HEROES 3x04 "I Am Become Death" Discuss and Grade
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Saving something important in the present would be nice.
Not even the JLA saves the world/future/universe arc after arc.
Its the repetitivness and sameness that is wearing on people and its really showing up in the Nielsons.
Saving something important in the present would be nice.
Not even the JLA saves the world/future/universe arc after arc.
Its the repetitivness and sameness that is wearing on people and its really showing up in the Nielsons.
I think that's where think the problem is.
Comic book readers are used to expecting other plots and I would assume they're the ones turning away. Other viewers that are non-comic book readers don't know any difference and expect that most powerful superheroes save the world all the time.
The writers and producers are giving the comic book fans the special EFX they think we want to see but keeping the plot simple for the regular mass audience.
BTW, is Jeff Loeb still writing it?
And it's not just repetition of the future being saved. It's that the set up of the threat, so far, plays out the same way. We get cryptic glaucoma produced paintings, the occasional dream, and jumps to the future to tell us that there is an impending threat of some kind, and, additionally, a world which has turned down an obviously wrong path. And to make it a bit more interesting, they give us future "mirror universe" type characters, whether the progression makes sense or not, for the shock factor.
Don't get me wrong. I find the show entertaining. But I also recognize that the creators feel they have a good thing; and while they may shuffle the deck a bit and make some cosmetic changes, they don't want to mess with the formula too much.
Time and ratings will tell if they are being smart or a bit too cautious.
Don't get me wrong. I find the show entertaining. But I also recognize that the creators feel they have a good thing; and while they may shuffle the deck a bit and make some cosmetic changes, they don't want to mess with the formula too much.
Time and ratings will tell if they are being smart or a bit too cautious.
My autopsy on the show reveals three things that seem to have been overlooked. First, no one's saved the future yet. Only the nature and magnitude of the catastrophe are changing. I suppose in season four the whole universe will face annihilation. Feeling imminent disaster has loomed rather long time is not short attention span, but the opposite.
Second, the show no longer has any use for nor interest in normal people. Matt's wife, Nathan's wife and children, Claire's friends (and family---Lyle was never given a character and Sandra is now edged out by Meredith!) the FBI agent, all vanished, without replacement. Mohinder has superpowers and Ando will. Bennet is the only "normal" left.
And that's third---Bennet was the face of true evil. Sylar was never anything but a maniac, not a true character. A redemption arc for Bennet might have worked but they chose not to write one. The emotional vacuum there hurts. I mean, really, why would Bennet appoint himself Sylar's archenemy?
Second, the show no longer has any use for nor interest in normal people. Matt's wife, Nathan's wife and children, Claire's friends (and family---Lyle was never given a character and Sandra is now edged out by Meredith!) the FBI agent, all vanished, without replacement. Mohinder has superpowers and Ando will. Bennet is the only "normal" left.
And that's third---Bennet was the face of true evil. Sylar was never anything but a maniac, not a true character. A redemption arc for Bennet might have worked but they chose not to write one. The emotional vacuum there hurts. I mean, really, why would Bennet appoint himself Sylar's archenemy?
Yeah, in the olden days when I joked about Sylar being the lost Petrelli brother, I didn't envision him being a full brother or being Angela's kid (largely because I thought Ellen Green played a very convincing bio-mom for Sylar). But it's possible that Nathan was told by his parents that the baby died in childbirth. He would have been about, what, seven years old I'd guess? A kid that young isn't going to be suspicious.
The writers clearly want us to believe it. At this point they've gone too far with it for it to ever be rescinded. It would fall flat dramatically. If there's one thing these writers are good at, it's throwing plot twists at us that work dramatically at least in isolation. Coming up with a coherent, consistent plotline may not be their strength, but they understand the dramatic punch.
He made it crystal clear that he's not "cured" and can never be cured as long as his power still operates. "Every day is a constant struggle," etc. That's why he warned poor dumb idiot Peter away from wanting his power.
As long as the bullet remains in the brain stem. There needs to be some foreign object in the brain for Peter to remain dead. What might happen if he's buried and decays and the bullet falls out of his disintegrating brain is another issue entirely. Would he re-form and come back to life at that point?
I don't see how she could finish the job unless she physically obliterated Peter's corpse (burning it into ash, perhaps). I don't buy the notion that decapitation would work. If a scalp can latch back onto the skull and repair itself, why not the same for a severed neck? This isn't Highlander.
