Second-best season of "Heroes"

The general consensus seems to be that the show’s first season was the best. But which season was the second-best?

And should anyone actually think that Season 1 wasn’t the best, I included it in this poll as well.

 

Fugitives, but this I stopped watching after that.

 

After the absolute shit-fest of the entirety of season 3... I looked back on the mediocre season 2 with a new reverence.

I didn't bother watching any of season 4. Season 3 was the death of Heroes for me.

 

Fugitives, definately. I thought it was a step in an interesting direction. I've really lost my patience with season 4 though about 7 episodes in.

 

Generations. The new characters were good - Adam, Bob, Monica and Elle - and the last 4-5 episodes were all very good. Unlike the incoherent, twist-for-a-sake-of-a-twist every five minutes volume 3, the dull as ditchwater volume 5 or the reasonable but ultimately stupid volume 4.

I'd rank the show 1, 2, 4, 3 then 5.

 

Interesting question. I gotta go with the much-maligned (but what isn't? ) Villains. They may have largely botched a promising premise, but there was a fair amount of fun-in-the-moment stuff. Peter and Sylar's bizarre but kinda touching alliance. The notion (never really followed up on) that to use time travel effectively and save the world, Peter would have to sacrifice his sanity by glomming Sylar's powers. An attempt (also abortive) to solve the Sylar Problem by "taming him down" to a point where he could interact with the other characters by giving him what he (arguably) wanted all along - a sense of belonging by being a member of the powerful Petrelli family. Sylar and Elle's cool Bonnie & Clyde routine.

Yes, it was all reversed by the end of the volume and didn't add up to zip, but for a while at least I could delude myself that the show was going somewhere at last...

Maybe I should watch it again, but I can't recall liking much about Generations and that's when I really started to lose faith in the show. Elle, Adam and Bob were worthwhile additions, but they were counteracted by the utter boredom of the Japan plotline, the wtf-ness of the Ireland plotline, and the sheer stupidity of the Maya & Alejandro plotline.

What I recall liking: the basic idea of Peter having amnesia and hooking up with petty criminals who would take advantage of his powers. Another plotline-to-nowhere, but the idea was good. Sylar's road trip was fun only because it was fun watching Sylar be oozingly eeeeevil and sweating in the hot desert sun. So once again, we have a smattering of fun elements in an ocean of stupidity.

Or I may be getting this mixed up with Genesis. I don't remember where one ended and the other began.

 

Reversed by the end of the volume? Most of that stuff was reversed by the end of the episode it happened in!

 

It was reversed, counter-reversed and then counter-counter-reversed. But until the end of the volume, you didn't know where the merry-go-round would end.

 

Nope, but I sure did feel sick

 

That's what I mean. It's fun until you throw up.

 

Season two. While it took forever to get going at least the story made sense unlike season three and it had interesting new characters unlike season four.

 

Best volume was "Villains". Second best... tie between "Generations" and the first season. I think S2-3 (NOT counting Fugitives which was lame!) is unfairly maligned.

 

Villains really gave me a headache trying to keep up with what they were doing. If they hadn't backtracked and left Sylar as a Petrelli, and left him somewhat calmed-down, and left him and Elle together, then perhaps the show might have started to get somewhere.

The show has gone off the rails so many times now it's funny!

 

What they needed to do with Villains, and rest assured, this is just a partial list:

1. Stick with the notion that to use time travel effectively requires also having the ability to know what to change - Sylar's "seeing" ability - and without that ability, time travel is pointless. This will stop the time travelers from embarking on pointless stories. It would be nicely ironic for that ability to be part of the mix, but rarely used, because it's not actually all that useful.

2. Establish that the S1 finale, in which half of NYC was not blown up, was just a temporary fix and in fact set in motion something far worse. (This may actually have happened - is the planet still due to crack in two? I can't recall if this plotline is still in effect or if it's just one of the many that have been dropped.)

3. Establish that Peter has to obtain Sylar's "seeing" ability to stop the coming catastrophe. Don't just have him get the power and then lose it before this plotline goes anywhere! Carry it through to some impactful conclusion, such as, he saves the world but the insanity drives Peter to do something truly awful such as killing a major character (and for a better reason than that the character is useless and should die.)

