[tv] Heroes: Ah, much better

[siderea]

I just caught up on "Heroes". I have to say, my enthusiasm had been waning. I thought the premier was fantastic and that the first few eps were, of course, not quite as fantastic, pretty great, but then, things started... bogging... down. And then, last week, the Big Important Episode made me think (and I was going to post) "If that's their idea

Comments

[joshwriting]

"the narrative purpose of the superpowers is to illuminate something about the human condition, about how humans cope with their potentials -- the potential for greatness, the potential to do good, the potential to do evil, the potential to be hurt, the potential to fail your potential"

This is it, in a nutshell. This is what teaching kids is about for me - and especially gifted kids. This is what the best F&SF is about for me, too.

I have written about the frustrations of limits, and this, too, is a part of both Heroes and life.

[lauradi7]

What an excellent post. It reminded me in a sidelong way of one of my favorite quotations from the NPR series "This I believe"

"In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing."
Dierdre Sullivan

[alexx_kay]

Huh. I had almost the opposite reaction. But then, I value "plot" far more than you seem to, so that makes sense. I didn't actiely *dislike* the latest ep, but it did nothing to assuage my annoyance at the previous one. If you spend several episodes building up to a plot climax -- going so far as to invent a multiply-repeated tagline about it -- then I expect much more in the way of a payoff. Not only was episode 9 anticlimactic, but they followed it up with an episode that was about 85% backstory! Well-done and interesting backstory, it's true, but still backstory. And then adding insult to injury with the ending montage: "Remember all those cliffhangers from last week? Still hanging!"

The emotional plot twist in Hiro's story was just fabuIt bugged the hell out of me. The Charlie we had seen in the present timeline showed no evidence (or foreshadowing) of either brain aneurysm nor despair. That's just lazy writing. It was also Yet Another WIR moment -- the only function of the girl is to inspire the hero by being

[alexx_kay]

On the subject of "what people like in their science fiction", you might find this conversation interesting: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/596867.html?style=mine

[siderea]

Not at all, welcome aboard, ben sias vengut, domna de Montengarde!

Editing Tangent

[dglenn]

I'm planning to quote from this in a future quote-of-the-day. But I wanted to check -- is the following edit correct?
Every day we find ourselves confronting choices between what is easy and what is right, choices which require, for us [to] meet them as the people we wish we were, [with] the moral fortitude we usually attribute to only superheros and saints.

Unless it's just brain-fuzz from the lateness of the hourm the "to" seems like an accidental omission and the "with" sounds like it could be a stylistic choice (technical correctness aside).

[I don't think this comment really needs to be part of the permanent record of an otherwise much more interesting discusssion, so I wouldn't mind if you deleted it after replying, if you see it as a distracting nitpick. I just didn't want to find out I'd misapplied the editorial square-brackets after handing it to my QotD script.]

Re: Editing Tangent

[siderea]

That's perfectly dandy.

Re: Editing Tangent

[siderea]

Oh, wait, the "with" would be wrong. The "to" is definitely missing (will add), but the "with" is bad grammar. Will fix in the original.