Heroes, season 3. Spoilers abound.
I’m up to episode 4, and I’m getting tired.
I’m tired of bad, pathos-laden acting, like Future and Present Peter shouting coarse-voiced pseudo-ideologies at each other.
I’m tired of railroad plot devices, like Parkman getting fed tidbits of future by an all-knowing African.
I’m tired of bargain-basement Fausts recycling clichéd psychodrama tropes, like Suresh’s Jekyll/Hyde routine.
I’m tired of recycled powers and meta-powers driving recycled plots, like the continued abuse of time travel and future-painting.
I’m tired of plots that go nowhere while others are force-fed down our throat, like Nathan’s slow political career vs. Tracy’s “Ooh, by the way, I’m a Nazi doctor-type who genetically modified you to give you power because there’s a company that wanted me to” conversation.
But most of all I’m tired of lazy scriptwriters writing lazy blind-spots to obvious solutions just to keep the plot moving, blocking communications between characters for no reason other than to keep them in the dark. Characters who know each other but never think of talking amongst themselves to correlate plot points. Characters not using their powers fully just to create fake tension, like Peter’s super-speed punch-out with Future Daphne which allows Sylar’s son to die, when he could have easily stopped time and carried him to safety. That’s my problem with some of the bigger powers there, especially time-stopping and teleportation, not to mention bringing people back from the dead - they’re such amazingly strong powers that, once released, are game-changing. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. If he can stop time, why doesn’t he? If he can use a few drops of his blood to revive a dying man, why doesn’t he? Remember that he can heal that blood right back. It’s lazy plot-writing, like ignoring the existence of cellphones and basing your plot around characters not being able to talk to each other at a critical moment.
Bah. And still I watch.