I think I may be a little bitter about this. Heroes, in my opinion, had its chance. It had multiple chances. Its first season was wonderful and then came that horrible finale… and then the horrible second season and the even horriblier third season. Despite an amazing premise and start, the show insisted on sucking more and more with each passing episode until it sucked itself right off the airwaves and, by that point, not even its most dedicated fans shed a tear. It was like hearing about that estranged family member who finally dies of a drug overdose. You’re not happy about it, but seriously… what did he honestly expect to happen?
Now, in a world of cancelled quality television shows like Firefly, Almost Human, and dozens of other properties that were never given a proper shake, Heroes is back with Heroes Reborn, a quasi spin-off and partial sequel to the bungled up science fiction series that started it all. NBC called it “groundbreaking,” but it was only “groundbreaking” in that you wanted to dig a hole to bury it in.
Still, I’m going to give it a chance. Heroes, to me, is like M. Night Shamaylan. Started amazing, turned terrible, then became insulting to the point that I was openly hostile to it and yet… I want it to be good. I want it to be great again. I want it to live up to the potential that I know is there. I want this new series to be good.
What we got instead was… pretty much more of the same convoluted bull. Too many characters, a vague threat, vaguer powers, no real antagonists, and not a single resolution in the entire two episode premiere. This new and improved Heroes has only just started and I’m already bored to tears.
If you were one of the twelve people who were still watching Heroes when it crawled off the airwaves to die, you remember that the final scene had the immortal cheerleader Claire reveal her superheroness to the world. Five years later, the indestructible cheerleader is killed in a terrorist explosion which sets the normal humans against the “evos” who all run and go into hiding despite the fact that that, you know… have superpowers and could probably turn their enemies into globs of screaming burning Jell-o by snapping their fingers.
Nitpicking aside, Mr. Bennett – the horn-rimmed glasses man – is rustled back into the plot by a conspiracy theorist who tells him that he thinks that there was something more to the explosion than the public was told. Meanwhile, a girl who can Tron herself into video games tries to find her father who is also Tron’ed into a video game. Meanwhile, a woman tries to con a superpowered douchebag out of some money. Meanwhile, Peter Pan has to keep his Nightcrawler Bamf’ing powers a secret. Meanwhile, Chuck and his wife try to kill evos.
Just watching this show made me upset because, despite the hype surrounding it, I can already tell that it’s going to devolve into the same plodding idiocy that Heroes was when it first crashed and burned. There’s really no reason for this spinoff to exist other than NBC wanting to get in on the superheroes craze and believing that the stink has finally wore off of the Heroes pile.
The most infuriating things is, it wasn’t terrible… It wasn’t good, either, but it wasn’t terrible. It was so frustratingly mediocre and did absolutely nothing to be remembered. I don’t remember character names, I can barely remember who had what powers, and I can’t remember a single memorable sequence. The most damning thing that I can say about Heroes Reborn is that… it just happened and seemed content with just happening.
The Flash can be amazing in an hour… Heroes takes two hours to just be. It’s the same garbage from last time and watching it makes me feel like I just saw my ex-girlfriend from across a restaurant and now she’s sitting at my table, talking about how great our relationship once was while all I can think about is what a terrible relationship it was and wondering why the heck she came over here in the first place.
Jason Gaston 