Claire obviously would have the most impact but that may be too much for Peter - don't want to drive him over the edge. The best option is that he kills Ando - he'll definitely feel bad about killing a sweet guy like that, and it will mean something for the audience - and that will have the added advantage of giving Hiro a chance for a character direction, namely does he forgive Peter for being insane at the time (after all, he was just doing something loopy in order to save the world - Hiro should understand that!) or does he go all Badass Hiro and pick up a samurai sword?

Or come up with something else, but it must be impactful - it changes Peter and it changes the plotline.

4. Cast Peter Coyote as Arthur Petrelli. The guy they got was awful. Peter Coyote is one of those fun actors who can make something out of a role even when it sucks. Of course, Arthur should not be written so that he sucks. He should be a charming megalomaniac who has been used to extreme power for so long that he's convinced of his own right to obtain as much power as possible.

After decades of stealing powers, he's pretty much got them all. His main concern is to re-establish his power and pass his legacy on to whichever of his three sons is the most deserving.

Gabriel is not Angela's son - I'd keep Virginia as his mom. After Nathan's birth, and testing determined that he just would have lame-ass flying power (forget the notion of artificial powers, that's dopey and unnecessary), Arthur figured that Angela might not be a good genetic match for producing the successor he had in mind. So he committed bigamy in order to give himself more options. If he had the splitting power, that would be simple. He might have married more women than just Angela and Virginia. That would be a good element to leave open and use later, or not.

I'm not sure whether Arthur should also be the watchmaker. Maybe they could establish that watchmaking is his hobby. If he were split in two, he could be a lawyer named Petrelli and a watchmaker named Grey very easily.

He stays with Virginia till Gabriel is an adolescent and then bails, secure knowing he has at least one son with the "right" kind of power. In the meantime, Angela has given him another with another flavor of the "right" kind of power. So Arthur has two successors who he plans to pit against each other.

Of course the difficulty is, 1) Nathan is the most natural leader among all his sons, 2) Peter is unlikely to fight anyone for power, and 3) Gabriel would jump at the chance to run his own mutant empire but he's too unstable. Cutting open your employees' heads is not an effective managerial style. As stable as Gabriel would like to be, in order to make daddy happy and inherit the kingdom, he simply cannot be stable long-term.

There won't be any ping-pong between Gabe being good and evil; the struggle will be internal, between his need for power and his need to kill. Power and killing used to be the same side of the coin for him, and now they're opposite sides - he's his own worst enemy. That's how you solve the Sylar problem (for a while).

I don't know what story you create from all these elements, but add in the fact that Peter will no longer be able to sit in judgment of Gabriel's psychotic behavior quite so much anymore, and Nathan will stop dithering and directly battle Arthur to keep either of his unstable brothers from obtaining power (and to protect Peter, who is in bad shape after killing Ando or whatever), and the battle between all five members of the Petrelli family could be fascinating. All the material was there, the writers just didn't come close to putting it together correctly.

5. Forget about Elle teaching Sylar how to get powers without cutting heads open. Sylar is Mr. Cutting Heads Open. Keep it that way.

6. If Sylar is battling Nathan for power and Nathan is protecting Peter and Hiro wants to kill Peter, that might make Sylar and Hiro natural allies. Hmm, that has some fun potential...

Okay that's enough for now. I could keep going, trust me.

 

Season two, at least Peter spent most of that season unnerfed.

 

I'd have to go with Villains as well, or at least the first half before all the eclipse nonsense which finally saw me ditch the show.

Generations was a bit more consistent, but it was boring as hell.

 

This is a dubious honor at best, but I would rate Villains as the "best" or least horrible of the seasons that weren't the first season. At least the big bad was fairly compelling. Fugitives is what turned me off of the show for good with the whole Nathan / Sylar thing. Talk about character assassination.

 

...I just realized I cannot even remember who the big bad was for "Villians." Was that Peter's father?

 

^ It was the writing team. Seriously, the three steps to ruining the show after the lacklustre-but-had-an-excuse second season:

Step 1: Kill Adam, one of the better new characters and better actors an episode after reviving him FOR NO REASON
Step 2: Waste two hours of everyone's time with the most nonsensical eclipse in TV history. Honestly, entire essays could be written about the number of things that were wrong, stupid or just plain bullshit about that two-parter. And they wouldn't be short essays either.
Step 3: Spend a whole episode retconning half of season one in a retarded manner
Step 4: Kill Elle (see Step 1 above)

Those 4 things combined, if not in isolation, are what really killed my Heroes love.

 

Yup. I thought the whole father-brother-brother-brother angle was kinda good.