Demi’s Blog #3: How To Stop An Exploding Show

I have to be completely honest with you all. While presenting some fairly decent moments, overall this week’s episode “One of us, One of them” was not overly impressive. It has come to my attention that there’s a crisis in the Heroes Universe right now. The problem is a lack of intelligent storytelling. Is there a way to correct this tangled mess known as Heroes? I’m not sure, but here’s five things that must be done in “Villains” in order for me to watch Volume Four…

1. Kill off a main character.

I can’t stress enough the importance of establishing an environment on a television show where you feel as if your main characters are vulnerable. It’s bad enough that there are four characters that can potentially live forever (Peter, Sylar, Claire, and Adam), but there’s also an element of which blood produced by these powers can bring people back.

The following is a list of characters that have “died” in some way and have come back to the show in some form.

• Claire (who knows how many times)
• Peter (glass in the brain)
• Nathan (TWICE)
• Linderman (Came back as ghost?)
• Niki Sanders (Okay..so she died…but apparently there are multiple “clones” oh yay!)
• Maya (Seriously? Tease us by killing her and then bring her back to life?)
• HRG/Noah Bennett (Shot straight through the eye/brain and is brought back to life).

Seriously. Grow some balls and kill of a main character. Don’t bring them back. In both season one and two’s finale, Nathan “died”. Didn’t last for long because in both the season two and three premieres, he was brought back to life.

I’m starting to feel like there are no consequences in the show and that the actors hired are more important than the characters on the show. I’m hoping it’s because of network contracts involving the actors (they get paid whether they appear on the show or not) and there’s tremendous pressure for NBC to get their money’s worth, but that’s no excuse.

Kill off somebody significant and do it quick. Better yet, kill Claire. She’s the most “invulnerable”, so have her die to cause panic in the world of Heroes. There’s too large a cast to get anything personal going on with the show. Fix it.

2. Limit the powers of Peter and Sylar.
They’ve literally created monsters. There needs to be limits. The only thing right now that will satisfy Heroes fans is for those two to battle it out. But since they can now both heal themselves, such a battle is nearly pointless. Not to mention any other “evolved human” is pretty much negated when there are two characters out there that can take their powers. Peter doesn’t even have to massage your brain to do it.

Of course, the Haitian is immune if he wants to be, since they can’t use their “power-taking powers” against him if he’s conscious. He seems to be the only limit, and its an extreme one. Peter “exploding” due to having too many abilities at the end of Season One was clever, but where is that limitation now?

3. Enough with the paintings. If you are going to use the future in your storyline, stay there. We’ve seen the storyline of Season 3 played out before. Don’t remember? Go back and watch the first two seasons.

Season One: Psychic Artist paints the future, depicting horrifying events yet to happen (The bomb, the cheerleader). Characters run around trying to figure out either how to avoid said future or how to make it happen (Trying to save Claire, making sure Nathan becomes president). A visit to the future reveals how everything happens (seeing the aftermath of the bomb and what the bomb was). People in the “present” must rally in the last second to stop it from happening (everybody joins forces to “stop” Sylar and Nathan flies Peter into the sky).

Season Two: More paintings found from dead psychic artist depicting even more events that have yet to happen (Set of 8, HRG dying, etc). Characters run around trying to figure out either how to avoid said future or how to make it happen (HRG grows paranoid, Peter paints future to find Canada). A visit to the future reveals how everything happens (Peter goes to the future and finds that a virus wipes out most of the population). People in the “present” must rally in the last second to stop it from happening (Eventually the virus is stopped).

Season 3: A new psychic painter is revealed (This one apparently is more based around Matt Parkman’s life). Characters run around trying to figure out how to avoid said future (Parkman wants to change his future, Hiro needs to get the formula). A visit to the future reveals how everything happens (Ando “betrays” Hiro and the Earth explodes).

If you have to involve the future, then why not just stay there?

Don’t do some stupid “going back to the past” or “visiting the future for a couple minutes brb” vacation spot, delve into the future for a couple of episodes. Show the viewers how dire the problems are and why they MUST be stopped. Every episode that has featured a world in the future has been phenomenally more interesting that the present. Why? Because people aren’t afraid to let things go to hell in the future.

4. Drop the “choose your side” promotional BS. Make the villains evil, and the heroes good.

As engaging as it sounds, viewers don’t need to be continually exposed to a “who’s really good and who’s really bad” complex. When you have no clear lines between who is good or bad, we have nobody to root for. Some people need to be good. Some people have to be bad. Quit trying to tease us with crappy storylines that sound good in thirty second promos because the excitement only lasts that long. Volume Three is called “Villains” but the show is called “Heroes”. Neither of which says to me, “Gray Area”. This season should be about Heroes vs. Villains, not about good turning evil or vise versa. Get a team on both sides together and let the powers fly.

5. Despite the failure of Season Two, don’t give up on developing a story.

“Heroes” is meant to be an Action-Drama. It’s only an Action-Drama when it includes both action and drama. Season One had a perfect balance. Season Two was nothing but slow moving “drama”. Now, it looks as though “Villains” will be nothing but action. Instead of taking the time to tell a good story, Kring and his writers have taken the unfortunate route of throwing everything in your face at once and ignoring simple acts of story-telling. Looking back at the second season compared to the story presented in the first three epiosdes of “Villains”, I’m starting to miss the stories dealing with the founders of The Company.

Can I have some substance with my special effects please? You can put lipstick on a pig, but its still a pig. Oh wait, didn’t Obama get in trouble for that one? Oh well, you get my point.

Slow things down, get in a good pace. The premiere was a clusterbomb of tangled storylines that end up needing “fixed” at the start. How about we see some continuation of the storylines from past seasons? What happened to Caitlin of Ireland? How about Peter and Nathan’s dad (I don’t care about Sylar’s father)? Some more origin stories would be nice.

Tim Kring said this regarding Season Two: “”We assumed the audience wanted season 1 — a buildup of intrigue about these characters and the discovery of their powers. We taught [them] to expect a certain kind of storytelling. They wanted adrenaline. We made a mistake.”

Hmm…that explains it. We want Mission Impossible 3 instead of Star Wars.

WRONG.