fix Heroes (spoilers thru S3 finale)

1. Restore Peter and Hiro's powers to their season one levels and properly explore them and the costs, dangers and limits of using them. If Peter's ability to recall powers is dependent on empathy, then say he can't recall powers from people he doesn't empathize with (but can still copy them if they're in the room with him). Say Hiro can't actually change the past and can only observe without causing one of those rifts he talked about.

In addition to that, never EVER depower another character. There's a reason why the Women in Refrigerators types treat depowering the same as rape.

2. Introduce lesser villains. It doesn't have to be the Big Bad or nothing. If there are all these people with powers, and there's no Company to catch them, surely some of them would be using their powers for criminal acts. The return of Tracy Strauss is a good idea here.

3. Make Claire less useless. Perhaps instead of the constant I Hate You/I Love You relationship she has with her father, she should be the One of Them to his One of Us. Her power is very passive right now, so she should learn to fight from her dad.

4. Mohinder is very much like the X-Men's Beast. There are some interesting ideas for him there.

5. Add a new female hero. This show is turning in to a sausage fest. Failing that, bring back Monica. Her power had a lot of potential. Or, introduce Barbara as a hero but keep Tracy around and let Ali Larter play both parts.

6. Cut out the ridiculous Light Side/Dark Side of the Force idea. It's not universally true, but the good guys often seem to have very passive powers while the bad guys get more active, aggressive powers.

Remember how the Jedi never used Force Lightning because it's a Dark Side power ? That's what I'm getting at. No ability is good or evil, it's how it's used. Superman has heat vision but doesn't go around burning bank robbers to death.

7. Have the heroes and villains use their powers in smarter ways.

8. Stop frustrating the audience - this connects to #1, but they made a big deal out of Peter copying Sylar's powers and them finally having the big fight but then Peter only copied his Shape Shifting and the fight was behind closed doors.

Similarly, why hasn't Ando tried boosting the other Heroes' powers ? Why wouldn't Peter ask why his powers don't work the way they used to ? Nobody ever asks the simple question "why ?"

 

WHAT!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Anyway, my thoughts:

• Give Peter his original ability back.
• Give Hiro his original abilities back.
• Forget about Sylar for a long while. IMO opinion they should have got Parkman to do his Jedi mind trick on him so he can no longer suffer "the hunger" and then give the guy some councelling and have him become a good guy.
• Bring in a new villain who has only one power but that power makes him/her more powerful than all the other heroes put together. I think a villain with the ability to generate force fields would suffice. He/she would be protected by pretty much everyone else's abilities and the forcefield could even protect them from Parkmans mind tricks and even protect them from Hiros time freezing capability. It could also be dangerous for Ando to use his ability on him/her because it causes the expansion of the shield which could be enough to wipe out several city blocks. The shield ability could also be used offensively ie. like on the Fantastic 4. Their motivation for being a bad guy is that they believe the world has gone to shit and everyone is greedy and everyone must pay for their greed.
• Claire for me has become pure boredom. Give her a costume and have her go off crime fighting or something.
• Bring in a new character with the ability to dimension jump. There are numerous alternate realities and he is capable of jumping between them all and jumps into this one. He's a good guy and he's been jumping between different realities warning the heroes of the cataclysms that have occurred in other dimensions in the hopes of preventing them happening in all of the dimensions. I think an interesting episode could be this new character enlists Hiro's help (after he get's his powers back ) he jumps Hiro back to his own reality and asks Hiro to send him back through time to try and save his own reality. There are some cool possibilities with this ability, for example in one episode he might get thrown from a building and he's falling to his death so he jumps himself to another dimension he's been to before that's become a water world from melting ice caps, he jumps to this other reality and falls into the water, climbs out then jumps back.
• IMO we just don't see enough of peoples abilities being used, it's all talk talk talk. I want more action. I think we've seen Andos power about 3 or 4 times in bouts of mere seconds. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY!!

OR and this is a big OR: The character I just mentioned with the shield ability could be the good guy and the dimension jumping guy could be the bad guy. imagine if they killed the dimension jumping guy thinking they'd won only for another of the infinite number of them in alternate universes to show up. Just imagine how scary his power is, he could touch someone and send them into another reality never to be able to return, goodbye claire bear.
Also just cos this guy from the alternate reality if a bad guy doesn't mean the same dimension jumping guy from this reality is a bad guy. Could be interesting to watch the interaction between two of the same people from different realities.

 

Personally, I'd have Hiro begin to loose touch with reality, being sicker and sicker until he decides whats happened isnt worth all the pain and suffering he and others endured. Ando supercharges him (you know, what his whole frakin power is to begin with) and he goes back to Kirby plaza on the night they killed sylar - except this time Hiro shows up before Younger Hiro does and outright cuts his head off - preventing any form of recovery. This last act leaves Hiro on the verge of death, and as Younger Hiro shows up, Older Hiro says something like "You didnt have to become the monster to be a hero..." or some such.

