“Heroes”- The Kindness of Strangers
Finally, the show is getting kinda good again. Not great, mind you, but pretty solid. It’s almost as if they figured out what was bad about the first three episodes, and in the span of a week, did what they could to rectify those issues. They pared down the number of major plots to a manageable four-ish (three of the four had a few side-scenes with other characters) stories. They moved some things ahead a bit, even if we don’t know where it’s all headed. More after the jump…
Claire officially has a boyfriend now, although her facebook page would probably list her status as “it’s complicated”. She’s gonna have to keep him secret and pretend she’s cheerleading. Here’s where it gets me though: if she pretends she’s off cheerleading, she’s gonna have to go back to actually being a cheerleader in order to keep the ruse going. How that buys her free(fall) time with the still-stupidly-named West is beyond me. Hopefully, now that they’re together we won’t have to watch the actual courtship happening anymore, like tonight’s terrible clunker of a line, “I know you can heal, but I don’t want to see you hurt”. So I’m definitely glad we’ve moved on with that stuff. I can foresee perilous things coming from this though. After all, he managed to convince her to jump off the Hollywood sign; I wonder what else he could convince her to trust him about. He could still totally have ties to the company or at least a tracking device or people spying on him or something. Here’s to hoping that this all has a point to it, besides giving Claire the plot equivalent of busywork.
Speaking of plots that didn’t seem to be going anywhere but through the Mexican desert, the Hondurans story finally has a purpose. Where Sylar came from or why he was lying there on the ground don’t really matter that much to me, because now there’s some actual conflict in the story. That it’s unspoken tension that the potential victims are in makes it all the more suspenseful, and I couldn’t be happier to finally be feeling more than indifferent about their story. I get that the first few episodes were all to set this up with them, get us to feel sympathetic to their plight/flight to America. I was just bored with it though, because it wasn’t going anywhere. Like I said before, it’s almost like the creators knew that this story wasn’t working, and in the past week decided to abandon the whole “Sylar in the middle of the jungle eating Candace’s brain” story, and just throw him into this one to see where he would take it; a metaphorical defibrillator. And it worked. I have a wholly renewed interest in this story now. One little detail that might’ve been too much, though: why was there a ticking noise before Sylar clubbed that guy in the head? Isn’t the ticking usually reserved for people with powers, whose brains he’s going to eat? And wasn’t the ticking a part of his powers, which he supposedly lost?
The Parkman/Nathan/Molly story was good, and now Parkman has a few real motivations to go after this guy ASAP, and a serious lead. We saw the picture of the nine, so we know who seven of them are: The Petrellis, Linderman, Nakamura, BOB, the guy who died last season, and PaPaParkman. There was a woman in the bottom corner who may or may not be Uhura, and another woman next to Parkman’s dad. Nathan shaved his beard off rather abruptly, perhaps for fear of teachers at his sons’ school thinking he was a weird homeless pedophile and calling Chris Hansen. Again, forward motion with some real stakes finally being added.
Meanwhile, down in post-Katrina (I guess it’s still called that, right?) Louisiana, Micah is living with some new people, and while I still don’t like him (why they give the worst actor on the show a line like “I wish I could fix your dreams” is beyond me), or the younger cousin really, I gotta say, great debut for the new girl. She’s got a completely original power and is pretty much capable of doing anything… as long as she makes like Rick and watches 40 or so hours of TV a week. Grandma was barely there, but I’m sure she’ll get more screentime as things go on, and all will be well. There’s hope yet. Bonus props for giving some love to Rey Mysterio and the 619! Not sure where they can really go with this one, either, but they’ve got me intrigued.
The best move of the night, though, was definitely to pare down the amount of story dispersion they were accustomed to dishing out the first three weeks. I’m glad I had a week off from Hiro’s story in Japan, and Peter in Ireland, because it seemed like their little three-week arcs had both come to a stopping point anyway. There was no momentum lost from where their stories left off at the end of the previous episode (one of LOSTs flaws is that it tends to build to a cliffhanger, only to lose that momentum by switching to a different character/story the following week), and withholding the characters not only makes us long to see what they’re up to next week, but gives much more time to actually focus on giving the other stories full dramatic arcs. We can only hope that this trend lasts a few more weeks.
October 16th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
I am Claire the Cheerleader’s biggest fan, but I hate that “West” fellow. Dude can’t act, and character bugs the crap out of me.
And what’s up with the horrible fake flying effects from last week and this week? I know NBC is broke but come on- the NBC News graphics department could do better than that Grease-style car flying.