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Heroes Watch: Out of Our Misery

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SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, whip yourself up a batch of chilaquiles and watch Heroes.

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NBC photo: Adam Taylor

Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, so in the spirit of holiday generosity, I will kick things off by finding something nice to say about the volume-two finale of Heroes:

Well, at least it’s over!

I don’t mean that entirely sarcastically. Whether the wrapup was accelerated in some ways by the writers’ strike or whether Tim Kring and company planned it more or less this way all along, the finale at least gives the show a welcome chance now to hit the reset button and start relatively fresh.

There was kind of a Nikki-and-Paolo feel to the finale, in that it often seemed driven less by the need to pay off or advance stories than to cut the show’s losses, putting an end to characters that needed to be ditched and storylines that turned out to be regrettable. For starters: what in the hell was the point of the entire, half-season-long storyline of Micah and Monica in New Orleans? After several episodes of showing off her powers, Monica ends up a pathetic damsel in distress, all so that Micah could watch his mother getting blown up? Granted, there was a nice bit of redemption and closure in Niki becoming a hero after losing her powers–or would have been had the writers not made us stop caring about her long ago–but the net result was an entire lengthy, futile storyline, almost entirely divorced from the rest of the show, for the sole purpose of offing a character who could have been written off long ago.

Another gripe (and believe me, I’m not going to get to all of them): OK, so last week, some commenters suggested I was being too nitpicky by asking why no Hero had gone public with their powers before. Well, I’ma go there again.

Nathan’s press conference: look, I get that this is comic-book world. I am willing to accept that the former politician would not have, oh, issued a press release before his speech, or that he would give his announcement a rambling introduction (that made sense only to the audience and not the actual reporters he was addressing) simply to build tension. (“I have witnessed ordinary people becoming extraordinary heroes… hey, why hasn’t anybody assassinated me yet?”) I appreciate the notion of giving Peter a sibling to avenge. (Though has he already forgotten the Irish Spring lassie? Because the writers seem to have.)

But as far as a way of shielding The Company from being exposed, it didn’t make even the most elementary sense. I mean, good thing that Nathan wasn’t there with two other superpowered people with access to the same information as him, right? Or that his companions couldn’t have proved the superpower phenomenon in two seconds by flying after his assassin or speaking directly into the reporters’ minds, right? That’s not willing suspension of disbelief. That’s just bogus.

Then there’s Sylar. Oh, Sylar. What did they do to you? Am I simply romanticizing season 1, or did Sylar not used to be a charismatic, interesting villain? When did the writers decide to turn him into a flimsy cardboard bad guy spouting cliched zingers from a bad ’90s action movie? (“Now look what you made me do!”)

Hiro’s denouement I’m more ambivalent about. Certainly his choice of final punishment for Adam (burying him alive forever) was bad-ass–and, again, kind of Nikki-and-Paolo. I suppose it was understandable as well, if you accept that Hiro didn’t know that Adam could be killed with a wound to the head. Nonetheless, it was so ghastly and cruel–essentially trapping Adam in Hell–that it didn’t seem like the Hiro we knew, even when that Hiro was avenging his father’s death and punishing a man who planned to exterminate most of the human race. I’ll reserve judgment, because it may be that experience is really changing Hiro into someone more hardened and less happy-go-lucky (and to his credit, Masi Oka’s final scene gave a hint of that). But Heroes hasn’t exactly been a hotbed of character evolution in the past, so I worry this was another case of temporarily changing a character for the sake of a cool plot twist.

I could grouse more, but I’ll let you do that (or stick up for the finale) in the comments. In the holiday spirit, let me close with a few things I liked:

* “OK. We don’t talk about that ever again.”

* Molly’s failure to find Alejandro for Maya, even though we knew it was coming, was genuinely eerie and well-played. In fact, Molly in general is an intriguing character, so I wish she got more to do this season than stay under house arrest.

* Yet again, anything involving HRG. He’s the best character on the show because he’s the most flawed and complicated: he’s not just a guy who’s done bad things, he’s both dealing with the consequences of them and continually fighting his tendency to do more bad things (albeit for good reasons). An HRG returned to the dark side could be interesting indeed.

* Props for following through on the promos with two actual, if by-now peripheral, Hero deaths–though at this point the show has lost my faith that its deaths are permanent.

* And, again, it wrapped up a lot, giving Kring et al. the chance to use their strike break to dream up a revived show that doesn’t keep repeating its own season one greatest hits. Although ending on Sylar getting a fix of fix-everything blood doesn’t make me too optimistic. Zachary Quinto may make a fine young Spock, but at this point I don’t really want Sylar to live long and prosper.