It's the end of Heroes Season 1. Nathan has taken Peter into the sky and there was an explosion, leaving us wondering if Nathan and Peter are alive or dead. Sylar has stabbed by Hiro but his body is nowhere to be found. Matt has been shot and taken on board an ambulance. HRG and Claire decide to return to the family and go on the run from the Company. D.L. has also been taken to the hospital, leaving Nikki and Micah worried over his life. Mohinder is left looking after Molly. Hiro wakes up in 17th Century Japan and sees the eclipse. Now it's your choice where things go from here. Forget Season 2, 3, and the current 4 season. Create a Heroes you can be proud of instead of being annoyed with.
I actually think you could have fixed a lot about Season 2 while keeping some of the concepts they used (which is what you would probably have to do, if you were one writer in a room of writers spit-balling ideas.) What I would have pushed for: Hiro: First of all, shorten the trip to the past by about two episodes. In fact, maybe have him show up in the second ep of the season and tell the trip in flashbacks, as he puts the pieces together. Most importantly, Kensei is an actual Japanese person, not Mr. "American Audiences will respond better to a white person" Munroe. Establish the dangers of time travel - have Hiro encounter an unforeseen butterfly effect, or get bumped out of synch with time due to some sort of paradox protection. Make Hiro the detective of the story, using his powers to piece together the history of the Company and Kensei in more detail. Peter: No side trip to the Land of Bad Irish Accents. Have him show up in a Company Hospital, memory gone due to the fact that he exploded in S1. Angela wants to find a way to restore his memory to get her boy back, the rest of the Company is variously terrified of his power or want to use him to hunt down the Killer of the Original Twelve, which scares them crapless. Eventually Kensei and his faction bust Peter out, try to turn him to their cause. Kensei teaches him to get his memory back, because it is necessary to get him his powers back (in Season 1, he had to remember people to use their power - kind of hard when you have amnesia.) Nathan: Also in the hospital, healed by a sample of Adam's blood kept on ice (while we're at it, point out that the blood only works once on a person, like anti-venom, to prevent future abuse of it.) The psychic scars remain, however. After he gets out, he is manipulated by the mind-controlling Maury, who appears in his head as Scarred Nathan. Nathan begins blacking out, and eventually it is revealed that he is being used by Kensei and his faction to kill the Original Twelve. He eventually breaks free of this control, with Parkman's help. Parkman: Goes home to his wife, with Molly in tow. Marital tension ensues. Gets sucked back into the story when the somebody demands Molly find the scary man, and she is psychically attacked by Maury. Play up the creepy angle with Maury (seriously, this is like finding out your dad is a child molester. They should have made a bigger deal about it.) Parkman's power becomes stronger as a result of having to battle Maury, and he gets a glimpse of the dangers of over-using that power (I kind of like this corruption theme with Matt.) Mohinder: Working with HRG to bring down the Company, gets on the inside, then begins to question his motives and whether he is doing the right thing. Super-virus, what's that? (Maybe, maybe have him develop something that inhibits powers, but also kills the subject after long-term use.) HRG: Bringing down the company, or attempting to, in order to protect his family, being a badass, yada, yada, yada (I don't dislike HRG, I just don't think there is much to say here.) Claire: West? Who's that? (Seriously, I got nothin' for her. Maybe use some of those ideas they got around to in Season 3, where she actually learns to defend herself.) Sylar: honestly, I'd prefer we didn't see him at all, have him vanish into the sewers for a season, but let's be realistic and assume the network won't have it. In that case, I'd also stick him in the Company lockup, for roughly the same reason as Peter - the Company is frightened that they can't beat Kensei's Brotherhood of Evil Supers, and they think a multi-powered super is the only thing that will be able to beat them. They keep Sylar de-powered through most of the first part of the season (possibly confused by whats her names illusions), trying to put a leash on the mad dog, psychologicaly speaking. When Peter escapes, they turn to Sylar - over Angela's objections - to destroy Adam's faction. Of course, the guy can't be trusted, whatever control they have over him fails, and he does his own, bloody thing. This may or may not involve helping the heroes at some point. Maya: Maya? Who's that? Kensei: Deserves a mention because, without the Uber-Virus (please, not two world shattering threats in a row) his motivations must change. I'm kind of thinking it could play out as more of an intercene war among the Twelve - the pro-active "let's heal the world by almost destroying it" faction, and the "look, let's just bag and tag the dangerous supers and stay hidden" faction. So Volume 2 would really be about the aftermath of Volume 1. It would also be about children following in the paths of their parents, continuing those conflicts or choosing not to. I could easily imagine some tension between Hiro and the Patrellis, if Hiro goes back in time and sees it is Nathan who pushed his dad over the building's edge. Oh look, work. I guess I had, um, better get back to that.
