension that he could enter when he teleported, making him seem to teleport instantaneously within our own dimension. Hiro however, just stops time, does his stuff, and then starts up time again, in other words, he bends the space/time continuum. :)
What I'd like to see now is if he can freeze time while allowing someone else to move within the wormhole he creates around himself so that they move in real time with him. Like how future-Hiro does with Peter on the subway, freezing everything else except for him and Peter so that they can talk. Right now all Hiro seems to be able to do is freeze time, move people away from trucks/burning cars, and transport himself into the future, but there has to be more to that, I think. Also, I think he has to be the one to save Claire, solely because he's on a personal mission to save people from danger, and because geographically he's the nearest to Texas at the moment.
Isaac: Best. Tortured. Artist. EVER. From a purely fannish standpoint, he's the best angst figure I've seen in a long time. Artist struggling to make ends meet, lost his girlfriend on account of him being a junkie, able to paint paintings of the future (but only when he's high, which makes his junkie habit worse), loses his girlfriend to another guy that has special powers like him, and all the while he's in a drug-induced stupor or almost ODing. It's like RENT combined with X-Men, almost.
Seriously though, I can't see how Isaac would develop more as a character beyond his pre-cog abilities. Although if this were Marvel they'd put Wolverine with him as a bodyguard of sorts, because he's got one of the rarest and most important abilities. Pre-cogs are very, very valuable.
Matt: Oh Matt. I really like you. I love how he really wants his marriage to work, and how he's so damn intent on making it to detective. And all of a sudden with his telepathic powers he's got everything he ever wanted, even if it was for a day or two before he found out his friend was sleeping with his wife. He's got the usual Jean Grey complaints: hearing too many voices and not being able to control his powers, finding out things that he was better off not knowing, really bad headaches, etc. What I'm worried about now is that he'll do a Wolverine where even though his mind's been cleaned of the encounter he had with Mystery Guy With DNA Necklace (MGWDN) and Mr. Bennet, if the memory blocks collapse and he suddenly remembers what happened, or if they keep on cleaning his mind out (like how they did with Wolverine in the Weapon X program), that he'll get confused as to what really happened and what didn't.
Niki: Really compelling story, but with her it's more a case of dissociative disorder/ multiple personality disorder than any sort of supernatural power. It's more like the difference between Phoenix and Dark Phoenix rather than the difference between a normal woman and Jean Grey, if you get what I mean. There's a lot of parallels with Niki and Jessica with Jean Grey and the Phoenix, with the biggest similarity in the fact that they all exist as separate and individual entities all on their own.
DL: He's got the same power as Kitty Pryde, which brings up a lot of comparisons with the two of them. In Days of Future Past she's the one that knows what happens, but since we have Hiro knowing the future already, the only thing left with DL is the Truth of the nature of his crimes that put him on the run. The one thing we haven't seen yet that might happen is how his powers affect electronics, since in the comics Kitty ruins electronics when she phases through them, and the one thing she can't phase through is adamantium (the metal that covers Wolverine's bones).
Also, Kitty Pryde at the time of the Days of Future past storyline was a teenaged girl, a genius at school, an aspiring dancer, goody-two shoes (with a mischievious streak), white, Jewish, and semi-scared of Nightcrawler. It's nice to see the complete mirroring and flipping of the denominators with DL, who's an African-American man (dark as night, which makes his hiding abilities that much better), a criminal on the run (who might've been framed), and who basically walks on the wrong side of the tracks. And he has a run-in with Hero/"Nightcrawler".
Micah: I always suspected that Micah had to have inherited the mutant gene, because even in Marvel, even if only one parent is a mutant, the child will more often than not be a mutant as well. If you have two mutants having children together (ie, Jean Grey and Scott Summers), the child is definitely a mutant. Micah is like Forge! (ETA: alrischa pointed out to me that in the Marvelverse you have Graydon Creed, a homo sapien child whose parents are Sabretooth and Mystique, two of the more powerful mutants in the 'verse.)
Nathan: With all the ambition, he screams more Robert Kelly to me than say, Angel. He seems ruthless, and I haven't had many thoughts about him other than the fact that he and Peter both seem to be poised at a position where it's entirely possible that they will go over to the Dark Side in one way or another. He'll do it just to win the election.
Peter: With that hair and the constant air of being lost, he reminds me more of a young Neo (from the Matrix) than anything. Add that to his Rogue-like abilities (with the nifty catch of not draining anyone of their energy whenever he touches them), and you've got a character that I'm completely ambivalent about. One moment I like him, the next I hate him for having no spine. But is that deliberate? Especially considering his power, his personality might be shaped by that, or rather, that he is more a medium for other people than he is a person. He does seem to be the "lead protagonist" in this series, the one that's trying to find the truth, blahblahblah. Or as cals82 would say, he's the Confused Pawn of Destiny. Which I first misread as Confused Prawn of Destiny, which actually fits him better since he seems to spend a lot of his time wangsting in the rain. Also, that scene with Nathan on the rooftop. Superman Returns much? And with that red hoody Peter's wearing when he jumps off the building, he's only a few feet of cloth away from a red cape, sheesh. Saving one person at a time? Suuuuuuperman. *rolls eyes*
Claire: Or as I call her, Wolverina. Like the inversion of Kitty into DL, you've got yet another interesting inversion here. Wolverine: short, runty indestructible man with so many memory blocks put into his brain that he doesn't know his own past, very dodgy dealings with the Japanese mobsters, general tussles with every bad guy he meets, and a revenge streak a mile wide. Then you have Claire, a cute, dainty, blonde cheerleader from a small town in Texas, an orphan who doesn't know where she comes from, and is shown to have a taste for revenge (even if she apologises to Brody later) and for pushing/killing herself multiple times to see how far she can go. And all the time she wishes she were normal, and wants to find out about her past. Oh yeah.
MGWDN and Mr. Bennet: I don't know about you, but Mr Bennet stinks of movieverse William Stryker (from X2) to me. He is uber-protective of his daughter, and while it's unclear about whether he wants to find a cure for her like Stryker, you can bet that all of what he does is illegal. Baaaaaaaad guy. MGWDN for some reason is coming up as Emma Frost on my radar, which is yet another great inversion of race and gender (esp. since Emma Frost is the White Queen). They both use their psychic abilities for bad, yay, and I think that's about all the thoughts I have.
Conclusion
In the animated series, the Days of Future Past storyline had the X-Men finding out that preventing Senator Kelly's assasination didn't change the future, which means that it was some other event that triggered off the string of events that led to the bloody future. I'm really dreading the fact that this is actually very possible with Heroes. At this moment you've got the show dangling from one solitary string: Save the Cheerleader, Save the World. What happens if you don't save the cheerleader? What happens if you do save the cheerleader, but the bad guy escapes? Will Hiro be able to teleport everyone back to the past to try and stop the apocalypse from happening in New York? And is Ted Sprague the human radiator/bomb/whatever responsible for the nuclear disaster?