There has been much talk around the net about how the third season fell into many of the same traps that the second season had. That it really wasn’t much better than the second season. I’m not entirely sure of this. I would grant anyone that the third season was not nearly as good as the first season, but it also wasn’t nearly as bad as the second season. Heroes may not be doin what it did in that magical first year on NBC, but it still has some magic left in it.
The third season wasn’t perfect, it had many issues. For one, characters seemed to change personalities on a whim. Peter’s future self being so vastly different was about the only one that really made sense. Mohindir and Nathan changed almost completely in half a season (or less) with little logical explanation. Mohindir in this last episode finally came up with an explanation as to why he went from a good intellectual scientist to a nutball in just a single episode was that he always envied the superpowers. Really? That’s all they could do with him? If he envied it, why didn’t he really show it? I personally thought the trail with him would eventually lead to him having super powers of some sort. I don’t know, like the fact that his blood cured the Shanti virus, and that I don’t know Shanti was a super hero as well? But no we go through this junk. Nathan was a little more believable but he went so harshly to the “evil” side in the last episode that you didn’t realy understand how he got there. I mean he always teatered but he always had good intentions, now he doesn’t even seem to have that. What the heck happened to him?
I realize these could be questions answered in the future, but the real question should they. Should they actually spend time filling in the huge gaping holes that they left in the third season? I doubt they will… they still have plenty of huge gaping holes in the second season that we have no idea what happened. (Anyone remember Caitlin or the family in Louisiana that Micah is staying with? Talk about your cliff hangers!!!)
Another issue that is somehwo related to the quick change of personalities in characters is the new sister of Nikki, Tracey. A sure sign of a show desperately trying to hang onto characters that may not have been originally planned to be around for so long… I can already see the gears churning. “Woops we killed off Nikki, I know lets have long lost triplets who all have super powers that are all identical! That way we can keep killing off main characters without losing the actors!” A sigh pretty much sums up this story line.
I’ve also lost interest in Sylar about a little more than a year ago. He was great in the first season, however I really think they should have killed him off and found themselves a new villain of some sorts. I had high hopes that they would do so this year finally with a new “Villains” moniker, but no such luck. In fact, none of the villains from this season that were introduced seem to be continuing on past this year which is more than a little disappointing. Sylar was best used when he was barely in the show at all, now they force him into the show even if he need not be there. They leave off the season kililng him off, again, but surprise they’ve already announced that he isn’t dead.
There was bright points however. The scenes with Matt Parkman with the African future painter were some of Matt’s best IMHO and they really gave the character a little more. Hiro and Daphne were great as well and I hope they keep Daphne around for some time to come. The only disappointing thing for me was that nothing more came of Hiro’s duty for the formula. I think they wrapped it up really nicely at the end, however, I felt when they introduced that quest that Hiro’s father was playing him and it was never really followed up on after that. Lastly, Peter had some pretty stellar stories in it as well, I especially liked the future Peter coming in and completely screwing everything up. This in and of itself gave the writers to essentially ditch their previous storyline and move in a completely different direction, which they did.
Overall, I give the half-season a B-. I think Tim Kring needs to settle back and stop worrying too much what fans think. Of course you care, but I have a feeling he does everything he reads that fans want on the internet, and as any dev of an MMO knows, fans don’t often know what they want. It is good to listen to fans for general direction, but you often end up with a general mess if you listen too much, which is about where Heroes is. With news of one of the major writers coming back to the series, I hope they can finally rein it in a bit and get some honest direction back. Even so, this is still one of the more interesting and entertaining shows to watch on TV, especially on Monday night.
2 replies on “Heroes Volume 3 Review”
Great article. You pretty well summed up everything that I was thinking about Volume 3. The major let down for me is the massive holes in the story. Season 1 there was always a good plot and direction that was believable. In volume 3 it seemed as if they just went from episode to episode thinking after each one “hmmm, what will we do next week?”. It wasn’t well thought out and there was never much tension really was there? Your point about characters completly changing in the space of an episode is spot on too. I always thought Nathan would go bad, but not in the space of an episode!!!Come on like, they could have at least drawn it out a bit!!!
I for one am glad to see the back of a few of the character(Miya just completly annoyed me and Elle had pretty much done all she could do). They need to find some new people to bring in but they need to make clever decission about who and why. No point in just throwing a Villian in there for the sake of it or they’ll fast run out of storyline for them yet again and end up killing them off like this season. Good to see Sylar back to his evil ways and I’m glad they explained this season a bit more as to how he became evil. I just wasn’t liking the whole “Peter I’m your brother” thing. It’s messy enough as it is trying to think of all the family ties in Heroes so another one was just adding to the confussion. My head hurts jsut trying to think about it.
I hope they can turn it around in Volume 4 when it start(Febuary 4th i think?) as it’s one of my favourite shows. And as you say, “there’s still some magic left”.
Yeah when the Mama Patrelli announced to Sylar that she was his mother, I hit my hand against my head. That was awful and extremely generic, and relatively unneeded as well. The one thing I kind of like about that in retrospect was that obviously future Sylar knew about him not being brother to Peter, but he pretended to. Well obviously the creators may not have known how that would end up but if they did it was clever on his part to pretend to be brother still. Those two are brothers even if not related in an odd sort of way given that they share the same type of power.
I liked Elle last year, she was the highlight, I didn’t particularly care for her this year. I really wanted to see more of her and her relationship with her dad because I felt that could be interesting, but they killed him off very quickly. Too bad really, missed opportunity.