From there on you have a clean slate to fix all the mistakes the show made from that point on. I liked D.L. - Sure, he wasnt the best character on the show, but DL, Nikki and Micah were a family, moreso than the Petrellis. Same as Mohinder who was the normal person who was caught up in it all.

I feel as the show moved on it lost the touchstones for the viewers, the likeable characters, the powerless humans doing the best they can and still outshining the superheroes from time to time and an ordinary family who isnt the head of some super secret organisation just trying to get through it all in one piece.

This way, we could reintroduce fan favourate Kristen Bell as Elle and just work out what the characters motivations are and what they are setting out to do. Drama works best when the Characters act like real people and dont fall victim to idiot plots like the show has been retreading since Season 2.

 

No reset buttons, keep the heroes together in small if they have to, give Claire something of a normal life with her family and no more terrible futures to be averted.

 

I fucking hate Ali Larter, she's such a dry and soulless actor.

 

I agree, she sucks but Tracy Strauss was a triplet, we've seen two of them it's only fair we see the 3rd triplet and they should kill her off too.
Now the question is, what power/ability should this 3rd triplet have and how should they kill her off?

 

You know what? Maybe the joke's on us because I think that's what they are doing. They start every volume with new characters, they just don't change their names or the actors playing them.

That's why the characterization is so wildly inconsistent.

 

He was a good idea but the actor they hired wasn't up to the task. Yknow who I would have preferred? Peter Coyote. He looks like he could be Nathan and Peter's dad and he does "subtle creepiness" very well.

Maybe they can bring Arthur back with amazing shapeshifting powers and that will excuse the change in casting? After all, he isn't "really" dead, just because there's a bullet lodged in the sweet spot.

Here's how to bring time travel back into the plotline without it being a story killer: without visions to guide them, nobody knows what to do in the future or past to make things "okay." You could try something you think is going to work and it just fraks things up worse. They've already sorta learned this lesson, I think.

Angela's visions are too vague and open to interpretation to provide decent guidance. No other visionary character should be allowed (nerf Matt's vision-quest powers if he still has them) because they are writers' crutches. The only way to get time travel to work is in combo with Sylar's seeing power, but that makes the weilder insane. So that rules out time travel as a useful power, while leaving open one possible way to use it, but only at extremely high risk, and only when the stakes are extremely high.

 

I think if there is going to be a new villain, they need it to be someone who is completely unconnected to all of the characters.

It would be awesome though, if somehow this new villain was working behind the scenes, or perhaps they were the reason for the eclipse (that could be one of their powers, or side effects).

 

They went wrong by putting it on the air in the first place.

What NBC shoulda done was reject the pilot.

Failing that, the cheerleader and Hiro shoulda died in the first season.

 

I'd be happy if they'd re-set Peter to the S1 situation. The limitation that using powers harms his health is enough to stop him from reading everyone's minds as a matter of course, stopping time, etc, and therefore killing every plotline before it gets a chance to get going. I think the boom-problem was caused by Ted's power specifically. So the danger to Peter would simply be that using his powers could cripple him physically or kill him.

Because they've done so well with every other show they've tried! By NBC standards, Heroes is still a decent show, how sad is that.

 

NBC need's to use Hiro to go back in time and fire that hack Tim Kring and his staff, give Bryan Fuller his own staf and fix the show. I am never one to join the wagon and bash a show so much that I watch and never had the problems other people had with season 2 but OMFG the 3rd season has been so bad plotwise, boring beyond belief in other times and has given ZERO ZERO ZERO payoff.

I might not watch season 4.

 

Perhaps it's the Chicago Fan in me, but I have hope things might turn around, in spite of the missteps of the finale. The fact that Angela and HRG are reforming the Company to help people with abilites is a step in the right direction. I agree that a new adversary is needed. Someone with some real power (and not just superpowers). Not some wishy washy, flip flopper like Sylar. In the right hands, Sylar could have been a weapon in the hands of a far more insidious, more higher up person. And the adversary has to think he or she is fully justified in their actions, and not some 2 dimensional Trekian moustache twirler. There was a lot of potential in person like Linderman. And lines have to be drawn this time. We should know what everyone's motivations are this late in the game. I hope Kring does the right thing and maintain the day to day production and goes to the network hat in hand and gets the cash while Fuller is allowed to use all his creative prowess unfettered.

 

Yeah, but among all the dry and soulless actresses on TV today (especially on the CW), she's smokin' hot!

 

I stopped watching at the end of the woeful S2 and, from what I have been told, it gets even worse after THAT.

Apparently there are now future versions battling mirror universe versions and sometimes people are good and then just go bad........sounds like a complete mess!


Cancel this turkey and come up with something new.

 

Instead of ripping off X-Men Plots, let's rip off some Legion of Superheroes plots.

