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“If I hear ’save the cheerleader’ one more time I’m gonna execute every last one of you m@therf#ckers.”

What the hell was that?

A few months ago Wired magazine did a profile of Heroes creator Tim Kring, and it kind of confirmed what I had long suspected: Kring is the weakest link in the Heroes food chain. He seems uninterested in the material he produced and instead hands off most of the heavy lifting to a staff of incredibly talented comic book writers. When I saw that last night’s season finale was written by Kring, I new we were screwed. More on that after the break…

If Heroes answered any question last night it was the following: what’s more fulfilling on television, a quick pay-off or a slow burn? It seemed the big selling point for Heroes was that the show was going to wrap up the major plot lines every season — unlike Lost. Now that the season is over and we’ve discovered that the big climax was about as riveting as a region theater production of “me buying slacks at the Gap” I can say with certainty that I prefer no answers to all the answers.

This, after all, is television. It’s a medium designed to tell stories over years, not hours. If I wanted resolution, I’d go see a movie, but that’s not the kind of entertainment I’m looking for — I want to see characters slowly develop and adapt to their changing surroundings, and then right before everyone gets sick of seeing these characters I want them to quickly and painlessly complete whatever it was they had been doing all these years and quickly disappear into the history of popular culture. I say this, because its hard enough to create an interesting season finale, let alone creating a memorable series finale. Heroes seems to want to create series finales every year.

I think we can all agree that by the time Lost ends its run on television it will be almost impossible deliver a last episode that can successfully shock and awe its remaining viewers. But at least we’ll know the journey was fun (well, for some).

Or maybe the problem with Monday’s Heroes wasn’t even the notion of near-instant gratification on a macro level so much as creating an episode completely void of drama. For all the hand-wringing and trials and tribulations our characters went through as they approached a fate all of them knew was coming, it sure didn’t take much to right the ship.

Hiro, our beloved fanboy, got a running start before sticking that sword through a curiously defenseless Sylar. And even if we can believe a character as powerful as Sylar would just allow this to happen, the episode did a horrible job of giving that moment the dramatic release for which we were all hoping. That was suppose to be THE moment of the series. It was the character’s entire purpose on the show and after it happened there wasn’t a so much of a “Hooray, he saved the day!” feeling as a “So should we go out for Thai or Italian now?”

And then there was the big Sylar/Peter stand-off. They were the two most powerful characters, each with dozens of acquired abilities, and both of them just kind of stood there. Sylar used telekinesis, and Peter just kind of stewed as his body began to slowly go nuclear. Why not fly away or turn invisible or travel through time? Why not get a lasso and a horse and go cattle wrangling? Anything but just sitting there. That had to be one of the most anticlimactic battles since “Armor Hammer” put a quick end to “Derelict” on the second season of Battle Bots.

Even the “teaser” for next season, where Hiro ends up in fifteenth century Japan, seemed like a dry hand-job. I mean, he can travel through time, it doesn’t matter where he ends up as he’s a quick crinkled face away from being somewhere else (had they really wanted to surprise us, he would have ended up in front of a real Tyranosaurus just like in the painting earlier in the season — that would have at least gotten them a few points in my book).

Now the season is over and our cast seems greatly depleted. Maybe Peter, but definitely Nathan, has been scattered across the ionosphere. Parkman has four bullets in his chest. D.L. has a bullet in his gut. Linderman has a fist-sized hole in the back of his head. Sylar, however, did appear to get free. Unfortunately, Mohinder and Mikah are still alive and well.

None of this really matters for me, as I’m not going to be watching again next season. The formula is too flawed and the number of cool, interesting characters is dwarfed by the number of whiny, annoying ones. Though most importantly, it seems that the budget for the show is such that there will always be the chance of seeing something truly remarkable (and utterly awesome) happen, but that those moments are all kinetic energy — they have the potential, but never produce. The show was always up and down for me since the beginning, but now I regret not taking my own advice by having stopped watching the show right after the “future” episode.

Oh well, certainly something else will come down the pipe this fall that can replace it… maybe something with bionic legs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Heroes, NBC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.