“Cautionary Tales”
November 19th, 2007
Credit where credit is due: the end of the episode showed that someone in the writer’s room isn’t sleeping, calling back to one of the first season’s most memorable cliffhangers of Claire open-chested in the morgue. However, unlike that “Holy Sh-” moment, this one wasn’t earned: another middling and poorly paced outing for Heroes resulted not in an edge of your seat conclusion, but rather a bait-and-switch near death which only cheapened the episode as a whole.
The episode as a whole was a cautionary tale to Tim Kring that, even after his apology hit the internet, his show still needs to remember what happened in the show’s first season. In “Company Man,” Claire saw her father’s true love for her despite what bad things he had done in the past. When Hiro attempted to go back in time to save Charlie, he realized that he could never do it and that there were just too many consequences. They learned these lessons, received these cautionary tales…but now here they go repeating them all over again.
Cultural Learnings 