'Heroes,' 'Ugly Betty,' and other TV shows that burned hot, then burned out - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I take the occasion of the "Heroes" season finale - which could well be the series' finale, as well - to look at some other TV shows that went from phenomenon to afterthought surprisingly quickly.

Anybody around here actually still watching "Heroes" at this point? How has the carny season been? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "Cold Snap": Bryan Fuller to the rescue?

I know, I know... I swore off "Heroes" after the first episode of "Fugitives" -- because even though it was appreciably better than what had come before in season three, I felt too much irreparable harm had been done to the characters and the series for me to care anymore. But last night was a relatively slow one at Casa Sepinwall, and with Bryan Fuller -- who wrote the best episode of the series to date before going off to create a delightful little treat called "Pushing Daisies" -- back in the fold and writing "Cold Snap," I decided to give the show another shot, just to see if Fuller's return was really the cure-all that so many fans have been hoping for. Thoughts on whether he succeeded coming up just as soon as I fly to Paris...

Now, I came into "Cold Snap" having not watched the previous five episodes, so I had to play a lot of catch-up with the storyline, which characters have flip-flopped allegiances yet again, etc. But in spite of that, this was the strongest episode of the series I've watched in some time -- maybe not enough to get me back watching regularly, but at least to make sure I try to watch the episodes with Fuller's name on them.

What Fuller did so well in "Company Man," and what he did well here, is to take the characters seriously as people. They're never going to be as deep as anyone on "The Wire," or maybe even on "Lost," but the show is a lot more engaging when the characters seem like approximations of real people, with real feelings and with interests outside of accumulating more power, taking down the bad guys, or whatever the needs of the plot are.

So here Fuller spent a lot of time revisiting emotional beats that the series had largely ignored in the past in favor of keeping the story moving: Hiro reflects on what it was like to watch his mother die a second time, Ma Petrelli deals with the semi-normal life she abandoned as she got deeper and deeper into Company business, Daphne confronted Parkman on just how strange and superficial his love for her seems (before she was given a fairly poignant death), etc. Even Tracy was given an opportunity to revisit who she used to be before she became both a figurative and literal ice queen, right before the show apparently bumped off another of Ali Larter's characters(*).

(*) It's here that I should remind you again about the No Spoilers rule. For all I know, Tracy's going to melt down and then reassemble, or we're going to meet yet another of Nikki's dopplegangers, but I don't want to know anything about any interviews people have done, or spoilers that have been teased on other sites, or things in the previews, or whatever. Got me?

Because Fuller was dealing with so many characters and plotlines, he wasn't able to delve as deeply into anyone as he was with the single-focused "Company Man." But if "Heroes" could make this kind of effort every week to respect the characters, to think about who they are as people and not just pieces on a chessboard, to ask, "Well, how would someone really react if this incredible thing happened to them?," then it might be a show I'd want to watch more often.

Of course, it helped that Fuller chose to exclude or minimize most of the characters I can't stand. No Sylar, no Claire, virtually no Peter, Mohinder unconscious for a good chunk of the episode, and no Nathan (whom I used to like, but who has changed allegiances and motivation so many times that he's become just as useless as his brother, as far as I'm concerned). There's still a whole lotta dead weight in this ensemble, and I'm not sure that's a problem that can be easily solved no matter who the writers are.

So, what did everybody else think? Was it the miracle you were hoping for? And for those of you who've stuck it out over the last couple of months, how has "Fugitives" been working for you compared the last few story arcs? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "A Clear and Present Danger": The X-tinction agenda

Brief spoilers for tonight's "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I buy my own lair...

At the risk of being the boy who cried wolf, I think "A Clear and Present Danger" is the end of the line for "Heroes" and me.

It's not that the episode itself was bad. If anything, it corrects all sorts of problems that we've been complaining about going all the way back to the end of season one: The characters are thrown together almost immediately. Peter develops a spine and isn't so all-powerful that there shouldn't be any dramatic tension to his scenes (I think; more on that in a minute). There was a lot of action involving multiple powers (albeit most of them used by Peter). There's a concrete conflict, and the villain's motivation is both clear and somewhat logical. Etc.

I just don't care because of the stupidity that came before. I can't buy Peter as the go-getter who stands up to Nathan because I've seen him get suckered so badly in the past. Nathan has flip-flopped his allegiance and motivation so often that I don't care about his latest agenda, even though it makes a lot more sense than previous directions for the character. They finally seem to be giving Parkman some purpose in the show (even if they have to graft on Isaac's powers to do so), but all I can think about is how they wasted Greg Grunberg for two-plus years. I have no idea why Angela Petrelli and HRG have made the latest alliance they've made, nor am I interested in finding out.

There's just been too much damage done to the show's foundation for them to build anything on it that I want to spend time in anymore.

