by Angel Varak-Iglar
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to remember the life of NBC’s loveably insane and catastrophically bizarre Heroes.
For some, this death is surprising. Just as we all thought that we were safe, when we discovered that NBC needed to fill five new hours of programming per week and were going to have to scramble to come up with nonsense (quality or ratings at this point were out of the window), NBC dropped the axe, so that now we will be forced to endure five hours of crap we never liked in the first place as opposed to four hours of that, and then one hour of something we actually really used to like at one time even if it’s not as good as it used to be.
Some would say that this death is a long time coming. The health of Heroes steadily deteriorated as the ratings began to drop off. The story became more convoluted, more serialized, and considerably more confusing. Weaknesses began to show, until they started to take over. Eventually, Heroes succumbed to these illnesses, so let us pay our last respects.
Born in the fall of 2006 (probably conceived in 2004–I have nothing to back that up), we’ve shared some good times and some bad times with NBC’s occasionally-seminal original series. The days of its infancy were the days when large groups of nerdy college students would order heroes (sandwiches) and watch Heroes (people with supernatural powers). I wasn’t among these people because I had a class at the same time. It was either that or miss House. In retrospect I should’ve swapped it the other way around.
Even those of us who did not know Heroes well were probably touched by it in some way, at least enough to be familiar with the general concept: ordinary people begin to manifest extraordinary superpowers, but one guy ruins it for everybody else when his thirst for more power gets him murdering other heroes en masse. Then, despite a moment of moral panic, he decides that the human race deserves punishment for whatever it was they were doing wrong. I’m not quite sure what they were doing wrong–this being one of those details that comic books often find unnecessary–but Sylar (born Gabriel Gray) certainly had them pegged, and decided that a large portion of Manhattan should be incinerated. I guess here I cannot blame him; I have lived in Manhattan.
I fondly remember the first season, that lengthy 22 episodes or something of a near-perfect comic book-come-TV series, magnificently walking the line between supernatural soap opera and stuff blowing up. The formula seems easy enough to understand but so rarely can people manage it. We loved Heroes because people love superheroes. I can’t speak for everyone here, but I know that I secretly hope that tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and discover that I can fly or move stuff with my mind or become invisible. Or, ALL OF THE ABOVE. Nothing is impossible!
So anyway, Heroes worked because it tapped into the secret desire most of us have to be more exciting than we appear, to know a secret that the people around us can’t understand, to have the power to destroy or save the world. At times the show could be cheesy, but this was excusable–how could it not be? One can hardly become a supervillain without a mental cache of dramatic one-liners prepared for use at a moment’s notice.
What should probably be surprising is not how Heroes failed–I think a lot of us know this–but how successful it was in the first place. In season the first, its ratings were nice, its award recognition curiously high, and it was a serial drama on a broadcast network that people actually watched. It brought down the house at San Diego Comic-Con. We were looking at a successful primetime sci-fi serial. How can that happen? Seriously? Look at Firefly. This just goes to show–”successful primetime sci-fi” is a really weird thing to hear somebody say. How could something so innately nerdy have gotten so far so fast? Serialized broadcast sci-fi is like an amalgam of “things you would never try to pitch as a serious TV show that you think anyone would buy and anyone would watch.” And yet!
At one point, Heroes was on top of the world. I think, deep down inside, everyone was expecting some kind of sophomore slump, but instead what we saw was this rapid degeneration of a minor illness. The sniffle became a cough become a cold became, I don’t know, that really rare and untreatable strain of tuberculosis that guy who like escaped on an airplane and caused this whole fuss a couple of years back had. It got the swine. Something really terrible happened to it and at some point it was like every form of treatment made it worse. Its loved ones couldn’t watch as it slowly died.
