So tonight, Heroes will be flashing forward five years into the future (As it will occur if the bomb goes off). Considering that the show had a great deal of success with flashing backwards with ‘Company Man’, will ‘Five Years Gone’ be able to achieve the same? Well, to be honest, I don’t really think so.
You see, the thing about Company Man is that it details things that actually happened. Like Lost, its flashbacks were designed for us to gain a better understanding of the show’s characters. We were able to understand the past dealings within Primatech, Mr. Bennet’s history with Claire and that organization, and in the end we got perhaps the best 42 minutes on television this season. The reason was that it mattered; it was an episode that felt like something substantial, something tangible, something meaningful.
The thing about Five Years Gone is that it will not, ever, actually matter in the core storyline. I’m no comic book fan, I’ll be honest, and this seems right out of that industry; the cheap, gimmicky flash forward into a hypothetical scenario of what could happen. The reality is that Sylar will actually be defeated (Zachary Quinto is a guest star, after all), and that Peter is likely to live. This scenario that we’re seeing, one of where the bomb goes off, is extremely unlikely to actually happen. If it was going to happen, if the things in this episode were going to pass, why would they be showing them to us now? It’s clear that things will not go down this way.
And that’s the problem: this late in the season, they should be concerned with getting their storylines organized in the present, not flashing forward in the future for an entire episode. There are a lot of loose ends kicking around that will just sit there for an entire 42 minutes, as the storylines just stall for an entire week. While they could pull out a stunning two episodes of finale-style goodness afterwards, I don’t think we really need a preface at this point.
We’ve known what they’re fighting for since the very beginning, rehashing it yet again seems like a waste of time, for me. It can’t build character, since it’s all happening in the future and the present day characters won’t learn from it, and it’s not like their journey is unclear to the audience: Peter wants to stop the bomb, Nathan doesn’t really want him to stop the bomb but sort of does, Hiro wants to stop the bomb, Niki/Jessica is incapable of coherent thought, Linderman wants the bomb to go off, Mr. Bennet wants to stop Primatech, Claire wants to not be captured by Primatech…we get it. There is no need for an episode-long trip into the future.
Will it be cool? Perhaps. It will certainly fulfill the question of what Claire will look like as a Brunette, and based on previews shows Nathan’s incompetence if he seriously hired clueless Mohinder to do anything of importance in his administration. But, do we really need to worry about these questions? I just find that Heroes is a better show when it’s focused. Learning Mr. Bennet’s backstory made sense for its focused storyline of Primatech and the backlash it faced. Flashing into the future, however, won’t be nearly as effective from a storytelling perspective, and just feels like a cheap attempt to provide a gimmick during May Sweeps.
No matter my opinion, flash forward Heroes will tonight at 9/8c on NBC, or earlier on Global if you’re in Canada. I’ll have my recap up during the NBC broadcast, for those a little impatient to find out what happens when there’s ‘Five Years Gone.’
Cultural Learnings 