But before I go (and I swear I'm going to have the willpower to delete the season pass for real this time), a few other observations and questions:

• As Nathan asks, what exactly are Peter's powers these days? Why does he apparently need to touch people to copy their powers now? Can he (as Rick Porter from Zap2It suggested when we were discussing this episode earlier today) only hold one borrowed power at a time? That's the only reasonable explanation for why he would be so freaked out about falling out of the plane when we know (or thought we knew) that he can still fly, but that's a rather huge development that needed to be adequately set up before the fight scene on the plane. I'd forgive the writers' decision to change his powers, both because it was dramatically necessary and because the end of "Villains" sort of gave them license to do so, but if you don't tell us in advance that you're changing the rules, then scenes that depend on the new rules don't work. Peter's cab ride with Mohinder would have been an awfully easy place to do it quickly, but they didn't bother, so I spent most of the climax yelling at the TV, "You can fly, moron!!!!!"

• What's the US government doing traveling to Japan to illegally detain a foreign national? And why would they bother to fly Hiro all the way from Tokyo to New York, just so they could then fly him to the new and improved version of The Company's old Level 5?

• There was a brief moment, as Hiro was showing off the firehouse lair to Ando, where I was reminded of when and why I liked this show, but that feeling faded within a few scenes, probably around the time Sylar showed up. If Peter's powers have been neutered, why couldn't they bother to do the same to Sylar? The more we see of him, the less scary he becomes.

• Has Peter ever met Tracy before? Does he know Nikki's dead? I assume his confusion at the end was because he expected to get super-strength from her because he thought it was Nikki. I think. Again, not a lot of that fight scene made sense.

Anyway, that's it for me. For those of you who are continuing, I hope you enjoy it -- or, at least, that you enjoy hating on it. I've realized that nothing "Heroes" can do at this point will satisfy me, and it's not fair to me or to "Heroes" to keep going.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "Dual": Lock 'em up and throw away the key

Spoilers for the finale of the third "volume" of "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I rip up some paper...

Gosh, where to begin? How about the way that, after last week's episode ended by trying to present Ultra-Marine as the scariest man in town, Knox snaps his neck about five seconds into U-M's appearance in this one? Or what about Sylar having apparently stolen the abilities of the world's greatest travel agent when we weren't looking, given his ability to get from Costa Verde, CA to Ft. Lee, NJ to Odessa, TX so quickly? Or that they brought back George Takei just to show him use his katana as the world's greatest baguette slicer? (Could that be his power? Bread-Slicer Man?) Or that it only just occurred to Knox that Arthur Petrelli's plan would give abilities to other people? Or that Sylar uttered a line like "That's the thing about the truth, Claire: it stings like a bitch!" and it was supposed to sound menacing?

But here's really all that I want to say: when Nathan was done telling the president (played by Michael Dorn, which gave us Sulu and Worf in the same episode), all I could think was, while Nathan's motives may be suspect, he's absolutely right that every single one of these characters, whether they're "heroes" or "villains," needs to be put away forever. Despite the show's title, nobody ever does anything good for the world at large, other than solve problems that wouldn't exist without their particular subculture. Yeah, the X-Men spend a lot of time battling evil mutants, but they do occasionally help people. What we have here is a bunch of incredibly powerful, and incredibly stupid and easily persuadable, people who spend all their time fighting other parts of their insular world, not really worrying about collateral damage.

The last scene, and the previews for "Fugitives," suggests that Nathan's supposed to be the villain of the piece. When I'm rooting for the bad guy to win, something's gone horribly awry.

And yet the knowledge that Bryan Fuller is coming (albeit not until episode 19 or 20) is going to keep me around, which makes me just as big a sucker as Peter Petrelli.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "Our Father": The mother and child reunions

I had to take about an hour to sort through a mountain of paperwork on my desk this morning, and watching "Heroes" on Hulu to help pass the time seemed like an appropriate combination of drudgery and a show that deserves a whole lot less than my full attention. Some brief thoughts coming up just as soon as I eat some birthday cake...

So, it's still unimaginably stupid. We have to just take that as a given, along with the arbitrary shifts in allegiance, the stilted dialogue, wooden acting, etc. All the usual problems remain. I want to talk about two specific things in this episode, one good and one bad.

First, the good: Hiro's reunion with his dying mother, and, to a lesser extent, Claire getting to hang with younger versions of HRG and her mom. On the emotionally simplistic scale in which this show works, those sequences were very effective, and well-played by the actors, even the usually-problematic Hayden Panettiere. Nothing ground-breaking, but grown-up Hiro being the one to cry over his mother (because, of course, he knows what it's like to miss her for so long) was a nice human moment, the sort the show rarely pulls off anymore.

Now, the bad: now Sylar's the funny super serial killer? Really? This is the direction they want to take that character? Campy, quippy imitation Hannibal Lecter? Oy.