Five Year Gap: When the original LSH book was cancelled and brought back, they skipped 5 years. And in comics, a lot can happen in 5 years!. Imagine if Heores just skipped 1 year? Who is a hero, who is a villan and who are these people? Is that Sylar or Nathan? One of the things that made the first year so good was that we were still discovering who these people were, Past & Present.

Iron Curtain of Time: The Legion has Time Travel, but it also has the Time Trapper. He lives at the end of time and really doesn't like people pissing in his pool. If you give Hiro back his full abilities, then there should be others with similar powers. Imagine somone from the past traveling to our time, should they be allowed to return? Imagine someone from the future coming back to stop all time travel, are they a hero or a villian?

Substitute Legion: Not everyone with powers is a hero or a villan. Sometimes the powers just are not very useful or could be like the Jokers in Wild Cards and have negative effects. Are there people with powers hiding from the world like the Morlocks of X-Men? Are the monsters of legends; vampires, werewolves, ghosts and witches actually people with powers?

Fatal Five: There have to be villians to oppose the heroes and they need to be EVIL! None of this shades of grey stuff, the Fatal Five destroy planets! The so-called villians from Level 5 were pathetic! We have superpowers, so let's go rob a bank! Please...
The original concept was that the people's powers were based on their personalities. Peter empathized with people, Nathan was "above" other people, Hiro wanted to escape being mundane, etc. Humanity has a dark side and the villians should show this in all it's darkness.

 

Manipulation? Nefarious? Nah. They just need money. And they'd to do it make money, likely in fairly reasonable ways.

Now, most standard superhero powers do not lend themselves well to enhancing corporate productivity. This is simply the nature of the genre rather than any specific limit, however. Certain powers are extraordinary money-saving when applied correctly.

Healing is the most obvious, or it should be. Linderman made a fortune in organized crime, but he could have made even more as a medical doctor. The ability to cure the incurable fetches a high premium.

Telepathy has obvious uses as well. Babylon 5 had commercial telepaths to ensure honesty in business dealings, which does make sense. It's also fairly useful for short range communication in environments where radios won't work or are too dangerous to use.

Teleportation has the most obvious commercial applications, freight transport. Instantaneous transmission of goods without the expenditure of fuel. Thats worth millions a year, at least, probably billions or trillions depending on how much can be teleported at once.

And Candice was a total idiot. With her ability to project illusions, she would have made a fortune in the entertainment industry. There would have been no need for special effects, or even actors. She could have just bought an interesting spec script and pointed a camera at an empty room for two hours, projecting the illusion of a kickass $250 million dollar blockbuster movie.

Sylar's base power allows him to revolutionize any field of science with minimal study. Five minutes of examining subatomic particles and he could give us an accurate theory of everything. Proper application of his powers could lead to quintillions of dollars of profit in the long term.

Weather Controllers are absurdly versatile in their potential applications. They can do everything from making airplanes fly faster and more efficiently to improving crop yeilds. The fuel savings produced by a weather controller manipulating the winds is enough to have any air freight company employ as many as is possible.

Personally, I think they went the wrong direction with recreating the Company. Instead, they should have gone fully public, and have Nathan introduce a Bill to create an independent agency to perform the functions of the Company with complete transparency, autonomy, and accountability. Essentially, make it an independent federal agency, which Congress has the power to create. That agency would have three branches, one law enforcement, one educational, and one scientific.
The primary purpose is to identify people with powers and to teach them how to use their powers ethically, for which the educational branch exists. People don't have to accept training, unless their power is both lethal and difficult or impossible to control. If it is, they the Agency can get a court order requiring power suppression if the training offer isn't accepted. This way, nuclear man incidents can be avoided without being absurdly totalitarian. Convicted felons with lethal or invasive (mind control and such) powers are required to undergo power suppression treatments as a matter of course, just as felons are prohibited from owning firearms. Those with passive and non-invasive powers, such as regeneration, water breathing, and flight, however, are not.

The enforcement branch is tasked with aiding law enforcement in cases involving superpowered individuals, both local and federal, and has ties to both the DOJ and DHS, but isn't under either of them. They can assert investigatory jurisdiction in any case where a person with an ability is a suspect or a victim and they can make arrests, but they don't have the authority to initiate prosecutions or hold prisoners.
Their primary role is to develop procedures and protocols to allow the preexisting justice system to deal with superpowered criminals.

And, of course, the science branch would fund and perform peer-reviewed research using all commonly accepted ethical and procedural rigor.

PR would also be a huge concern. The idea is for the Agency to give a lovable trustworthy public face to superpowers, to assuage potential public fears.

It is the lack of transparency, checks, balances, and safeguards that led to The Company's corruption, and that corruption will eventually seep back in if it is allowed to remain a secret organization. They're also not going to be able to keep the secret forever, not without resorting to assassinations and mind-wiping again.

My personal suggesting for fixing the show, make Hayden Panettiere train with a USMC close combat instructor until she can reliably kill a man with her bare hands, and then with a movie fight choreographer until she learns to apply those skills without actually killing her acting partner.