Heroes: Dying of the Light

By TrinityVixen

This episode in two words: hamster wheel. Everyone is going nowhere fast, and they’re exhausting themselves (and my patience) in their hurry to get there. This is very much a place-holder episode for conflicts yet to come. The question is will anyone still care when we get there?

Volume Three, Chapter Six – “Dying of the Light”

Take Pinehearst, for example. Once we got to know the Company, we understood that they were occasionally jerk-tastic, but that their hearts could sometimes be in the right place. We also know that they’ve made every mistake possible already and are in a position to smack the younger generation of heroes around before they repeat those mistakes. Except, of course, they totally haven’t, and now Pinehearst has decided to just give that live-and-learn aesthetic the finger. It’s time to stop playing at status quo and time to tear some junk up.

Ambitious? Sure. Productive? Yet to be seen. Pinehearst’s most active employee is Daphne, who is simply a messenger spreading the word (against her will) about how homicidal maniac-friendly Pinehearst is. Slight quibble with management’s decisions on that one: it would be better to take an extra minute to send someone actually excited about the R&D at Super Polytechnic than to send a less-than-enthusiastic speedster spokeswoman.

Daphne is at least the common thread in many of the increasingly tangential plots, so they’re not simply floating in the ether. (Not entirely, anyway.) She sends Hiro to Africa to grab Matt Parkman’s precog desert friend; visits and escapes Mohinder’s lair; tries to recruit Sylar; and warns Matt off of Pinehearst. She knows Sylar and Mohinder are killers (or as bad as) and thinks Hiro is, so she wants to spare the dodderingly adorable Matt from a fate worse than the Company. Matt and his turtle are in love. (Daphne not so much—she’s out.)

Love stinks, you ask me. It’s certainly not doing anyone any favors on this show. Sylar decides that Mommy Loves Me means never having to worry about trusting people who hate his guts. He goes to free Peter from his coma medication so Peter can pop into Mama P’s vegetative brain, and Peter screeches and flips out about how his predatory power-hunger is all Sylar’s fault. Like the show, Peter chooses not to remember facts that are inconvenient to the current plot line, like how Future!Gabriel tried to convince him not to steal his ability. They fight, mostly over how pissed Peter is that Gabriel is his brother and how Mom likes him best now. Because the show loves Peter best, Peter wins the fight against Sylar. (Yeah-f***ing-right.) He’s off to Pinehearst to put the hurt on the people who incapacitated Mama, but not before he swaps Sylar into his seat on the drug train.

Over at Pinehearst, Arthur Petrelli is up and about thanks to his power-sucking Adam Monroe into corpsitude. Arthur’s power is another variation on his younger boys’ powers (again, assuming that Gabriel is his son), only his ability drains the power from the person who possessed it through touch. We get a gruesome (mostly because of the bad CGI) demonstration of this when he steals invulnerability from Adam; the four-hundred-year-old dude crumbles into dust. Arthur is lording over his recruited monsters—Knox, the pyro called Flint, Father Parkman, and Daphne—when Peter charges in. Arthur diffuses his son with the shock of his being still alive and then steals all of Peter’s collected abilities in one hug. Methinks Peter will really regret shoving Gabriel’s kindness back down his throat when Sylar catches up to him while he is powerless…

Still treading water:

-The Bennets except for Lyle, Meredith: Because she assumed Claire took off after the wrong villain last week, Meredith ended up at the mercy of Doyle, the puppet master. He catches the two Bennet women and forces them into a game of Russian roulette. It takes a ludicrous amount of time for Mrs. Bennet to go along with the obvious solution and shoot her daughter until the one bullet comes out. Claire bops Doyle on the head; the ladies call in Mr. Bennet; Claire gives him the cold shoulder; and he picks up Meredith for the team. Aw, no more absurd Bennet-and-Sylar antics? Really? Is this a sign that things are improving or that both are going in even stupider directions? All signs point to stupid.