Beyond that, I got nothing. One more episode left in this "volume," then a hiatus until February, and we can't even rely on Bryan Fuller to save the day since he won't be coming back on the show until around episode 20 of this season.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "The Eclipse, Pt. 2": Open thread

I had my "Life's too short" epiphany on "Heroes" about 90 seconds into trying to watch tonight's episode. Just couldn't bring myself to keep watching, even for the sake of the blog. Sorry. Feel free to talk about any or all aspects of "Eclipse 2: Electric Boogaloo." Don't know if I'll do an open thread every week (I don't usually do posts on shows I'm not watching) or if I'll give it another chance once the next "volume" begins, but I feel much happier without feeling some kind of obligation to keep watching. Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "The Eclipse, Pt. 1": Power blackout

Spoilers for last night's "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I rent a convertible...

I wish I could come up with something more articulate than "meh" (now dictionary-approved!), but this allegedly game-changing episode didn't inspire much from me besides apathy.

If there was ever a point where we watched "Heroes" for the characterizations, I think that time is long passed. We watch... well, primarily we watch out of masochism, or out of a stubborn belief in the potential of "Heroes" rather than the actuality of "Heroes," but we also watch for plot twists and the occasional cool use of powers. So an entire episode in which the characters lose their powers and stand around to talk about their feelings and motivations wasn't the wisest choice. It'd be like a Phillies game where Ryan Howard only got to play defense, or an "American Idol" episode where Randy's the only judge who gets to talk.

Parkman's out-of-the-blue love for Daphne still makes no sense, no matter how many times he refers to spirit walks, but at least she was allowed to call him out on that now. I've completely lost track of whether Elle wants Sylar to be very good or very bad. (If the role were played by a less interesting actress -- say, a certain other diminutive blonde already familiar to the "Heroes" audience -- I'd just fast-forward through those scenes by now.) Peter and Nathan's whinefest about who the bigger sap is might have been interesting if these characters ever had meaningful conversations with each other instead of the usual cryptic dialogue and yelling. And Mohinder is no more interesting with a clear complexion than he was when he was turning into Jeff Goldblum.

Still, at least this one moved, even after everybody lost their powers. The stuff with Baron Samedi (double geek points for naming him after both a James Bond villain and a Brother Voodoo villain) has potential for interesting action -- especially since they spent so much time on Peter talking up his invulnerability that his powers have to turn back on next week, and Seth Green and Breckin Meyer as Kansas comic shop employees has the potential for the entire show to turn into an episode of "Robot Chicken."

But, again, I'm just being a sucker if I'm watching this show based on potential. Or what was that word Tim Kring used last week before he wrote his letter of apology?

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "It's Coming": Love shock, baby, love shock

It's been one of those weeks, and Monday's not even over yet, you know what I mean? So while I had the time to actually watch "Heroes" tonight, I'm not going to have the time or mental energy to really write about "Heroes," beyond three things I'll say about tonight: 1)Kristen Bell is a really good actress, and it's nice to watch her work even in something this dumb; 2)As amusing as the Hiro storyline is, it's the show's umpteenth different attempt to take the guy who controls time and space off the board so he can't just blink and fix everything; and 3)So, ya think an eclipse is coming?

Fire away with your thoughts, good, bad or indifferent. Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "Villains": Back to before the beginning

Spoilers for last night's "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I figure out how much the American pie-makers lobby has paid to have its product integrated into so many shows in the last few weeks...

I have to applaud Arthur Petrelli for decapitating our African spirit guide/plot device, because hopefully it means we'll be spared any more episodes in which one character eats the special paste and then spends the rest of the hour watching flashbacks or flashforwards of nebulous plot or entertainment value.

Both "Villains" and "I Am Become Death" felt like clumsy attempts to recapture the magic of first season episodes like "Five Years Later" and, to a lesser extent, "Six Months Ago." It's like Tim Kring, Jeph Loeb and Jesse Alexander(*) got together and said, "Well, everybody's mad at us. How can we give the people what they want?" "Well, they liked some of those time-bending episodes we did back in season one. Why don't we do more of that?" "Brilliant!"

(*) The various stories about the axing of Loeb and Alexander aren't exactly filling me with confidence that this will somehow be a cure-all for the series. Not only will their absence not be felt until very late in this season, but it sounds like they're being scapegoated. In the New York Times story on all the changes, Edward Wyatt compares the axing of Loeb and Alexander to George Steinbrenner firing the Yankees' pitching coach in the '80s because the team was slumping.

I don't feel like we learned enough -- or enough of interest -- about our various villains to justify the time spent watching Hiro watch their stories, and other than a reminder that HRG used to be a very, very bad man, none of the stories were particularly entertaining. If anything, they served as a reminder that The Company, whether it's supposed to be good or evil, is among the dumbest ultra-secret organizations in the history of filmed entertainment, even though it employs some of the show's allegedly brainier characters like Angela Petrelli and HRG. Encouraging Sylar to become a power-stealing serial killer? Again, brilliant!

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "Eris Quod Sum": Everything's relative

Spoilers for last night's "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I ask if I can have an exit row seat...

Hate... rising...

After spending the last couple of weeks feeling like I had vented so much of my spleen at "Heroes" that I had no anger left, "Eris Quod Sum" was such a stupid, boring episode that I feel some of the old-time fury coming on again.