He decapitates her, but we don't know whether she could have been revived by simply placing her head back on her neck so she could regenerated.
It would make sense if the writers wanted to establish a "this-kills-definitively" method but they'll have to come up with a rationale why decapitation would work, in context with the other rules they've established. Peter and Claire both survived massive trauma to the brain stem, which argues against decapitation being a permanent method of killing them.
...back to arguing about Sylar.
Fair enough, but I would still have been interested in the character. Dukat, Scorpy and Dexter are all villains who manage to be very complex - so that they never have to get wearisome through overuse (writers' missteps still always being possible) any more than a hero-character will get wearisome - and they were never depicted as objects of pity, particularly Scorpy and Dexter, who are written in such a way that they never for one moment ask for our pity. Just the opposite, really.
But the real issue here is that the writers should have planned better. Kill Sylar during the first two years = make him a monstrous killing machine. Keep Sylar for three-plus years = make him a normal person with a horrific problem. They had reason to realize in S1 that Sylar was becoming mega-popular and unkillable at least for the foreseeable future, so they had plenty of time to develop the character to be durable. I saw that they'd need to do this in S2, so what took them so long?
I think they figured we wouldn't even notice the discrepency. Their sloppiness is kind of insulting in that way...if the ratings are tanking because people are sick of being jerked around, I can't say people are wrong to be annoyed.
Sorry, I never got into Buffy so if there's a botched villain character on that show, I wouldn't know. But I cited three prominent examples of complex villains that can last just as long as any character in a story so that proves it can be done. Maybe it's not to your taste, but it's perfectly to mine. My only problem here is the sloppy way in which the whole thing was carried out.
Wow, this is just flat-out wrong. Without a villain or some sort of antagonist, you have no story. The villain is essential to the story. They could have presented a different villain than Sylar, but who's to say he/she would have been any more successful?
But the real issue is that people tune in to watch certain characters: Peter, Hiro, Sylar and Claire being prominent fan-favorites. Kring et al aren't going to screw themselves over by killing off the reasons why people watch the show.
And if the ratings are tanking, it's probably because the story is overly complex and even worse, sloppily written. Following a complex story is one thing but it should at least have internal consistency and intelligent characterization. I suspect that the people who keep watching are doing so because of the characters and the ones who wanted a good story are getting fed up.
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Whoah, faint praise!
(However, there certainly is an analogy here, because the X-Files survived for almost a decade on the charisma of the lead characters, largely conveyed through the actors, and that's Heroes' main strength as well.)I don't recall anything in this episode that proved otherwise. I'm still waiting to see where they go with it.Hey what happened to the folks from last week who were convinced Sylar wasn't really a Petrelli and Angela was lying?
What dya want, a DNA test?
Most stuff in stories isn't "proven" one way or the other. The way you tell if a writer wants you to believe something is to envision it being a lie. Would it work well dramatically for Angela to say, "oh I was just kidding"? No, it would be absurd - people complain about the S1 finale being anticlimatic, this would be even worse - so they won't go there. Why deliberately cause your drama to fall flat?
The one thing they might have used Angela saying "just kidding" for would be for Sylar to feel massively betrayed and go off on a vendetta against the Petrellis. But now we've learned that he doesn't kill because of people making him feel not-special, but rather it's simply inherent in his powers. So he doesn't need another reason to kill and the vendetta angle wouldn't really work dramatically.
Especially with them having Peter embark on a plot arc in which he becomes evil. To keep up the opposition with Sylar, that means Sylar should become more "good." Also, if he learned to control his hunger in the alt-future plotline, it stands to reason he'll start doing so in the regular plotline. That's a far more natural place for his character to go.
The problem is that the future is infinitely malleable. You do one thing to stop disaster, so what, another disaster will crop up, even worse!!! At a certain point this is going to become comic, and it's already semi-comic anyway. (When I saw the models of planets strung across the room in future-Gabriel's studio, I wondered whether that meant they would blow up the galaxy next."Saving the future yet again." I don't get everyone's beef with that. I mean, what do you want them to do, Save the past?
)Really what they need is a reason for these characters to team up. If they make it to the next Volume, I've heard it's
all the specials are on the run because the rest of the world has realized how frakkin dangerous they all are
My assumption is that they're setting up some kind of Karma thing where it is actually impossible for the specials to save the future and Angela was right to just want NYC blown up so that the future wouldn't get continually nastier, as though it were punishing them for their hubris in trying to change it.