-Nathan and Tracy: When they came to him for help getting rid of their synthetic abilities, Mohinder put the whammy on the new and improved Petrelli-Saunders dynamic duo so that he could add them to his wall trophies. Tracy tried to offer him the same moral escape that Mama P used on her baby Gabriel—it’s not his fault, he just got carried away. Mohinder’s mistake was shaking on it. Tracy froze him out; she nearly-but-not-nearly-enough killed him making her escape with Nathan. (Whose shirt is, bizarrely but wonderfully, unbuttoned while hers is, equally strangely, not.) All three remain in a stand-off until next week.

-Hiro, Ando, precog: The precog bitches Hiro around until he doesn’t use his power to try and catch him. This is a load of horse manure. If a precog can predict when Hiro is going to time-jump around and stop that, he can certainly evade Hiro lurking and trying to catch him by “surprise.”  I suppose we have to get to the precog’s painting of the Pinehearst villains somehow. Yay for bogus “lessons.” Two of the faces in the painting are obviously Knox and Arthur Petrelli. The other two are possibly Flint the pyro and Sylar. Except the one that looks like Sylar has his eyebrows (I’m an expert on this, so trust me here) and not a one of his other features.

-Matt and his turtle: This week, they got to sit around and do nothing in an airport. The quality of the amenities in the place where they waste their time has improved. Nothing else has.

Next week: “You can’t choose your family. You can choose a side.”

Show, can we talk? Look, you may be new to the super power thing, but that doesn’t mean your viewers are. This story may be unfolding on a prime-time network TV show, but the X-Men movie trilogy was in and out of theaters and onto DVD before you even got off the ground. Even if your audience hadn’t read the forty years’ worth of comic book source material, they know from superpowers. That means you can’t surprise them with new ideas; you can only win them over with your execution of those ideas. (It’s kind of like the new scoring system in gymnastics.)

And your execution has been extremely poor. While the means of ruination have changed, the motivating force in your narrative universe—the doomed, DOOMED future—has not. The future is constantly being rewritten, so there’s not enough fear about predictions of destruction because we know that it can and will change. In fact, I think Mama P’s dream sequence from only the second episode is already irrelevant, and I know Future!Peter’s world is gone. (Or it should be. Or something. That’s another problem: you need to decide how changing the future even works.)

It also does you no good to jump ahead of months or years of character development and then try to retrofit that back on the characters we already know. Characters with superpowers are immediately disconnected from normal people because they are, duh, not normal. To counteract that, you have to keep everything besides their powers as relatable as possible. Instead, we have soap opera, with characters and actors too popular to kill being reinvented or brought back from the dead. Reinvent them (Niki/Jessica/Gina/Tracy, Sylar, Mohinder) and our relationship with them, built up over the two seasons previous, festers and dies. Bring them back from the dead (Adam Monroe, Maya, Arthur Petrelli) and the consequences of death become less impressive, so our suspense over their welfare is minimal at best.

How to fix this? For starters, have anyone who has had a major character conversion (i.e. Sylar) turn out to be faking everything a la Mr. Bennet. Mama P isn’t Sylar’s mom, she was playing him. Sylar isn’t a good boy, he just wants to be trusted far enough to get the info on the best powers to steal. Mohinder has brain parasites. (Something, anything to explain his sudden turn for the psychotic.) Don’t be afraid to kill/send off popular characters. (So help me, one of the Petrellis needs not to see the end of this season.) Cull the roster of supers down to a manageable level so we can learn who any of them even are. Return to interactions with the non-super world so we can remember what normal looks like and how the supers, the Company, Pinehearst, et al. don’t just act in a vacuum. BRING THE SUPERS TOGETHER; DO NOT SCATTER THEM FURTHER APART.

And for the love of Nathan Petrelli’s God, stay the frak out of the future.

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About TrinityVixen: There’s an asterisk on TrinityVixen’scollege transcript that assures anyone who reads it that, though there is no specific major, degree, or certificate for it, she did, in fact, complete some kind of creative writing program as an undergrad. Armed with that symbol of irrelevant experience, she has polluted the internet with her opinions and horrible fanworks ever since (and for quite a long while before). Living poor in New York until she finds a means to become independently wealthy, she must subsist on the juicy meat of fandom. Fandom and noodles. And instant soup.

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