Why does Arthur Petrelli want to give everyone super powers? Why is Sylar just as gullible and susceptible to mentoring as Peter? What happened to Nathan's political career? Why is Parkman so in love with a woman he barely knows in the present?

I have no idea what the answer to any of these questions is, nor do I particularly care. This season has been full of ominous portents with no explanation, and with people randomly changing allegiances to suit the whims of the story. There are weeks when I can ignore all the dumbness, but this wasn't one of them. Outside of a few amusing meta moments -- Tracey trying to figure out Claire's family tree, two characters finally being shown using an airplane to travel cross-country -- I was either groaning at the latest silly twist or else zoning out altogether. (I have a feeling they explained how Suresh knew to go to see Arthur Petrelli, but if so, I missed it while reaching for the defibrillator.)

The head-fakes like Knox "killing" Parkman aren't surprising (and, if anything, are frustrating, since Parkman is so useless that the show would be better off without him), and I can't decide which explanation for the Sylar flip is more boring: that, after pledging allegiance to Ma Petrelli, he immediately switched sides to Arthur (but couldn't bring himself to kill Peter); or that Ma's hold over him is somehow so great that he's going undercover.

Really, the only plus was that they took away Maya's powers. While I fully expect to see Peter get back his sponge abilities (and maybe all the duplicated powers along with them), I'm semi-hopeful that the writers will use this as an excuse to put Maya on a bus to go hang with Micah, Monica and other abandoned characters from seasons past.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "Dying of the Light": Sucks to be him

Spoilers for Monday night's "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I hit the novelty shop...

If nothing else, I have to give the "Heroes" writers some attaboys for having Papa Petrelli siphon away all of Peter's powers (including, I'm assuming, the ability to copy other people's). Not only does it (temporarily) solve the problem of how to deal with one character being more powerful than everyone else on the show combined (and in a better way than the usual "Let's just make Peter an imbecile" approach), but it places them in the hands of one of the better actors the show's ever featured in Robert Forster. As I wrote about last week, the "Heroes" writing is never really going to get much better than it is, but when you give material to guys like Forster, Adrian Pasdar and Jack Coleman, they have the superpower to make it seem better than it actually is.

(It's just a shame that Peter hadn't used his borrowed healing powers to live for several centuries the way Adam Monroe had, or else he also would've crumbled to dust and we would have been rid of him forever.)

As for the non-Forster portions of the episode? Eh. Not as good as last week, not as awful as some of the earlier parts of the season, and a perfectly acceptable time waster while doing other things. I even laughed a few times at things that were supposed to be funny, like Hiro repeatedly getting hit with the shovel right after looking at a painting of it happening. Things are finally beginning to happen in the present instead of the future, and even the really stupid stuff -- like the completely inconsistent nature of the power-dampening capabilities of Level 5 -- just makes me roll my eyes instead of angering me these days.

I guess what I'm saying is that I've exhausted all my "Heroes" hate. It's a profoundly stupid show, but there are just enough good things going on to keep my inner fanboy interested in watching. And if they can bring in any more "Wire" alums (or, for that matter, give Jamie Hector something to do), so much the better.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "Angels and Monsters": 'Round the way, they call me Bubbles

Spoilers for last night's "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I show you this great red fedora...

Maybe last week's screed allowed me to once and for all dispense with the notion that "Heroes" is ever going to be good again (if it ever really was), maybe the presence of Andre Royo from "The Wire" (in addition to the already-present Jamie Hector) put me in a more forgiving mood, or maybe "Angels and Monsters" was just better than the last few episodes. For whatever reason, I didn't hate it.

Sure, I could spend this entire post picking apart the many things that continue to be wrong with the show. Start with the way that The Company seems to be just as stupid in its own way as either Peter or Mohinder -- does Mrs. Petrelli do anything anymore other than apologize for previous Company decisions and promise to do better in the future? -- or how arbitrary and rushed these attempts are to have characters (notably Peter and Sylar) change sides so we can better explore the Heroes vs. Villains idea. The characters are still painfully thin, the dialogue arch, blah blah blah... you know the drill by now.

But "Angels and Monsters" did a lot of little things right in the middle of the usual annoyances. Royo's character had a unique (for this show, if not for comics) power that was presented in a visually cool way. Hiro actually used his powers wisely for the first time in forever (until he got knocked out, and even after I suspect he used his gifts in some super-clever way to make it only look like he skewered Ando). Instead of giving the big emotional moments to the actors who can't handle them (Milo and Hayden, notably), this week they were handed to the far more capable likes of Adrian Pasdar (Nathan chewing out his mother), Jack Coleman (HRG pleading with Stephen Canfield to make Sylar disappear) and Royo. They still weren't exceptionally well-written scenes, but good actors like these can elevate the material. (I'm hoping Robert Forster gets a lot of screen time now that he's on board; it seems like his character is some kind of astral projector.)

Hell, I even enjoyed a sequence involving Maya and/or Mohinder for the first time in what feels like forever. The scene with Maya discovering Mohinder's cocooned victims and busting out her black oil powers was tense and creepy in a way that "Heroes" tries but too often fails to achieve.

