I love Heroes. I really do. All of it, for better and for worse. I have great affection for that world with its many stories and the characters that populated it, even if its quality decreased (or, if we want to be generous, fluctuated) as time went by and most of the potential it had went to waste.

Today marks the tenth anniversary of Heroes going off the air. So, of course, instead of writing a celebratory piece that highlights all the good (or even great) things about it, like its finest moments, the impact it had on television at the time, its phenomenal, lighting-in-a-bottle kind of success, or the careers it launched, I’m gonna highlight all the ways it went wrong.

I know, I know. We’ve been down this road too many times before. Thing is, there are reasons our beloved Heroes went off the air ten years ago (well, the main reason was low viewership even if there was still an audience for it, as it was the most pirated TV series of that year, but still…), and there is absolutely nothing wrong with good-faith, constructive criticism of something that you love. I don’t see a more fitting occasion than this one for me to revisit everything wrong with Heroes. So, let’s go:

⦁ Making Sylar the series-long antagonist

Unpopular opinion here. I love Zachary Quinto’s portrayal of Sylar as much as the next person, but it’s time to admit that his gimmick and overrall characterization just wasn’t strong enough to go on for more than one season.

Think about it. Sylar’s entire deal is that he wants to matter, and to do so he decides he wants to be the most special amongst all the other special people. That’s his only purpose in life. So he hunts people down to kill them and steal their abilities. That was pretty effective and scary in season one when he was some sort of bogeyman figure that scared the shit out of everyone. Even then, though, when it came to bigger picture plans, he just kind of… fell into them. Happy accidents. Just like he fell into the nuclear man plan. He was never really the brains behind operantions of the like because he didn’t care. He was a hunter, not a schemer.

Keeping Sylar as the series-long antagonist would’ve made sense if he were the main character, running around killing a different person each episode a la Dexter, if the story simply focused on him and the few characters he seemed to be oddly fixated on (Claire, Peter), or if they expanded in a more consistent manner on his desire to be someone and how it related to his powers. Maybe it could’ve worked, too, if his presence in the overrall narrative had been smaller. Just have him be the monster the primary characters will never escape, the shadow that will always follow them. But hey, the character and actor were popular, so they kept him around, always front and center.

Really, the long-term antagonist should’ve been either Linderman or Adam. They had the wits, the ambition, the connections to the other characters and most importantly, the drive and desire to cook up plans that a long-term antagonist should have.

⦁ The “comeback” season started with the weakest volume and villain Heroes ever had

Arthur Petrelli, you suck.

Alright, that wasn’t the best start. Let’s take it from the top. After the mixed reception to the second season due to its slow pacing and strong thematic similarity to season one,

the powers that be behind the series decided season three was going to be a grand return with style. It really wasn’t. They split the season in two volumes: Villains and Fugitives. I liked the latter, even if there were parts of it that kinds didn’t make sense due to what happened in the previous volume (more on that later), but the former, eh… That’s when shit hit the fan. Like, seriously, what was the deal with all the fantasy stuff they introduced with the eclipse that contadicted what we already knew about people’s powers manifesting for the first time????? What was all that????? Honest to God knock me out…

What was supposed to supposed to be the stage of an epic rivarly bewteen heroes and villains turned into a muddled story where allegiances changed with the blink of an eye, plot points were either introduced and resolved within time spans that would make Daphne Milbrook proud, or retconned only to be retconned once again with no real explaination (Sylar being able to acquire Elle’s ability without killing her, then resorting to killing again, no explaination. And no, don’t say that’s because he and Peter have the same powers; they made it clear from day one they had different powers: intuitive aptitude and empathic mimicry). Interesting story developments aren’t explored and past events glossed over. After all, Nathan has a rather easy reunion with his father even after he was ready to expose Arthur and his client’s mafia connections in the past, which almost cost him his life. Or how HRG doesn’t reflect on his role in creating the monster obsessed with his daughter’s ability.

