The achilles heal of this show was some of the powers the characters had. Sylar and Peter are too powerful. And so is Hiro. These guys can do anything, so they tend to overshadow the other characters, or else the show relies on copious amounts of plot induced stupidity in order to prevent them from doing so.
Is Heroes going to get season 5
- Thread starter startrekrcks
- Start date
^Which is part and parcel of what I said above about how the characters weren't meant to last beyond one season. Once Peter and Sylar both reached their respective power levels, there was nowhere to go but a big, decisive climactic battle. The only way to continue them afterward was either to contrive ways for them not to use their limitless powers or to change the nature of their powers permanently. That was one of the smartest things that was done in S3; they completely removed Peter's original, limitless power-absorbing ability and replaced it with a more limited, one-power-at-a-time ability that's far more dramatically viable. As for Sylar, though, they still haven't found a truly effective way of handling his character.
If the show does get one more season, I'll watch, just so I can marvel at how bad it is.
I long for the first season.
I long for the first season.
I'm just wondering after a brave new world they will make another season of Heroes
I remain in the 'Hopefully Not' camp but given how desperate NBC are you never know.
The show is too far gone to really be fixed, at this point, but I guess it would be nice for them to get a short season to wrap things up. The only way the writers can redeem is if the last ep ends with them actually destroying the Earth. Just beforehand, Hiro realizes that he's been a childish prig, and travels into the distant past. He finds the first person who carried the "special" gene, and kills them, thereby erasing all the events of the show.
maybe that is the answer to the problem of characters being too powerful,^Or worse - Heroes does the most dreaded word in comics...
CRISIS!
What if a new character (or Hiro) developed the ability to move to other dimensions, each week meeting new versions of our Heroes, and helping solve a problem in that dimension?
Would make it harder for the other characters to try and grow as people however, since each week its not far off a whole new character.
I'd just have some sort of reality altering event that sends us back to just after season one.
The whole thing would be one giant retcon bomb with no need to pay too much attention to what has been said about the heroes' powers. That way we can give Peter his old power back but come up with sensible ways of limiting it - like the idea I had where Peter could duplicate powers of anyone close by but could only recall the powers of people he had an emotional connection with - say Claire or Nathan etc.
The whole thing would be one giant retcon bomb with no need to pay too much attention to what has been said about the heroes' powers. That way we can give Peter his old power back but come up with sensible ways of limiting it - like the idea I had where Peter could duplicate powers of anyone close by but could only recall the powers of people he had an emotional connection with - say Claire or Nathan etc.
They already came up with a sensible way of limiting it -- replacing it permanently with a different power that only lets him borrow one ability at a time. That works fine at keeping him from becoming too powerful; I don't see any reason to replace it with something more convoluted.
That power just turned him in to Captain Redundant. All he could do is what the guy standing next to him could. May as well kill him off.
Let's put it this way, the Justice League manages to exist and have a point while still having Superman as a member as well as other heroes like Wonder Woman who are far more powerful than most of the other members. Batman has no powers at all yet sits at the same table as the rest.
There's no reason why some characters can't be that much more powerful than the others.
That is based on the assumption that Heroes characters are defined solely by what powers they have. That's a fundamental misreading of the entire series. Heroes isn't a show about superpowers, it's a show about people trying to cope with the consequences of superpowers. At its best, meaning the first and fourth seasons, it's been driven by character above all, and the powers have merely been story devices to explore character. What matters isn't which powers the characters have, but what they choose to do with those powers and what their choices reveal about them as people. Part of the reason the second and third seasons were so bad is that they forgot that -- they made the mistake of assuming it was a show about powers and plot twists rather than a character-driven show.
Peter Petrelli is a character defined by his empathy. That's why he was given a power-duplicating ability in the first place, as a symbol of that empathy (though the later-season producers who gave the same power to his evil father missed that allegorical point). That contrasted with Sylar, who had a similar ability but one that was more about taking from others than sharing with them, suiting his predatory characterization.
Besides, if the power to reproduce other people's powers one at a time is "redundant" and useless, how is it that Rogue has been such a successful and prominent member of the X-Men for 29 years?