All is not forgiven, not remotely, but if they can give us more engaging moments within each episode, I can at least justify continuing to watch it while I do three other things, where if we had gotten another episode like the last few, I probably would have sworn it off.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "I Am Become Death": Atomic waffle man

Spoilers for last night's "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I pick the John Foster Dulles desk...

Okay, I think we're at the That's It For Me point, where I either stop watching "Heroes" or just stop writing about it.

"I Am Become Death" should, in theory, have been an episode that really got my blood pumping. We had another trip to an alternate future, a superpowered brawl at papa Sylar's house that culminated in a nuclear detonation, Peter inadvertently turning evil, Nathan making a rare trip through the air and Hiro and Ando digging up Adam Monroe. It was an hour that moved quickly and had a lot of action -- all of the things that we keep asking "Heroes" to do -- and yet all I could notice were the flaws.

Just like in the X-Men comics where they got the idea, trips to alternate futures yield diminishing returns the more often you do it. "Five Years Later" was one of the show's most exciting episodes ever, while "I Am Become Death" briefly had me wondering how all these role reversals came to be before deciding I just didn't care. After all, Future Peter already modified this future once, and our Peter's going to try to change it again, and the chances that we ever actually get to see the characters travel this path and wind up that way are as good as the chance that Masi Oka will ever get to permanently use his deeper Future Hiro voice.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Peter's gullibility and penchant for listening to whatever awful advice is offered by the person standing next to him now extends to himself. Future Peter doesn't give a good explanation for why Peter should need Sylar's "ability" (and good lord am I growing to hate the show's artificial insistence on using that word instead of "power") -- after all, Peter can already acquire any powers he wants without having to pop open skulls -- and Sylar offers a very convincing argument for why he might not want to have that hunger, but Peter goes and does it anyway.

Like Peter, I think you really have to be able to turn your brain off to enjoy "Heroes" these days, and unfortunately, I don't have that ability... er, power. (Gah!)

What did everybody else think? And if I'm still watching, do you want me to keep writing anti-"Heroes" rants, or should I stick to my usual "Life's too short to waste it writing about bad TV" philosophy? Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "One of Us, One of Them": Shoot the hostage

I was going to write another long rant about how "Heroes" has become incredibly dumb even by its own dopey standards -- especially involving any decision anyone makes about Sylar -- but then I decided I didn't have the energy, or the interest, to say it all again. I'm going to bed. Feel free to complain without me, and maybe I'll jump in on the comments tomorrow. Click here to read the full post

Heroes, "The Second Coming"/"The Butterfly Effect": The greatest American popsicle?

Spoilers for the "Heroes" season three premiere coming up just as soon as I quote Dan Fogelberg...

I made my feelings on "The Second Coming" half of this episode pretty clear in yesterday's column, and nothing in "The Butterfly Effect" changed that opinion. For every cool moment like Daphne's frozen speed lines or Mohinder casually doing a Spider-Man impression (two of the better FX sequences the show has ever done), there were a half-dozen moments that had me questioning the intelligence of the characters, the script, or both.

Since some people already started talking about the episodes in the original review post, I'm just going to make some random observations:

• Just when I thought Mohinder and Peter were so far ahead of the pack in the "Heroes" Stupid-Off that no other character could catch up, Hiro has to go and open the safe, when the only thing his dad asked him to do was to not open the thing. He doesn't want to be a sentinel? Fine: use your powers to bury the safe in an underground bunker no one else can access, then go on with your adventuring life. For someone who's read as many superhero comics as Hiro has (and I did enjoy the Batman/Catwoman/Robin banter with Ando), he seems to not grasp how this stuff works.

• Which isn't to say that Mohinder isn't still an idiot (albeit one in a comic book mad scientist vein, ala Curt Connors), or that Peter, past or present, isn't. I did love Ma Petrelli calling out Future Peter for never being as smart as he thought he was, vis a vis the butterfly effect. But at the same time, I don't see how this time travel escapade led to Claire being assaulted and Sylar stealing (or, rather, duplicating) her powers. Yes, Future Peter told her not to come to Odessa, but if he hadn't traveled back in time and shot Nathan in the first place, she would have had no reason to go there, blah blah blah.

• I had forgotten how stilted Zachary Quinto's attempt to be creepy could be sometimes. We reached the point of diminishing returns with Sylar a while back, and though giving him Claire's powers finally takes away the "Why doesn't someone just kill him?" problem that ran through parts of the first two seasons, it also means we're going to be stuck with him for the run of the show.

• Fair is fair: I'm at least vaguely intrigued by the Niki/Tracy thing, and about whether Linderman is a ghost, an angel or just a figment of Nathan's imagination. Vaguely.

• Really? They hired William Katt (aka The Greatest American Hero, aka the man with the greatest theme song of all time, aka the man whose theme song led to the greatest outgoing answering machine message of all time) so he could pop up twice in a parking garage and get frozen to death?