The plot twist with Peter learning to "see how things work" might mean he sees how the timeline works well enough to comprehend what he's been doing wrong. He would see things no human can, akin to a Jedi sensing the whole flow of the cosmos through the Force or some such hooey. That's the one way he actually could succeed in his Quixotic quest to change something as big and stubborn as "the future." I'll wait and see where this goes.
3D Master
Rear Admiral
I will, this episode with Booboo was the breaking point.
Have you been reading any JLA comics lately? You'll find that even though he's officially on the JLA roster, he hardly ever actually appears in a story, and when he does, they either really thought about using him, or he's an idiot and everyone who reads it is wondering; "Huh, if the Superman of the previous issue of his own comic was here, he'd have wrapped this problem up in no time, what gives?"
That's exactly because Superman too, has become a story-destroying character. He's too ridiculously overpowered and unhurtable, and worse yet, after Birne powered him down to more manageable levels, they went and powered him back up recently.
Uh, no, I already explained this; what you're talking about, is a villain being important to a CHARACTER, but not to the story. You can fill in any villain in a story, to a story, a villain is not important. To a hero however, there are one or two villains that are important, that's the arch-nemesis. Usually the other side of the coin to the hero.
However, the arch-nemesis never, or hardly ever, arrives in the opening act. The first villains a hero or group of heroes faces, are the small fries that teach them to be good enough to handle the arch-nemesis when he/she/they finally arrives.
Sylar is not an arch-nemesis. And, in fact, he's not Peter's villain either, he's Hiro's. Hiro spends his entire journey in S1 to his ultimate goal; stop Sylar. And then he doesn't get to do it. In fact, right now, there isn't even a villain anymore, there's just Booboo.
3D Master
Rear Admiral
But they're still villains, or at least two of them are. I don't think Dexter is a villain. He actually kills villains, as a means to manage his psychopathy so he doesn't kill good people. That would make him an anti-hero, but not a villain.
Booboo however, would not have been, and no longer is, a villain. He's a victim. A guy with a problem in his brain, that some psychotherapy, and maybe some drugs will solve.
That's not a villain, and it's not interesting. Well, the fight to put him away, might have been interesting, but anything beyond that - nothing interesting at all.
Sylar WAS a monstrous killing machine. Now he's Booboo. And the simple fact is, that SYLAR is interesting, Booboo isn't. Sylar becoming good, isn't interesting either. In fact, something truly evil becoming good, immediately turns the story as well as the character, BAD. It will make people stop watching FAR QUICKER than killing him off. Indeed, killing a popular character off, will probably get people to WATCH, and look what happens afterwards, because here are writers who don't pull their punches, it's refreshing. And if they could create interesting characters before, they can do it again.
But Booboo isn't a villain, he's a victim. And it makes him very much NOT complex. A quirk in his brain made him kill, oh boo, wow, such complexity - not really. Now Sylar being pure evil and killing, because he believes it's his destiny to be the most special one around, like S1, THAT is complex, because then you can delve into why exactly made him think that, and why and how he goes about doing things. Booboo, not so much.
A villain - apart from the arch nemesis - is not much more important than a MaGuffin. That's because you can exchange them for any other villain. If you could not exchange them, then you have an important character. And whether or not another villain is more successful or not, is besides the point.
It's partly because the story is just pale imitation repeat of the first season, but it's also the character no longer being fan-favorites. Mark my words, look closely at the ratings next week, you'll see them drop like a rock more than ever before, because just about any Sylar fan will tune out. Sylar after all, is gone, there's only Booboo now.
There is a reason why Freddy and Jason get sequel after sequel and eventually even faced each other in a movie. That's because people like to watch and love to hate and fear a truly evil villain. If they'd turn them into Booboo though, watch the end their respective franchises.
Booboo... 
Thespeckledkiwi
Vice Admiral
I got to ask this because I was thinking about this:
Shouldn't Adam be dead? I mean if he was buried that means there is no air. If there is no air, then there is no oxygen going to any vital parts of his body including his brain. If his brain starts breaking down, how can it repair itself? Or is it so rapid that it repairs right as it dies?
Shouldn't Adam be dead? I mean if he was buried that means there is no air. If there is no air, then there is no oxygen going to any vital parts of his body including his brain. If his brain starts breaking down, how can it repair itself? Or is it so rapid that it repairs right as it dies?
Thespeckledkiwi
Vice Admiral
Interesting...
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