While its exposure to its fatal illness probably predated 2×01, its progression from stage I to stage IV was slow and labored. What’s actually kind of hilarious is that the plot of season 2 revolves around this bizarre disease that’s infecting all of these people. I’m just saying, it’s ironic in this particular paragraph. The writer’s strike hit the show pretty hard, for one. For another, somebody up there at Heroes thought that it would be a really good idea to try to replicate the first season but slightly different. I’m not even kidding here. I’m not going to cite this because hey, I recently graduated with a media arts degree and I’m enjoying the fact that I can now say things without backing them up with footnotes, but I read an interview with one of the writers where he mentioned how they thought that since people had responded so well to the first season, they decided they’d try to repeat it in some way with the second. So, while the plot itself changed, 2×01 began with all the characters separated from each other, but with a crisis that would ultimately bring them back together in the end. This was stupid. And that’s what the writer said–our bad. After that it could sometimes be painful to watch as the writers attempted to regain the glory days of the first season with no real idea how they were going to do it. It seems to me almost like watching somebody who can’t swim drown (which of course, I’ve done–who hasn’t?)–the more they struggled the faster they sank.
Because of this desire to separate all of the characters and bring them back together again, but now with the added caveat that a lot of them had each other’s numbers programmed into their cell phones, they had to add new characters. This was where I think things really began to fall down. Discord began to spread. Here suddenly we had all these new and weak additions to what used to be a really strong ensemble, and people hated them. And trust me, someone really, really, violently hated each new character enough to stop watching the show. I personally almost stopped watching the show just because of Kristen Bell’s character, Elle Bishop, who was a royal pain in the ass. I kept shouting, “DIE, DIE, DIE” at the screen when she’d show up. I couldn’t wait. You don’t understand. I really hated her. She was such a Mary Sue. (For those less nerdy than I am–check the definition of a Mary Sue in Urban Dictionary. It’s like a bad fan fiction trope. And if your actual show reads like bad fan fiction, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.) Anyway my point here is, if she had lived an episode longer than she did, I would’ve stopped watching. Seriously.
This flaw–and it applies to so many more weird patched-up characters than just Elle Bishop–deeply affected the quality of the show. Once the head honchos of Heroes realized the monsters they had created, they decided to put them down, but the manner of doing so became steadily more absurd. First they just killed them off. Then they decided they were killing off too many characters, so they had to get rid of them in other ways. Sometimes the character would simply disappear, never to be heard from again, a technique I formerly associated with David E. Kelly procedurals a la Boston Legal. My particular favorite character dismissal goes to Peter Petrelli’s weird Irish girlfriend (realistically, every girl who watched the show wanted Peter to be single). He took her into the post-apocalyptic future, and then came back to the present, but he left his girlfriend in the future. Determined not to leave her to certain death, he fixed the present to remove the post-apocalyptic future, and then, he never tried to go back to her or mentioned her again. Hilarious. Maybe this is all because long-distance relationships never work. Or there was another time when they sent Maya–who wept toxic tears that killed all the people around her whenever she cried, which was often because she was a huge crybaby–to New Jersey. I’m not even making this up. They were like, “Nobody likes Maya. We should write her off. But we’ve killed like eleven people already this episode. What should we do to her? We’ve already done ‘dropped off in barren future wasteland’ with Peter’s girlfriend. How about New Jersey?”
Eventually, to me, a lot of the serious issues with the show that other people considered faults became things I liked about it. I started to read actual comics around this time. Not like a ton, but some. So maybe this was just really well-timed for me, but doing this, I could identify all these comic book tropes within the show and I loved that about it. In this sense, Heroes never stopped being a pretty good televisualized comic book. I guess in comic books, things like, “Well, Robin didn’t really die in this case, he was actually like revived by the Riddler who was called on by Hush to freak out Batman” make sense. It even looks like a comic book! There’s this disgustingly great shot of HRG at some point in the third season that’s like an extreme close-up of the right side of his face, and we can see, behind him in the back seat of his car, the person he’s talking to. There was space for a freaking speech bubble. I’ve actually seen this panel in comic books. It was brilliant.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we’re discovering that everybody’s related to everybody else in the series, except for half of these things are lies told to take advantage of somebody else. It is pretty soap operatic, I think, to take a character who killed his own mother in a moment of weakness, and then tell him that she wasn’t his real mother, and that he has this whole other family. Then when it’s convenient you tell him the truth, as if his psyche weren’t damaged enough as a result. Then you try to make him believe the only way he can become a Good Person is to find a love interest, which he does, but she’s a huge pain in the ass, and since nobody likes to write her, she gets killed as well. Then, after that, he discovers that the person he thought his was his real father really wasn’t his real father. Really this time. And that his real father is a total d-bag. He goes to kill his father, but, realizing that his father would have done that, and feeling strong spite for the man, he leaves his father alive because he doesn’t want to be like his biological father. Then he can’t decide what he wants, because it seems to him that everybody is a jerk. Meanwhile you try to trap somebody else in his body, because if the good/evil/good/evil/good/evil flip-flopping wasn’t enough now you have to shove another morally ambiguous character in there to confuse him further. And people wonder why Sylar is evil. I think it would actually be easier to just be evil at that point.