• Is it me, or did Future Claire's line about always loving Future Peter sound like it was in a non-uncle way?

• Where's my Bubbles at? Jamie Hector (aka Marlo from the greatest drama ever) popped up briefly as one of the escaped supervillains, but after I saw fellow "Wire" alum Andre Royo's name in the guest credits for the second hour, I kept on waiting and waiting and waiting, and... nothing.

• Daphne's apartment lived up to Roger Ebert's rule that every fictional building in Paris must have a view of the Eiffel Tower.

• I'm glad Adrian Pasdar, one of the few genuinely strong actors in the cast, is getting a lot to do this year after being sidelined last year, but there didn't seem to be an emotional throughline between Holy Nathan of the first hour and the much more normal Nathan (who could crack a joke about knowing Niki/Tracy "Biblically") in the second.

• Fair is fair, part two: Elle tossing HRG a gun to go after Sylar was also a nice moment. But how are people getting back and forth to Claire's house in California from either New York (Sylar) or Texas (HRG) so quickly? Are we supposed to assume the scenes aren't all taking place in chronological order (especially when you factor in things like Mohinder randomly putting Molly on a plane to some new life outside the country), or just that the writers are lazy?

• Ando with powers? Boo! Ando's whole role is to be the normal guy, the one who brings real world logic to superhero problems -- or, on occasion, vice versa, like his suggestion that Future Ando was a robot or shapeshifter. I only hope that's true.

• Is this them writing out Elle, or will she now get a storyline about the struggles of being a super trying to live in the real world? They rarely used Kristen Bell well last season, but she's still one of that handful of good actors on the show, and I'd hate to see that number diminish.

• Speaking of "Veronica Mars" alums, is Francis Capra now going to be reduced to a "Quantum Leap" reflection for the rest of this storyline?

• Unlike Papa Nakamura, they bothered to finally reveal Ma Petrelli's power while she's still alive. But I don't like the "Sylar, I am your mother" twist at all.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Sepinwall on TV: 'Heroes' season 3 review

In today's final column, I review the first half of the two-hour "Heroes" season three premiere:

The first hour of "Heroes" season three is more exciting than most of the 11 hours of "Heroes" season two combined. Considering that "Heroes" had one of the worst sophmore slumps of all time, though, that's not a high compliment. "Heroes" may be better this year than it was last year, but it's still a very dumb show that just wants you to think it's smart.

Perhaps the second hour (which NBC said they didn't send out for review because Kring wanted to keep it "sacred" for the fans) will be better, but so long as Mohinder and Maya and a number of other people and things are around, I doubt it. "Heroes" is what it is -- just interesting enough to make me watch so I can complain about it, I guess.

(Speaking of which, since I still need to watch that second hour, please wait until after I've done a spoiler post -- likely sometime tomorrow -- before commenting specifically on the episode. And that includes anyone who happened to be there for the Comic-Con screening.) Click here to read the full post

Heroes: A fate worse than death?

Spoilers for the "Heroes" "volume finale" (or season finale, or pre-strike finale, or whatever you want to call it) coming up just as soon as I figure out why one of my heating vents has a flashing red light behind it...

To quote the great George Costanza, that's it for me!

Probably.

My willpower is about as weak as Elle's ambush strategy (hint: calling out your target's name before you throw the first lightning zap is a very bad idea), so I have a feeling I'll wind up tuning into "Heroes" volume 3, whenever it debuts, but I won't be happy with myself for doing it.

You tune into a show like "Heroes" -- a heavily-serialized, heavily-mythologized, heavily-pretentious drama -- for the payoffs, and we're now 0-for-2 on that score. Season one built up to Peter hitting Sylar with a parking meter while everyone else stood around and watched. The close to "Generations" wasn't quite as lame -- more characters got more things to do, and at least one story thread (Hiro vs. Kensei) came to something of an interesting conclusion -- but it still wasn't remotely exciting enough to justify the time I put into this mess of a half-season.

There have been interesting ideas in these 11 episodes, but the plotting and pacing has been so haphazard that none of them came close to realizing their potential. Why devote all that time to Monica's mimicking powers and then structure the climax to her storyline in such a way that prevents her from using them? Why waste all that time on Peter and the lassie from Cork and not even address what happened to her after Peter nuked the virus? Why keep Niki and Nathan on the sidelines for virtually the entire arc and then make their deaths the big stunners? (It's almost as if Kring couldn't bring himself to kill off two major characters until he had made them as irrelevant as Simone or Alejandro.)

Nathan was one of the few characters who rarely seemed paper thin (and I think that's as much a credit to Adrian Pasdar as it is to anything in the scripts), and so I guess I'll miss him (but no moreso than when he would be absent for long stretches this year). But the character's death -- I'm guessing at the hands of HRG, though the silhouette of the assassin could have been anybody -- is going to make it easier for me to cut the cord with "Heroes" (assuming I have the intestinal fortitude to do so). When Pasdar, or Jack Coleman, or Kristen Bell, or Masi Oka or a few of the guest stars is on screen, I can fool myself into thinking that "Heroes" is something deeper and better-constructed than it actually is. The fewer actors there are like that, the harder that illusion is to create.

