Re: Fringe: "Concentrate and Ask Again" 2/4 on FOX - Grading & Discuss
Also in S1 Heroes favor was the fact that its season one arc was narratively coherent and when all the pieces came together it made sense as a whole.
The problem with Heroes later on was the writing. The S1 characters had completed their journey for the sake of the particular story Kring had envisioned but NBC forced him to keep them around and he obviously didn't want to write about them anymore. Also the writers crammed way too much story into later seasons. They didn't realize that they should have introduced two or three parallel storylines to span the season the way traditional dramas had been doing for years. Instead they didn't bother to develop them or give them satisfying payoffs but rather they jumped from one to the next treating them as plot points.
I have to disagree. S1 of Heroes was one of if not the most consistent season of tv ever.--sff or otherwise--all the episodes were at least decent and there wasn't one bad or awful episode to be had.. There was virtually no filler, the story moved along at a good clip and had plenty of intriguing mysteries, effective attention-grabbing cliffhangers. I'll grant you the series was very plot-centric and the characters were mainly there to provide exposition and be action figures but at least they were enjoyable unlike the Fringe cast.
Also in S1 Heroes favor was the fact that its season one arc was narratively coherent and when all the pieces came together it made sense as a whole.
The problem with Heroes later on was the writing. The S1 characters had completed their journey for the sake of the particular story Kring had envisioned but NBC forced him to keep them around and he obviously didn't want to write about them anymore. Also the writers crammed way too much story into later seasons. They didn't realize that they should have introduced two or three parallel storylines to span the season the way traditional dramas had been doing for years. Instead they didn't bother to develop them or give them satisfying payoffs but rather they jumped from one to the next treating them as plot points.
As a Whole--yes it is. But it was quite entertaining watching it unfold and that counts for something even if in hindsight a lot of it were dead-end threads, non-answers or twists just for the sake of a twist. However I'd be remiss in mentioning that they did do a pretty good job at season long arcs like S1 or S4 with the Escape from the Island framing it or S5 in introducing some threads that were resolved rather immediately and not carried over until the very end and never getting payoff.
