Heroes Season 3 Premiere: Both Awesome and Horrible

The following rant/review contains spoilers. It assumes you have watched the two part season premiere.

I finally got a chance over the weekend to watch the TiVoed season 3 premeire of Heroes. In Season 1, I had found myself watching the first few episodes, giving it a pass for most of the season, then picking it back up near the last quarter of so of Season 1 and really enjoying it. Then Season 2 was abbreviated due to writer’s strike and other issues and ended up not being terribly exciting one way or the other. (The fan theories about it were far more entertaining than what actually ended up happening.)

Season 3 is their chance to show what they can do with a full season that doesn’t have to waste any time on establishing the series. You know who most of the characters are, you know the powers, you know the big players. This is their chance to finally pull off whatever grand plots they want to towards an established audience. Did they pull it off? Well, yes and no.

I think from the beginning Heroes has walked this line between Awesome and Horrible, and no where is that more evident than the season opener. I know among everyone I discussed the first season with, there were good characters, and there were bad characters. Hiro = good, Mrs. Hyde Stripper = bad. There were some gray areas (Telepathic Cop caused some debate) but mostly there were segments you looked forward to, and others you didn’t. Where it was at its best, however, when it was surprising, where the writers took chances. (In my mind, pretty much anything involving time travel was a risk, but always was rewarding.)

In Season 3, we get some great surprises, and in fact, many of the big ones involve time travel. Uber-Petrelli from the future is back to change things, starting by shooting his brother. Having such a super powered character around that nonetheless seems to be having major difficulties is good. (You could call this “addressing the Superman paradox.”) Hiro jumps into the future to see how the results of his actions will affect things, and we see Japan utterly obliterated by a mysterious force (that’s not Godzilla) after being blasted by Ando. Both plot lines that spun out of those two stories kept raising questions in interesting ways. Other plotlines, like Captain Sheridan the mayor sleeping with amnesia/cold-powered Stripper doesn’t grab me at all.

However, then there is the utterly, utterly predictable. Dave’s rule of bad dialogue is that if I can accurately predict the next line to be spoken, it’s probably bad dialogue. I suppose this could be extrapolated to plots, since I was able to accurately predict at least 3 “reveals” before they happened:

• Super-fast thief owns the Mona Lisa. (This was somewhat redeemed by the line “you didn’t check behind the Mona Lisa?”)
• Mr. Linderman can only be seen by Nathan Petrelli.
• Bob is dead. (Anytime somebody is in a chair not responding to a character, he’s probably dead.)

There were more, I’m sure. But each time, I was like “come on, don’t be that obvious…” and they were.

One particular plot point of note, however, was Mohinder injecting himself with the super-serum. I was able to predict this was coming, and on its surface seems a bit hokey, but I was perfectly fine with it: it’s probably one of the most “comic-booky” things to happen in the show in a long time. The brilliant scientist ALWAYS experiments on himself first to get superpowers and ends up having to deal with the side effects. If anything, I wish there were more moments like that. If you’ve got to be a predictable, be predictable in the genre, not just cliche.

So there was enough overall to grab my attention and keep me interested- even though the primary motivator of the arc seemed to have been thrown in at the end, with the villains escaping. However, I’m hoping that the predictable moments die off now that they have had their “shocking” opening, and focus on better twists and turns to come.