There are a lot of reasons we will miss Heroes, now that it’s gone. There are a lot of great characters to be mourned. And I encourage you just to remind yourself of why you liked it in the first place, if you liked it, or to at least watch the first season if you never did. Now is the time to reminisce on the good times.
For me, it’s the little things. I loved how Sylar as Gabriel Gray looked like Clark Kent. I loved that every time Hiro did something I felt like completely excited. I love how it made me start referring to people’s children as things like “Baby Matt Parkman.” I’ve actually started talking to babies like this, addressing them as “baby” and telling them important things. I loved that scene in the first season when Hiro refuses to kill Sylar because Sylar is asking for forgiveness. I loved that shot of Sylar standing on top of a skyscraper, with the Empire State Building in the foreground, as he practices detonating…uh, himself, I guess…to punish New Yorkers for being jerks. I even love all the gross injuries that Claire has sustained that they showed onscreen. I relish every one-liner from the lips of Zachary Quinto. I loved how one of the most badass characters on the show was completely without supernatural gifts, and how he singlehandedly changed the way I thought about horn-rimmed glasses. I loved discovering that the entire contents of Peter Petrelli’s fridge were water and mustard. I sometimes even miss (it’s just nostalgia) that creepy feeling I got watching Peter and Claire interact with each other while Milo Ventimiglia and Hayden Panettiere were dating offscreen. I loved that they just forgot to mention Nathan Petrelli’s wife and other two children when it was inconvenient to bring them up. And my god, I loved all of the ridiculously inventive ways they came up with to kill someone and somehow bring them back to life, anyway.
These are just a few of the things that I really loved. I will miss you, Heroes, because, on good days and on bad days, I always did care for you. For just a little while, for the first time in years and years, I began to feel occasionally suspicious that there was an entire world of people with superpowers around me. And also, thank you, for making me remember the greatest rule of superhero mythology: the crappier your power actually seems, the more amazing it actually turns out to be. You can only manifest the powers of the person closest to you? Whatever, you can learn how to use everybody’s powers no matter the distance. You have a superhuman thirst to know how things work? Okay, even I can figure out how you would turn into a supervillain, if you discovered that there were people out there with telekinesis or immortality or telepathy and all you could do was…tell if your watch was off by a quarter of a second an hour or something. That would actually probably drive me insane, legitimately. But regardless, Heroes, I love that you took this series of little truths that I had loved as a kid but forgotten and brought them back to television. I love that you gave me, for those precious few years that you were with us, the thrill of the Saturday morning cartoon back, but for grown-ups.
In the end, when all is said and done, Heroes changed something in me that makes its death beautifully cyclical and curiously ironic. Because of Heroes, I no longer see television deaths as final. Who in the principal cast of Heroes hasn’t died at least once and come back? Writing a eulogy for Heroes seems almost in vain, because, a victim of some kind of demented thematic inheritance, I am solidly convinced that, like Sylar, it will come back, someday, some way, somehow. Even if it is in a different body.
So, to quote from another show that got canceled before I was prepared: thanks, Heroes, for the fun, sexy time.
RIP: Heroes (NBC): 2006 – 2010. Dearest, darling, dead.
For now.
