Nowadays, everyone seems to be certain degrees of heels because it's "kewl" to be the badass. But to me, it's boring to see various degrees of the same personality. The same thing is happening with Heroes.
The way to do a story about villains is to forget the WWF as a model (I certainly hope that's not what they've been using but it might help explain why the writing is so bad) is to find the specific and unique "villain" in each character so that all the characters are different and true to their own selves.
All good characters have some weakness or deficiency. If they were perfect, they'd be a bore. The
Heroes characters have some nice ways their unique villainy could be pulled out of them:
Matt means well but he's an action guy and he doesn't think in abstractions of good and evil. That would make him very prone to abusing his mental powers without stopping to realize that what he's doing can't be justified just because he means well and the ends are "good." Like in Five Years Gone.
Mohinder is in this story because he is motivated by what should motivate a scientist, a love of exploration and uncovering amazing things. With just a few changes, his dopey mad scientist plotline this season could have been perfect for him.
Nathan overcame his ambition, cynicism and selfishness in the S1 finale long enough to become a hero, but those traits didn't just vanish. They are part of his personality and can re-emerge under the right circumstances. Stupidly enough, his "villain" story seems to be about him being idealistic, stupid and naive, which are
not his villain traits or any sorts of traits he's ever possessed! Those belong to his brother...
Peter can get carried away by his martyr complex and angry sense of self-righteousness when he isn't wallowing in self-pity. To top it all off, he's immature, kinda dense and lacks personal insight. In short, he's a disaster waiting to happen. Give him unlimited power, and villainy would be the next logical step. All the while of course he'd be so enmeshed in his self-justifying fantasies of heroism, nobody would be able to get through to him to kick some common sense into him.
There was never any reason to bring on new characters like Flint or Knox to be villains. Those guys are duds compared to the wonderful potential of the incipient villains they've already got on the payroll.
The idea of
Heroes: Villains was a great one. But man oh man, these writers are horrifically bad at it. It's like they know what the right thing to do is, and then they do the opposite!
Apparently each writer is given one storyline/character to work on and they write the scenes with those characters, which are then given to the episode writer who stitches them all together. This supposedly makes it all go faster. The reason given is that production needs to be able to shoot at a given location all at once, so if there is more than one episode at that location they need all those scripts ready. That may be true...but it's the crappiest way of writing a TV show I've ever heard. I'm surprised it got a whole good season out.
Oy! That sounds like a recipe for deliberately sabotaging the show. Were the producers who got fired responsible for that nonsense? If so, I'm glad they got the boot. And I wonder if a lot of S1 weren't written before production got underway and therefore there was more time for revision and adding overall coherence. It's very odd that it's so much better than S2 and S3.
