Ever since the lack luster end to its first season, and its aborted second season, Heroes has become a pariah of 'nerddom'. Not bad enough to be canceled, but not good enough to be lauded. Why you ask?
3. Lack of Heroic acts...
Sure there's the occasional save the day, but rarely does anyone outside of Peter or Hiro do anything worthy of calling them heroes. In the recent episodes, Peter is trying to change that, and good on him for using his abilities to help people... So whats wrong with that you ask? Nothing except that we hardly ever see him actually saving people. All his heroics? Off screen!? Brilliant because instead of focusing on being a hero the show seems to be more worried about his emotional needs.
Note to NBC and the writers ... Heroes save people! Superman puts his all on the line not because he has a complicated back story or a weird shape-shifted brother... but because he wants to protect his fellow citizens. Why not have an episode or three devoted to actually saving people from a disastrous situation? Wait I know! Lets set up and elaborate plot with characters no one knows or cares about so that we can have another top heavy hammy story arc that no one will care about!
Which leads us to Number 2...
2. Arcs' that end in Tangents...
So Hiro and the cheerleader and HRG and Nathan and Peter and Mohinder have all joined forces to end some horrible threat. Day saved, apocalypse averted... now what? Whats that you say? Form a club? Start a therapy group? Link to each others Facebook page?
No... they all go their separate directions and act as if they never met. Seriously the characters seemed to get amnesia at the end of each season, and go back into caring only about themselves and a limited amount of others in their sphere of influence. Whats the deal? Is it so much to ask that some of characters stay in touch? The point of the arc is to have characters grow and learn as a consequence of ongoing events. Yet with each new season a reset button is pushed, characters disappear and no one much seems to mind.
Which leads us to number 1...
1. Characters Matter
Stop treating characters as simply means to tell a story. The characters in Heroes don't seem to matter much, they don't have deep lives, and they seem to exist only as a sounding board for the writers. The series leaves characters behind casually, kills them indiscriminately, and is so
obsessed with Sylar so much so that we know more about him then we do any other character. Now, I like Sylar as much as the next geek, but Heroes has become almost the 'Sylar Show'."Remember us? No? Don't worry we didn't matter either..."
We could see the beginnings of a group dedicated to help people with abilities... not locking them away but using them constructively. Instead we get the same overlong plot arc after arc.
Instead of really interesting and well thought out villains we get boring cliche's (My Fathers Evil!!), sinister government agents (Grrr, Heroes are Dangerous), Or we pull out the old Sylar bit and give that a go.
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