New ideas are worthless if you waste them by going back to your old standbys.
Yeah that's what I mean about them not paying off their ideas well. They either drop the ideas or the payoff is dopey and makes you wonder why they bothered. They need someone who can channel their ideas into a competently structured story.
The fun part of writing is coming up with ideas, but the important part is the boring work of structuring and organizing those ideas. The
Heroes writers have come up with lots of ideas - I'm trying to think of what they haven't come up with yet (one thing: a splitting-in-two hero) but they've been using them so poorly that my main prescription for them would be a big do-over. Go back to the Generations, Villains and Fugitives ideas and do them right this time.
You're right that the
Heroes writers use too many contrived crutches to make their badly-thought-through plotlines work out. One of their favorite crutches is making their characters lose powers. Another is simply making their characters stupid, and
forget they have powers that they could use to solve the problem in about ten seconds. To me, that's even worse than the losing-powers crutch because it creates contempt for the characters that really undermines everything. But the crutches are a symptom of their larger problem of not thinking plotlines through to their conclusion and making sure the writing is reasonably tight and free from stupidities.
You mark my words, there will be some power disabling person in the next season to explain why Peter and this new Company can't do anything to stop the new villains.
It's frustrating that they have the perfect kryptonite for Peter right under their stupid noses, yet they won't use it. They introduced the notion that Peter glomming more and more powers harms his health, particularly when he uses those powers, that his seeming super-duper-power of getting powers inadvertently is actually a huge handicap.
That's a good notion because it taps into the mythological basis of hero stories. In this case, the idea that the gods will give the hero a power, but only if he can use it wisely. If he uses it unwisely, it will destroy him.
Peter's challenge is not to get more and more powers, it's to gain wisdom so that he is not destroyed by his powers. It's the Luke Skywalker myth. Luke's kryptonite is the Dark Side; Peter's is the fact that he cannot control obtaining powers, and each new one makes the situation less controllable and more dangerous. By introducing a kryptonite that is character-based and has the force of ancient myth behind it, the writers could make Peter's story seem cool, epic and never stupid and contrived.
I think the writers have all the solutions to their problems already set up and ready to go. They just need to
see those solutions.