But that's at the expense of saddling the most godlike members with convenient and contrived weaknesses and giving the villains almost constant access to the source of that weakness. With Superman, every villain seems to end up in possession of kryptonite sooner or later. Making a character too powerful is poor writing, and too often it's "fixed" with the equally poor writing of a handy, gimmicky weakness like that. It's better storytelling to make your character more limited. That's why John Byrne reduced Superman's power set when he rebooted the character in the '80s, and why Timm, Dini, and Burnett did the same -- even more so at first, reducing him almost to his Fleischer-cartoon-era limitations -- when they brought Superman to animation.
His power now, however, is not empathic. It's just pure duplication of any power he comes across with no connection to the person he copies it from. His father did not have the same power, he stole powers the same way Peter now copies them. By giving him this new power they've abandoned the empathic side of the character.
Well, it helps that X-Men has often had significantly better writers than this show.
However, Rogue has never remained static. They've changed the nature of her powers over and over and over again. In addition, Peter does not have the weakness she did. He can touch people without harming them or taking their memories.
You're right about Kryptonite - see my comments on your average episode of Smallville (it would help it that show's writers would understand the effect Kryptonite is supposed to have on Kryptonians), but I would argue that just taking a superhero's powers away is worse. Heroes does this over and over and over again, crippling their characters so they can't use their powers until the season finale.
I'm not going through it all again, but IIRC I came up with a list of roughly twenty occasions in the first three seasons where one of the "good guys" had been artificially hobbled in order to get them out of the way.
I'd say that description is a better fit to his original power. Back then, he automatically absorbed any power from anyone he was within several meters of, whether he knew them or not. He didn't even have to be aware of their existence in order to clone their powers. Now, he has to make direct physical contact with a person and choose to absorb their power in order to acquire it. That seems much more symbolic of empathy, because it requires a conscious choice to connect and skin-to-skin touching, and is one-on-one rather than generalized and impersonal. It's more intimate now, not less.
You're interpreting my analogy way too mechanistically and thereby missing my entire point. My point is that the technicalities of the powers are not the important thing -- that character is the root from which all else springs (when the writers are doing it right), and the powers are peripheral. So changing the powers doesn't change the character. It isn't Peter's powers that define who he is. What defines him is what he chooses to do with his life and how he chooses to relate to the people around him, regardless of which powers he has or whether he has any at all.
That's indisputable, but if anything it proves my point -- that you can't pre-emptively say any type of power is useless, because it depends on the skill with which the concept is developed.
This is exactly why Peter's current, one-at-a-time absorbing power is better from a storytelling standpoint than his original multiple-absorption power. Since he's now permanently less powerful, there's no further need for any gimmicks to shut down his godlike abilities, no more stupid amnesia plots or time-jumping him out of the narrative. You're describing what the show used to do with his character, and that was lousy, but they solved the problem once and for all when they gave him his current power.
Exactly -- the first three seasons. The writing in the fourth season was better because it depended less on those contrivances and more on character-driven storytelling. True, there are still some occurrences of the problem, like trapping Sylar inside Matt's head, then giving him super-impotence, then having him do an instant reform to hero status. I admit freely that Sylar's arc in the fourth season was not one of its strengths. But changing the nature of Peter's powers spared him from having to be subjected to such lame gimmickry any longer. And Hiro's powers were dialed back somewhat as well, so that he was subject to more limitations. From a story standpoint, giving your characters limitations is good, so long as you go about it the right way. So long as you don't start out making them unlimited and then temporarily hobbling them in contrived ways.
(bolding mine)
If I may butt in - while I definitely agree with the overall points you're making, that's not entirely true actually.
Peter accidentally absorbed Emma's abilities without knowing she had any; though that doesn't decrease his empathy any, since it was from that event he connected with Emma to help her understand her ability.
Yes, and that struck me at the time as an error, or at least an anomaly, because it contradicted how his power was portrayed in every other instance, before and since. We saw plenty of cases where he touched people without absorbing their abilities, so it wasn't automatic. With that one exception, it was clearly portrayed as a matter of choice. And it still bugs me that they never justified why it happened accidentaly with Emma.
You could just write it off as an error, or that they still weren't entirely settled on how Peter's power was going to manifest. Maybe the writer just forgot in that particular instance? Although... really, the entire sequence of events falls apart entirely if Peter intentionally absorbing her power.
Certainly not the biggest
moment Heroes has done.Similar threads
