Either Kring had been honing that first-season story for years, and then didn't have time to come up with something equally good in later seasons, or it was the work of some unknown writer that Kring stole and claimed as his own. Seriously. It's weird to see a writer just "lose his talent" like that. Any writer or writing staff that can pull off S1 should be able to do semi-decent work as an ongoing thing. Something is really wrong with that picture.
This is as good an opening as any--the problems I had with S2 and S3 (haven't seen S4--actually at this juncture it's bled together a bit and I can't remember if I finished S3*) were pretty much the same problems S1 had, only writ somewhat larger. The biggest problem has always been the reliance on insane coincidence, followed by inconsistent powers, followed by the extremely poor, but plot-convenient, judgment exhibited by most characters. These two troubling aspects were on full display in S1, and didn't really jump in frequency in S2. S2's only original problem was failure to make Adam's heel face turn believable, which distinguished him from Sylar's superior villain model (even if at first Adam probably had greater potential, because he wasn't as purely evil).
I'll grant that these three Cs--coincidence, convenience, and (lack of) consistency--are the sort of thing that get exponentially grating the more they're used, but they were all there in S1.
*Okay--I never got to the bit with the eclipse, or where Mohindrance became a spider, wherever these are in the chronology. These plot points come across as so ungodly stupid that I was sort of glad the wear and tear from the normal Heroes experience--that is the coincidence, convenience, and inconsistency train--exhausted me. I did get far enough to understand why the fan-moniker "Mohindrance" was coined, however.
South Park's been on for
fourteen years?!?
Now this, I agree, is mind-boggling. Hasn't been particularly amusing or novel in five or ten.