I would only change it to bring it in line with Kring's original plan about a fluid cast, where attrition is very high on cast turnover and we see lots of new powers. In Season 1 you cared about the characters because you didn't know who would survive at the end of it. When they became popular and the networks demanded the same actors be used it became a foregone conclusion they'd be back. So all tension went away.
All tension went away because the writers basically reset everything for the characters at the beginning of Season 2. All of their struggles in Season 1 were essentially meaningless. They definitely could have kept the cast going and kept the tension there. They just didn't know how.
Come up with an overall plan for the show. Each season will have a larger theme, as outlined below. S2 - The Death of the Heroes' Dreams of Normalcy. Early on, spend some time cleaning up after the mess of the finale. Then let the characters retreat to their respective corners. Do what they're doing now with Peter and Matt, namely that the heroes are trying to integrate their powers into their lives and/or ignore their powers. Start to reveal the backstory of the heroes and how they got their powers (the Generations idea.) By the end of the season, the heroes should realize once and for all that they simply cannot live normal lives. This would also be a good place to broach the Villains idea - that having powers isn't something these people can easily control, and can lead to terrible things. Kill Hiro and drop Ando from the plot. Kill Nikki and forget the triplets thing. Mohinder will never, ever, ever have superpowers. His role is to be the empathetic scientist who does what he can to help the heroes. Peter should keep his swiss-army-knife absorption powers. They can limit him by having using the powers harm his health so that he doesn't dare use his powers without having an extremely good reason, and even then, presumably some powers are more costly than others. Flight is not too costly; mind-control is very costly. Calibrate the cost to the value of the power. Forget about adding new characters willy-nilly; most of then have sucked. The good ones: Adam and Elle (who wouldn't be around long in any case since they couldn't keep Kristen Bell on TV). All time-travel-using heroes learn early on that time travel generally does more harm than good. That alone should prevent its overuse. Sylar can stay with the story throughout its whole run but should drop out of the storyline for long stretches so he doesn't wear out his welcome. If they want to pull the Gabriel Petrelli plotline (and I'm not necessarily opposed), they need to start foreshadowing it in early S2 so it doesn't seem so pulled out of the writers' posteriors. Make some reference to a child born between Nathan and Peter in age that died before he ever came home from the hospital and nobody likes to discuss that tragedy. Cast Peter Coyote as Arthur Petrelli and make him more interestingly sinister, the Godfather of mutants. He doesn't need to show up till S3. S3 - The Sh*t Hits the Fan. The end of S2 should have something truly catastrophic - half of NYC blows up for real or some such. This thwacks Nathan upside the head and he thinks he has to lock the heroes up for everyone's good. It's the Fugitives idea, but without character assasination for Nathan being the propelling factor. Nathan just needs a plausible motive. The heroes are definitely public knowledge by now. Revisit Micah, who has been living by his wits since his parents' death. Start to integrate him into the main cast. Mohinder should develop a therapy (not a cure) for the heroes, which will suppress their powers as long as they take it. He experiments on Sylar with it and gets him to become "normal" for a while, until he inevitably decides he prefers being a fun maniac to dull normality and falls of the wagon. Matt's attempts to use the therapy meet similar results - but that's because, as a cop, he can't stand the idea of not catching criminals by using his powers, particularly if he's put to some really tough test (rescuing a child who's been kidnapped by a pedophile ring or some such). I don't dislike killing Nathan at the end of S3, or even the way they did it. S4 - We Have Met the Enemy and They Are Us. The upshot of S3 should be that the heroes cannot just run around loose, doing as they please, since bad things will inevitably happen. This splits them into two camps, the "tame" ones who decide the lesser of the evils is to work for the Company, and the "feral" ones who are still deluded enough to think they can live without restraints. Matt and Mohinder will be tame, Peter and Micah will be feral. The others could go either way. Claire could be feral. S5 - Resolution. This should be the final season. Not sure what it should entail but there better be a kick-ass Peter vs Sylar showdown at the end. All TV shows have a regular cast that viewers expect to stick with the show, with major characters being killed off only rarely. So how do all those shows manage to hang onto their audience? My outline does have a lot of major character deaths but that's because I'm trying to get rid of the useless ones, and while Nathan is far from useless, I think you gotta kill some good characters too, just to maintain credibility. But I'm not taking a chainsaw to the cast.
After Season One I assumed they were going to form the X-Men and live together in a mansion responding to evil mutants. Why they continue to split up from each other I'll never understand. Safety in numbers.
