The Hiro Conundrum

You are Hiro Nakamura. You are one of the top 3 or so most powerful characters on the hit show "Heroes". You are the master of all of space and time. You became too powerful on the show. What ingenious idea did the writers of your show have do to solve the problem?

They took away your powers.

Yes, the writers took the easy way out last chapter. Rather than coming up with a clever way to have such a powerful character coexist with people who can do useless things like fly or breathe underwater they simply took his power away rather than deal with the difficult task of coming up with a solution. Now, they didn't originally take away his powers at first. No, rather they tried something silly such as giving him the mind of a 10 year old first. So he was still powerful, he just didn't have the mental facility to use it. But that storyline couldn't have gone on forever - although compared to what the character is now I'd have prefered a Hiro-as-a-10-year-old character who struggled with the immense task of being so powerful than a powerless Japanese guy trying desperately hard to recapture the good times.

But that was such a long time ago. I'm too lazy to check, but I assume it's been probably 8 episodes now that Hiro hasn't been "normal" (as much as a person who can bend time and space to his will can be considered normal).

Evenutally the writers found a solution for Peter, his "one power at a time, losing the previous power" limitation will allow him to be on the show for as long as NBC airs Heroes now that the writers found a clever way to deal with his 100+ powers. In hindsight it was a rather simple solution, simply making it so that Peter can't walk around with so many abilities and limit him to one at a time and make him have to decide if it's worth it to lose his current power in order to replace it with a new power that may be a better fit for the current task. But how to you do the same thing with Hiro? Either he can travel through space/time or he can't. That is unless...

Make it so that he can travel through time, but he's invisible. So instead of going back 2 years ago and changing the future - he can still go back 2 years ago but it's more to witness events for data collecting purposes. Kinda like how Matt went into HRG's head to find out the trail of events that lead up to the government project, Hiro would be doing the same thing except being actually there. He would become strictly an observer. Then he'd go back to the present time and armed with the info from the past he'd be able to affect events in real time as the present day happens. Or when he freezes time, instead of freezing time and, for example, take the gun out of the hand of the enemy who's about to shoot him, he loses the ability to tangibly touch things and he can only escape.

Either that, or they give him a retarded power out of pity. I'd love to see Masi Oka (the name of the actor who plays Hiro) at the writer's table trying to convince them to give him his power back:

Masi Oka: "Ok, guys, don't you think Hiro being powerless has gone on long enough? Whaddya say we get him back to the old Hiro, the one that audiences loved to cheer for?"

Writers: "Yeah, about that...we just can't have Hiro running amok like the old days. We've caught a ton of flak over the years from the critics who like to point out how we've used Hiro as a crutch by having a time traveller who can erase bad storylines."

Masi Oka: "Ok, I understand. It certainly was getting repetitive having my character always bail out you guys when you wrote yourselves into a corner. I can take another power though."

Writers: "Well, we do have one power that currently doesn't have anyone claiming it. But we gotta warn ya, it's not exactly on the same page as being master of time and space."

Masi Oka: "I see...well, whatever it is it's gotta beat having no powers and being shipped off to India for no good reason. What's the power?"

Writers: "How do you feel about being able to breathe underwater...?"