I'd like to give Kring and company a mulligan, based on the difficulty of getting these episodes done before the strike. For all I know, there may have been a much more elaborate plan for "Generations" and its denouement that got ruined in the rush to provide any kind of closure at all. But there was no such rush involved with season one, and I'm inclined to think that no matter how much planning time was involved, "Generations" would have come to an underwhelming end.

Some specific thoughts on "Powerless":

-Given that Nathan can fly but isn't super-strong, and that Parkman ain't the lightest bowling ball in the alley, I was wondering how they would deal with them having to fly together to Odessa; the "let's never speak of this again" approach was genuinely funny. (Also funny, for tradition's sake: "Flying man!")

-I was really hoping that Monroe was going to try to break open the vial, only to discover that Hiro had, in the middle of their conversation, stopped time and taken it out of his hand. Ah, well; would've robbed us of a non-suspenseful act-out with the finally non-gullible Peter running for the vault.

-Speaking of things I was hoping for but didn't get: that Sylar would regain his ability to steal other people's powers but not the powers he had already stolen. Seemed a more interesting journey to take the character on -- plus deals with the usual problem of him being too much for anybody but Peter to handle (preferably with parking meter in hand).

-One reason to be very glad that "Generations" is over: we'll never again have to hear Ma Petrelli or anyone else utter that nebulous "We thought we were going to save the world" line again. And I still have no clearer an idea of what The Company is all about than I did at the start of the arc.

-Anyone actually going to miss Niki? Other than guys who think Ali Larter's hot?

-What purpose does Maya serve going forward? Or is she there to compensate for the loss of Larter with the horndog demographic?

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes: All-day suckers

Spoilers for "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I teach my daughter never to talk to strangers...

Oh, "Heroes," you had me, and then you lost me. After last week's unreservedly strong outing, we get an episode that had me counting the minutes till "Journeyman" came on. (Blog post on that to follow later today after I finish watching it; sacked out halfway through.)

If the theme of last week's episode was fathers and children, this week's theme was "with great power comes great gullibility." The plots all moved forward, but all depended on characters -- primarily Maya, Peter and Mohinder -- being foolish enough to put their trust in the bad guys, all while ignoring the protests of characters they should trust more.

Obviously, we have more information than the characters in the show do -- and, in fairness, it's still not completely clear what Company Bob's intentions are (though if he's made a face turn, then it's HRG who looks the fool) -- but the entire episode, and much of this season, falls under Ebert's Idiot Plot rule, where the only way the story works is if as many characters as possible act like idiots. I gravitate towards stories about smart people, which is one of the main reasons why HRG and Nathan (remember him?) are among my favorite characters on this show. Mohinder and Peter have always shown themselves to be vulnerable to whatever svegnali crosses their path, and it annoys the snot out of me.

As Peter's powers expanded last year, we talked a lot about how the writers would need to be careful or else he would render all the other characters useless; turns out their solution is to once again make him a moron. So maybe he doesn't want to listen when the Joanna Cassidy character accuses Monroe of being the one trying to release the virus, but when Monroe unties her binds entirely as an excuse to kill her when they could have easily left her tied up and unharmed, that should have been a big flashing danger sign.

(Hiro doesn't come off looking so smart, either, by giving vengeance as his reason for wanting to fight Kensei/Monroe; given that they did have several marvelous team-ups in the past, and that the Cassidy had already accused Monroe of wanting to release the virus, even Peter might have been willing to listen had Hiro played that card. Probably not, though. This is Peter Petrelli we're talking about.)

I could talk in more detail about the rest of the episode -- about how the pay-off to the Monica/Micah story next week better be pretty sweet to justify her not kicking some gangbanger butt upon being discovered, how I really like the work Kristen Bell is doing and wish we were getting a lot more of her, how Mohinder and Parkman must employ the least reliable babysitter in New York -- but I just want to wash the taste of idiocy out of my mouth after that one and get back to "Journeyman," or something else I might genuinely enjoy. Blurgh.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes: Fathers day

Spoilers for "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I take a foot bath...

Well, alright. First episode this fall that I can call good not just by the drastically lowered standards of season two, but on its own. There are some things here and there that could be tweaked, but that was a pretty solid hour of television.

"Cautionary Tales" was helped by both its narrow focus and who it focused on. Usually, episodes try to pack in so many stories and characters that none of them has the time to build momentum and make an impact, and it's especially annoying when we jump away from a good story to the likes of the black oil twins or Peter hanging with Irish stereotypes.

Only three stories here that, for the most part, stuck to the more interesting characters: HRG, Hiro and, in a surprise to me (not that they used him, but that I found him interesting), Parkman. We got a straightforward thriller plot with the HRG/Bob double-kidnapping, a sentimental farewell with Hiro and Papa Nakamura, and some mystery thrown in with a corruption of the hero tale with Parkman and Ma Petrelli.

