Fixing Heroes Season Two (With Help from Tim Kring, the Show’s Creator)

Writer’s Note: See this post for an update on the sad state of Heroes.

___

I spend an awful lot of time on this site biting more eyes than I can chew. This is not going to change anytime soon. Every once in awhile, however, something happens that makes the eyebiter…smile.

Like taking responsibility for your crap, something that Heroes creator Tim Kring seems to be doing.

My thoughts on this:

1. It’s a big step just to admit that your show sucks, even if you make this admission gently and/or with tact. Most actor/directors/entertainment types, if they do this, do it well after the fact, when the show is over or the movie has made its run. Those who don’t wait sometimes lose their jobs, so I don’t necessarily blame them for their silence. Admittedly, it’s probably easier to admit that your show sucks when you’re the creator (and when you’re on strike) but, hey, at the very least, Tim Kring’s eyes are safe for now. If I had enjoyed Season One of Heroes a little more than I did (I liked it, and I got a little sucked in, but I wasn’t shocked to see Season Two take a turn into Tanktown) I would have already chomped those ojos with such ferocity that he could have channeled Claire Bennet till he was Hank McCoy blue in the face and it wouldn’t have helped him.
2. He basically hits on almost all of the major things that are wrong with Season Two. This includes: Not Tom Welling and Claire’s romance, Hiro’s way long unending infinite overstay in Japan (that goes on forever), the stinky new characters, and a lack of foreseeable connections between new story lines (made out of crap romances and stinky new characters) and the overall plot (whatever that is).

What else is wrong with Season Two?

1. Not enough Peter Petrelli. As I said, I enjoyed Season One. There were many parts that I found less-than-enjoyable, but few of these had to do with Peter. I probably am not alone in saying this: the coolest parts of Heroes are when Peter (whose power is the ability to permanently absorb the powers of others when he is in their immediate vicinity) starts flashing skill and/or kicking ass. There is not nearly enough Peter Petrelli ass-kicking going on! What are you waiting for, Kring? Did you spend a whole season setting this guy up to become an ass-kicker, only to completely under-utilize him in the next season? While we are at it, if you are going to keep Sylar around, give the man his freaking abilities back. Maybe you fellas decided not to do this because it seems too obvious a choice, or maybe it’s not in your budget, but please think about what a mano-a-mano between Peter and a worthy opponent would be like – especially if it’s a climactic event coming at the end of a much improved overall story line. Which brings me to another point…
2. The overall story line sucks. “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World” was cute. More importantly, it was clear. It was pulled off. It worked. The world was facing a nuclear blast and the Heroes stepped in and the world was saved. After this, I for one would have been all right with a smaller act of heroism. Instead, Heroes Season Two went straight to the next “logical” place after nuclear winter…epidemic super virus. If Season Three ever happens, and if it features an alien attack against Earth, I’m going to: kill Sylar, take his taking-power, kill Hiro, take his time travel power, travel into the future, copy Sylar’s taking-power, give it to the children of everyone involved in the making of Heroes, make those children kill Claire’s closest living relatives, make them eat the brains of Claire’s closet living relatives (or whatever he does!), and then I’m going to strap the children down to a table and bite their eyes over and over again until the end of time. Then I’ll use Hiro’s power to go back in time and do it all over again.
3. Little story lines suck. I bite Maya’s Hersey-syrup dripping eyes. Also, maybe this has been the plan all season, but if it is: do it already. Kill off Ali Larter. I don’t care what it takes. Her story line has almost completely sucked from the beginning. If you don’t want to kill her kid, have him sucked into a video game. An old school video game, like Pacman. That way, when he eats the big pieces of Kix cereal on the screen, and eats the ghosts when they become vulnerable, they will turn into eyes. You can guess what would happen next.
4. Cut back on the mf’ing ambiguity. I cannot tell you how many times, over the course of Season Two, girlfriend of ibiteryoureyes has turned to me and said “I don’t understand why that just happened,” or “what’s that person’s power,” or “what are they doing.” After a while, I just started answering, “they (the writers) don’t know.” Because they either don’t, or they think that leaving things hanging in the air bare-ass naked is the same as suspense.
5. Rip off the X-Men some more. For the first few episodes of Season One, the X-Men ripoffs bothered me. I got over it. After all, there’s no copyright on cellular regeneration. But Heroes went from ripping off the X-Men while adding some good old regular modern situational TV drama to…mostly providing just plain regular modern situational TV drama. I suppose that the addition of new characters was supposed to keep the comic book part of the equation going – but it didn’t. This relates to my Peter Petrelli point. If your “fresh spin” is going to be contextualizing the lives of comic book heroes in the real world and in the present day, that’s fine. Again, this worked in Season One. In Season Two, however, the use and/or the discovery of superpowers are old news. I don’t want to watch Peter re-discovering his powers one-by-one over the course of many episodes when I just spent a whole season waiting for him to get those powers. You need to do something else to excite us. Like getting some of these people working together to use their powers (something they supposedly learned how to do in Season One), or showing people using their powers for more than three seconds. If it’s a budget thing, or a time thing, I guess that’s different. But it doesn’t really matter. Something has to be done, and jump cutting in on Matt Parkman while he holds his breath is only going to work for so long (it’s not working anymore).
6. Decide what you want to do with The Company. I know I’m supposed to be ambivalent on where The Company falls on the old good/bad line. Congrats. I’m ambivalent. I also rollmyeyes almost every time Bob opens his mouth.
7. Play the theme song more often. A weeee-uuuu eeee-uuu eeee uuu!

You are the weakest link. Goodbye.