“Truth and Consequences”
November 16th, 2007
There’s a lot of tragedy flying around on Heroes these days, and this once again raises the constant struggle I have with the series. Independent of the whole, Peter’s trust for Adam Monroe is a tragic arc – waking up from amnesia, Peter blindly follows the man who we know is going to attempt to destroy the world. A lot of other tragedies are flying around – Maya placing her trust in Sylar follows the same lines, and Mohinder’s decision to follow the Company line is certainly tragic for the Bennet family.
The struggle I have, however, is that the greatest tragedy is that none of these storylines are given a chance to grow.
Every time there’s a moment of clarity in Peter’s storyline, we jump right into Micah losing his backpack and punching his cousin. The Twins storyline’s resolution is nowhere near enough to justify the nine episodes of dead air, and Mohinder’s betrayal of Bennet gets all of three scenes in the entire episode. While this makes for some occasional moments of quality drama, the “whole” lacks cohesion. And really, I don’t think that cohesion is too much to ask when the parts are coming together in some way, shape, or form.
Yes, Peter’s storyline was better this week: he and Adam visit Victoria Pratt, whose attempts to convince Peter of Adam’s villainy are unable to get through his thick skull. Peter really has good reason to trust Adam, considering that he doesn’t know much else. However, after the action in the episode, he’s really going to have to put two and two together in next week’s episode – even Peter isn’t dumb enough to question Adam’s motives, especially with Hiro arriving to provide further evidece to his evil.
Arguably the episode’s other most important development, we finally started to see some of our heroes start to band together. It’s unfortunate, then, that our first league of heroes action is Monica and Micah executing a rather terrible mission into a gang hideous. Seriously – why was a gang of what looked like near adults so concerned with comic books? Regardless of their perceived value, it was more than a bit far-fetched.
The Bennet story was really unfortunately handled – it needed more time, first of all, and Claire’s farewell to her father wasn’t given nearly enough resonance in the context of his fake death. While I like the idea of her and Elle interacting, as Kristen Bell brings out the best in any performer, it really didn’t do anything in this episode – West was as uneventful as ever, and Claire desiring to erase her father’s memory ignores (again) their Season One relationship. Plus, Mohinder and Bennet only got one scene – we really needed more of that.
Sylar and the Twins were as enjoyable as they’ve been, as Sylar finally was able to get Maya to control her powers so he could kill Alejandro and start making out with her as quickly as possible. I don’t really get where they’re going with her character, though: now that she can control her power, does she really need to be cured? If so, where does she go from here? She’d be great at crowd control, but I don’t really see where they’re going with this (especially since Sylar will soon be disappearing for a role with pointier ears).
What I do enjoy is that Heroes finally got a cliffhanger right, perhaps for the first time all season. Here, there was plenty of emotional story beats which could be mentioned, and the show actually hit a few of them – we got Sylar creepily sitting over Molly (Always a highlight, when Sylar goes to his creepy place), as well as Hiro confronting Peter at Primatech Paper. I have some quibbles with these (I wish we had seen Parkman abandon Molly in order to chase after Pratt himself, and how did they just walk into a paper company like that? Surely there was surveillance), but they nicely built and brought together disparate storylines into one cohesive whole.
The question now is whether, in next week’s 2.0 finale (They’re considering rebooting once the writer’s strike concludes, we’ll see how negotiations go this week before they choose which ending to provide on Monday), they might actually be able to take these multiple tragedies and multiple story threads and turn them into an hour of television which resonates thematically. I’m tired of seeing good plot elements go to waste with a series that can’t string together 40 minutes of cohesive television – I don’t think it is so unreasonable to expect that.
Cultural Observations
- Man, the acting in this episode was really quite bad. The actor playing young Kaito, in particular, was simply awful – he made Nicholas D’Agosto (West) look Shakespearean by comparison. They really should have just used CGI to input Star Trek-era George Takei into the series, it would have been infinitely more realistic.
- Claire’s family should by logic now be aware of her power, although Lyle didn’t seem all the shocked. Their entire storyline has always been compelling, but it has struggled this season. Claire’s actions just didn’t match up with reality, somehow, and I am more curious to see her relationship with Elle develop.
- Only on television would Pratt, confronted with a chance to finish off the villain of the piece, take time to explain why she had to shoot him in the head instead of just shooting him in the head. Sigh…
Cultural Learnings 