But the worst part of this volume is the one and only Arthur Petrelli. Technically, his comeback from the dead should’ve been an exciting development, since he had ties with so many of the characters and institutions they came into contact with. And yet, what we got is some guy who was just kind of… there. So bereft of charisma, so incredibly milquetoast. The only time he was an effective, scary villain was in the flashback episode, and it was so damn satisfying to watch Angela “kill” him. His storyline was underwritten. It just doesn’t make any sense that people would follow him, no matter whatever promises he may have made to them, because for the most part, he really just has others complete tasks because reasons. It doesn’t really become clear whatever his plan is until towards the end of his arc, which makes me suspect that the writers were just making shit up as they went along.

⦁ Personality transplants/stagnation

I remember years ago, when I was into Glee (which, coincidentally, shares a bunch of cast members with our dear superhero drama), I would read reviews for the episodes and one of the major recurring complaints was about how characters often seemed to get personality transplants episode to episode. At the time, I didn’t feel that issue was as severe as they made it out to be on Glee. Actually, to those writers, I would’ve liked to say: HAVE YOU GUYS SEEN HEROES?

Then there’s the issue of the characters who aren’t even allowed to yo-yo.

Seriously. Nathan, Elle, Sylar, Hiro, Mohinder. Actually, almost every single damn character. I mean, Nathan goes from being the guy who wants to create an army of superpowered soldiers to the guy who spearheads a government program to lock up his fellow superpowered folks in the span of what, two episodes? What was the deal with that? Or Mohinder waking up one day and deciding he wanted powers and going full The Fly once he gets them, all out of the blue. Honestly those really sting since they had really great arcs that fit them and made perfect sense for their characters in season one and two, especially Nathan. Then we got Maury trying to protect Matt early in season three, when he spent season two being the antagonist in Matt’s story and not showing much care for him. What? It’s at this point that Heroes shifted from being a character driven story to a plot-driven one, where the characters’s actions served the plot more than their linear arcs.

Love her still, yet Claire was the undisputed queen of stagnating characterization, being forced into complacency and frozen into being plagued by the same issues over and over again and react to them the same way, or at least barely different ways, over and over again. It makes sense to have recurring traits or problems that plague a character, but once that’s all the writers are willing to give them, you have a problem. A real shame since there were so many ways they could’ve used her power and the larger-than-life situations she was put in as metaphors for her coming of age. Instead, anytime she walked a different path to find herself, she was sent back to more familiar ground rather than new, uncharted territory. Same with Hiro going back and forth between growing into a heroic, level-headed badass with a heart of gold to being the silly comic relief every two episodes or so.

And all of this leads us to…

⦁ Plain simple fear of shaking up the status quo

Now, that was the main problem in the last two seasons. It’s funny series creator Tim Kring has stated he felt people reacted poorly to season two because its framework was too similar to season one and lacked “adrenaline”, because he pretty much spent most of Heroes‘ run trying to recreate season one by always keeping things more of the same. Say what you will about season two, but at least it tried something different by pairing up characters who hadn’t been paired up before and enriched that world’s backstory in good, intelligent ways. Aside from the formula plot and the Carnival, we didn’t get much of that in the later seasons. All we got is a story were, for the most part, after a couple of episodes, or even after less than an episode, everything went back to the way it was most of the time.

Part of it was the reluctance to kill off characters post-season two. In hindsight, it would’ve been better if Sylar got to die in the season one finale (though, to be fair, he does aquit himself pretty nicely in the series’ last two episodes), and if Nathan died either in the season one or season two finale (even if his final scene asking Peter to let him go was pretty touching). At the end of the day, even Peter and HRG could’ve stayed dead after the season one finale (the former) and a season two episode (the latter) if we’re really out for blood here. Even if they were unwilling to kill off/write out the main characters (I’m just a viewer and it was sad to see the core characters die, the rare times they did), there’s no reason they couldn’t get all trigger-happy on the recurring and minor ones a la CW‘s The Vampire Diaries, just to show that there were still actual stakes. I mean, did we really need characters like Flint, Maury or Alice to stay alive?