And, in a "Heroes" rarity, all the stories were thematically tied together as tales of parent-child legacies. Hiro and Kaito, in the moments before Kaito's death, finally recognize what they mean to each other. HRG and Bob, go to war over having made very different choices with their superpowered daughters. And Parkman gets too drunk with his expanded powers to realize he's slipping down the slope towards becoming the father he hated so much. (And not that I ever want to see Mrs. Parkman again, but the season already began with a Matt/Nightmare Man parallel, as he walked out on his wife and her child -- albeit a kid that wasn't his.)

The episode even managed to use West, arguably the most annoying addition of the season, in an effective way, by turning him into HRG's latest superpowered sidekick (after Invisible Claude and then The Haitian). West practically flew more in this one episode than Nathan did all of last season, and he was too busy pulling of high-speed rescues and abductions to creep me out like he so often does. (Though his behavior in this episode suggests that we weren't supposed to find him so disturbing in earlier episodes, which suggests poor acting and/or writing back then.)

Even with only three stories, some shortcuts still had to be taken. Parkman's slide into mind-control junkie is a rare case of a "Heroes" storyline that should have been stretched over more episodes (not that I think we're done with it, but he slid awfully quick here). I think Hiro and Kaito's journey could have easily filled up a whole episode without getting dull -- say, with Hiro taking his father on an extended This Is Your Life journey before finally stopping at his mother's funeral -- and, like others, I'm annoyed that, once again, Kaito is dead without us having any idea what his powers were. But damn if the funeral scene didn't get to me, anyway. Hiro's actions have always been driven by a childish love of comic books and legends, and he finally seemed to become a man (even moreso than when he "killed" Sylar) in that moment when he realized he was thinking exactly like his younger self. I don't want to lose the optimistic enthusiasm Masi Oka brings to the character, but I also don't like characters (even the usually paper-thin ones on this show) who remain stagnant, so I'm curious and hopeful about seeing a slightly more mature Hiro down the road.

Meanwhile, the writers found a way to, once again, make one of Isaac's paintings come true while dodging the repercussions of it. (See also the painting of Claire's homecoming, where Claire and Peter looked dead but got better.) I couldn't imagine them being dumb enough to kill off HRG -- for all the series' other missteps, Kring and company are smart enough to kill off the more disposable characters like Simone and D.L -- and we had just seen the amazing curative powers of Monroe's blood last week, so it wasn't a huge shock when HRG came back from the dead. But it was also a fun little callback to Claire waking up on the autopsy table at the end of the series' third episode. (One question: just how potent is that blood? Will HRG still need his trademark glasses? Are he or Nathan going to be missing some childhood scars?)

Two episodes to go in this arc -- and possibly in this season, depending on how the strike goes -- and it feels like there are even more loose ends to tie off here than there were with two episodes to go at the end of last season. Can they really pull it off, or are we in for another round of Parking Meter Beatdown Theater?

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Heroes: Easy, sparky

"Heroes" spoilers coming up just as soon as I ask Company Bob why his super jail has no surveillance system...

Somebody want to tell me how in any way this season was enhanced by holding this for episode eight? Other than the Adam Monroe/Takezo Kensei reveal, which could been worked around, and the cliffhanger at the end of the season premiere with shirtless, amnesiac Peter in a can where the iPods should have been (not that that was ever explained; not that I care, either), they could have aired this thing sequentially without damaging what was to follow.

If anything, making "Four Months Ago" the premiere might have made people feel more favorably disposed towards this season, since A)It provided answers instead of jerking people around, B)It did a better job of answering the "Why didn't Peter just fly away on his own?" question from the finale than the finale itself did, and C)It would have actually added some weight to the handful of Niki scenes we've had this year, where until now I just assumed D.L. had died from the Linderman gut shot wound.

Oh, wait, I thought of one reason Kring might have wanted to hold this one for so long: becase if we knew from the start why Peter was in Cork with no shirt and no memory, that storyline would have been even more blatantly pointless than it was when we joined it in media res.

I don't want to be too hard on "Four Months Ago," as there were some good moments in it: Elle's confession to Peter gave Kristen Bell a chance to do more than the sexy pout; corny as the D.L. firefighter story was, it gave a very marginalized character a moment in the sun before an ignoble death; and naive as Peter is (I hear he and Mohinder once had a race to see who could check first to see if his picture was in the dictionary under "gullible"), David Anders at least made Adam Monroe a plausibly charismatic Svengali.

But I still think it would have played much better eight weeks ago than now. As an added bonus, if we had begun the season with Maya and Alejandro's origin story, we might have been spared week upon week of endless variations of the "Don't make Maya angry / You won't like her when she's angry / Unless her brother's around" song. Coming this late into the season, the origin scenes felt beyond redundant.

If it wasn't for Kring's point-by-point mea culpa for every one of this season's faults, I'd be feeling a lot harsher towards this episode and this season. But I'll try to think positive and hope that, while Kring's walking the picket, he's thinking up a much better idea for Volume 3, whenever it might actually get made.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post