January 31, 2011

What Could Have Been

Looking back on this series, it started off white hot and then really went out with a little POP from a cap gun. What looked like a unique universe with lots of back story about people with special abilities fizzled at the end with an unnecessary lesbian sidestory and a once-fearsome villain exploring his emotions. There's many instances where the show set up something interesting or brought up a topic only to have it go nowhere. So since the show has been cancelled I figured I'd start pointing out issues that led to its demise.

Hiro Becomes Comic Relief

One of the greatest scenes in this series is from way back in the stellar season one. Peter Petrelli is on the train, only it stops and everyone freezes. What we see next is Future Hiro who looks like some type of rebel ninja/samurai. Gone is his broken English. He's a warrior from the future, evidently. What better way to show the potential of this character? For all intents and purposes we were energized to see how this character would ultimately progress into this ultra cool ninja. What happened over the next few seasons, though, was a gradual decline of this character into basically comic relief. Even his background theme music was whimsical. They took out everything serious about this character and ultimately made sure he couldn't cause anymore trouble by coming up with a handicap that he could eventually die if he kept using his time travel powers. What happened to Ninja Hiro with the katana blade strapped to his back?

No Purpose For Suresh or Ando

I've always wondered what the hell Suresh was doing? I know he was picking up where his father left off on research of people with special abilities. But what for? He always seemed like he was on the outside looking in. He had no offensive abilities - not like HRG who while powerless was able to coexist in a world with heroes and villains. Suresh was just a doctor. Perhaps it'd have been better to make Suresh a sort of character like Xavier was towards the XMen - a mentor and developer of abilities. Perhaps he'd find you and explain your abilities and ultimately what you'd be able to do once your powers were fully developed. I think the writers wrote themselves into a corner with this character and eventually decided it'd be easier to give him a power so as to justify him being on the show. Otherwise the writers never outlined "here is this character named Suresh. This is what he's researching and this is what he's going to do with that info."

As with Ando, the writers seemed to get lazy trying to explain how a normal sidekick could operate amongst all these people with abilities. The ultimately gave him a power, even if it was a stupid one. Instead of developing this character to make him complex enough to be able to survive in this world and influence it, they gave him a power because, well, the show is about people with powers. It would have been better to kill off this deadweight. Audiences would have had an "Oh no! They killed off Ando!" and the show would have had a little more gravity and peril. Clearly in a world where there are bad guys with special powers - not enough people died. If they didn't want to kill him off, they should have made it that he was able to supercharge Hiro's powers: on his own Hiro could only go back an hour or two but by having Ando with him there'd be no limit to how far back or forward in time he could go. Like if Hiro was alone, he couldn't completely stop time, he could only slow it down but if Ando was next to him he could freeze time completely.

There's a bunch more holes in this series that could have been handled better that I'll go into eventually. Knowing that the show had a limited shelf life and was eventually cancelled it'd have been better if they went down a drastically different route then just letting this thing die a slow death.