Heroes: I See White Men

By Lisa Fary

I’ve never found Sylar attractive.  Had nothing to do with his psychokilling or his Monarch eyebrows. Just didn’t dig him.  Until now.  I think it was the hair on his chest that got me.  I encourage more shirtless Sylar scenes.

I don’t encourage more scenes in which women portray pain as sexual.  Elle was begging Sylar to kill her with all the expressions, body language, and sounds of a woman doin’ it (perhaps that’s the tie in with this episode’s title: “It’s Coming”).  Heroes team, we know you have a problem with chicks, but sexualizing physical pain is something else entirely.  Just how deep does your woman-hate go, Heroes team?

And while we’re on the subject, Heroes team, why do you hate black people?

You wrote out all of the African-American characters from last season and the black characters this season don’t do wonders for your track record either:

• Nichelle Nichols: mysteriously disappeared.
• DL Hawkins: dead.
• Knox: the meanest and baddest of the Bads this season.  Nothing like the imagery of a black man ripping the head off a blonde cheerleader to connect with suburban white fear.
• Usutu: the “magical negro” who mysteriously showed up in the bush to help Matt Parkman find his spirit turtle/ life partner and is now dead.
• Monica: mysteriously disappeared.
• Micah: shipped off to Awkward Tween Island to hang out with Walt from Lost until they either become hot or become producers.
• Stephen Canfield: sucked himself into his own black hole and is now dead. Unless his black holes lead to an alternate universe where Journeyman and Moonlight are still on the air, Pushing Daisies didn’t get screwed, and chest waxing has been outlawed. In which case, I’d like to live there, please.

I would have liked to have seen Micah and Monica form a hero team.  They had the right attitude about their abilities.  They worked well together.  They just needed a trainer.  Heroes team, you missed out on something there.

But, wait. There’s more.  You also seem to have a problem with Hispanic people:

• Isaac: killed his girlfriend (who was African-American) and is now dead.
• Alejandro: had a creepy relationship with his sister and is now dead.
• Maya: disturbingly attached to her brother, embodied a stereotype (she’s hot, she’ll clean your lab, and do you on the table by the Bunsen burners).  She’s not dead, but she’s been depowered.

It’s like minorities are your Red Shirts, Heroes team.  I really dislike this pattern.  Yes, I’m seeing it often enough to know that it is indeed a pattern and not my imagination.  Fold that in with the gross problems with Heroes‘ female characters and it gets pretty disturbing. For people of African or Hispanic decent and women, anyway (I’ll deal with Hiro, Ando and Mohinder next week).  But, I guess we shouldn’t worry.  White dudes will save us.

But, Peter won’t save us, because Peter is a moron.  I’m no fancy pants scientist with an elitist education from some commie college or anything, but if I see a pipe leaking gas, the last thing I want to do is light a fire near it.  You know, because if you throw fire at it, all of the gas lights – even the stuff in the pipe – and the fire follows the fuel.  This is why it’s important to pay attention in science class.

Isaac has been dead for a while now, so who the hell is drawing 9th Wonder?  How many issues ahead was he working?  Is he the VC Andrews of comics?  Although, I suppose future painters are fairly common. There  was Isaac.  There was Usutu.  And apparently there’s a tagger running around New York City who also paints the future in the style of Tim Sale. And now Father Petrelli is doing it, too.

In that final scene it looked like Father Petrelli was whacking off.  Whacking off to the future.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

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