This. While I didn't really expect them to start wearing superhero costumes and fight crime, I did expect them all to stick together to help each other out.
Not me. I cared because some of the characters had interesting underlying premises (Peter, Nathan, Mohinder, Matt) and some were played by interesting and talented actors (Nathan, Sylar, Noah) or at the very least, actors of middling talent who were well matched to the role (Peter, Mohinder, Matt). I wanted to see where the writers would take these characters over a few years (rashly assuming that the writers had the talent and imagination to see the potential of these characters, silly me. ) My opinion on who lived and who died during S1 was: kill the deadwood, keep the good ones. (Which is largely what ended up happening.) They can start killing off the good characters only when they've developed the characters to the point where the death is meaningful - season three at the minimum. Before that, it's empty sensationalism: oh look, we killed a "main character." So what? Changing the cast every year would just have killed the show faster. There's a reason you never see that happen with TV dramas - when a show grabs an audience, the usual reason is because the audience likes the characters. Kill the wrong character, lose a big chunk of the audience. Once a series has a few years under its belt, then a little pruning may be in order. It's not good for the audience to think nobody can ever die, but kill the wrong characters and your show will die. I would have found it totally implausible that they would have done this. They were all independent people with their own goals in life. Only Peter and Hiro were interested in using their powers to "save people," and both of them struck me as juvenile and likely to get into serious trouble without adult supervision. (Peter is still struggling with the right way to go about using his powers heroically, but he's made some progress in how he screws up; Hiro is mired on square one.) If Peter and Hiro had decided to start their own Superhero Club, it would have quickly led to disaster because neither is remotely mature enough to know how to handle their powers. As for safety in numbers, after S1, they didn't fully grasp that they were in danger from the general public or the authorities, who would view them them a threat. That plotline needed to be developed, which it was, badly (all that nonsense with Nathan suddenly deciding everyone needed to be locked up). And the best way to be safe was to be incognito, meaning they should scatter, and be less obvious. Because once the larger society realizes who and what they are, what would you have them do? Slaughter everyone who isn't a metahuman? They can't fight seven billion people. They had no natural loyalty to each other after S1, other than pre-existing family ties. There were a few incipient loyalties being forged - Peter and Claire, based on kinship; Peter and Mohinder, based on similarity of temperament - but they were too weak to motivate these characters suddenly changing their goals in life. S2 could have been used to show these and other ties being strengthened in a natural manner. That did happen with Matt and Mohinder - their ad hoc family with Molly was the right idea and should have been developed rather than dropped before it had a chance to go anywhere. When Micah was orphaned, he should have spent some time living on his own, by his wits, and then rejoining the other metahumans as the only people who could help and relate to him. By S3, a natural-feeling team could have started to coalesce - Matt, Peter and Mohinder's adventures during the Fugitives volume felt natural at that point, but would have felt awkward and imposed in S2. The team concept would be a good goal to work towards but someone had to put effort into writing that story and developing it over time. Mmaybe he'll share it with the rest of us before the show gets cancelled?
its really a shame Kring dropped the ball on this, & so soon after the first season. The really frustrating thing is that now nobody else is gonna want to try a similar concept b/c of the bad taste Heroes has left.
Thanks. But Heroes really does have some good ideas - it's like Stargate, you see all these good ideas and then you gnash your teeth because the writers don't do anything interesting with them! Here's one of my favorites: remember in early S3 when Peter needed to get Sylar's "seeing" ability, presumably (and I'm not even sure about this part, but it's the way it makes sense) because time travel is useless without knowing how to change time, and changing something as big an amorphous as time isn't something a normal person should have the first idea how to do effectively? So to save the world, Peter can't just travel through time, he needs to have Sylar's power which will let him see what, precisely, he needs to do. There you have a neat little solution to time travel: it's useless without also having a power that will drive the person using it insane. But Peter, being an overconfident idiot, tries it anyway, with disastrous results. Why let the guy off quickly by having all his powers, including the insanity-inducing one, nerfed? Let him be a nutcase for a few episodes and commit some horrendous murders in the course of changing the future and saving the world. But since he changed the future, the world doesn't seem to be in trouble anymore and he gets no credit. Meanwhile, he still did commit murders and the cops aren't going to accept "but I did it to save the world" as an excuse. Presumably Nathan at least will believe that he did it for the greater good and being a Senator, will pull strings to protect his psychotic little brother (remember in S1 when Nathan was the one implying Peter belonged in a looney bin?) And that situation has all the makings of scandal that will soon blow up in everyone's faces.