It wasn’t just the prevailing lack of permanent deaths, though. There was an unwillingness to explore new uncharted territory and really commit to game changing events, for the most part. In season two, we find out Isaac had written a comic book about a superpowered vigilante, whom we late discover is most likely Monica. Instead of grabbing the opportunity to show how a more convential costumed superhero story would work and impact the established universe of Heroes, the character gets written out. Instead of building on the intriguing origin story provided for Primatech and its founders in season two, it gets disregarded for a completely new origin story in season four. People who are not the designated sidekick in the know (Zach, Gretchen) find out about Claire’s powers so there’s need to deal with the fallout? No way! Let’s just call the Haitian sensation that’s sweeping the nation!

Honestly, this point is pretty funny since the original plan for season two would’ve really changed the status quo, with the Shanti virus being released and the world being thrown into a tailspin. That would’ve been so epic! Unfortunately, that plan was scrapped due to poor audience reaction after it leaked (funny, cause if you go online now, they all bitch about how much they would’ve liked that better… Fickle bitches!) and the 2007 WGA Strike. I remain of the opinion they should’ve ended season two on a cliffhanger, with the virus being released and season three should’ve dealt with the aftermath. It’s better to stick to your guns.

⦁ Not playing to its strenghts

Heroes started out with a very simple premise: ordinary people acquire and cope with superpowers, all while being thrusted into not-so-ordinary situations and places. It was pretty good at that. There was something particularly fascinating about seeing these ordinary people leading ordinary lives discovering their powers, learning how to use them, reject them, accept them, build a life around them, integrate them into their ordinary lives or turning their lives into heroic journeys thanks to their newfound gifts, create hidden-in-plain sight places (Primatech, Pinehearst, the Carnival) for superpowered folks and a few ordinary people in the know, and finding more and more people to populate them. It was very good at writing families. Those were the most interesting relationships in the series: the Petrellis, the Bennets, the Nakamuras, Niki, DL and Micah, Tracy and Micah. That worked. You could feel the love and the conflicts and it was engrossing, character driven drama with a focus on sci-fi and plot twists every other episode that built towars a definite endgame.

Then, it lost the sense of wonder that permeated all that.

Gone were the days of the characters finding both joy and sadness from the experiences having special abilities put them on. Instead, Heroes got more and more convoluted as time passed, a loose cannon with no aim. That left little time for the little sweet, joyful, bittersweet and hearthbreaking moments that defined the series from the very beginning. It lost its heart in exchange for charcter and plot arcs that weren’t given time to breathe, therefore the wonder of seeing characters trying to decide how their powers and, at times, legacies, fit into their lives was cut in a half. The results were an absolutely, incredibly appalling waste of its potential, as well as plot twists for the sake of plot twists and betrayals for the sake of betrayals that led to no wondrous revelations and/or no endgame, seemingly existing for shock value only. But hey, there were still good heroics and character dynamics moments, even if they weren’t always what they used to be. So… that’s a silver lining.

⦁ Verdict

Like I said, I love Heroes. Got wasted potential there, no lie, and at the end of the day, that’s the biggest, and saddest, thing that went wrong with the series. Some believe it would’ve been better off if it had been an anthology series like it was supposed to be, but I don’t think it’s necessarily true. If they had kept the anthology format that churned out a bunch of origin stories, one after the other, the complaint of over-familiarity would’ve arose at some point or another. Still, there’s so much more good stuff on Heroes than some people would like to admit, and not just the very good first season, so that counts for something. Plus, there’s much, much worse television out there, it just doesn’t get the same rep as Heroes because most of that other stuff was never the phenomenon the NBC hit was, and never showed the kind of promise the subject of this piece had.

That being said, if Heroes ever comes back, either in the form of reruns or another spin-off (third time’s the charm, right? Oh, who am I kidding? First time was the charm for me), I know my interest will be piqued.

Happy tenth anniversary, “Brave New World”.