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So. Who's watching Heroes just for Quinto?

^ But that's part of the reason why you can't possibly know for sure how a storyline is going to turn out. Just because Sylar has been shown as complex, troubled, or tragic, does not have to mean that he must eventually be redeemed. They might not be even planning of doing that. They did a similar thing in season 1 with "Hard Part" to make Sylar interesting, but in the end he was the classic villain in the finale. TV writers know that one-dimensional villains are not that interesting, so they'll let them become three-dimensional and somewhat sympathetic if it is interesting for the show and if it works for the fans - whether they actually plan to redeem them or make them 100% villainous, or whether they are just thinking "OK, we'll figure out what to do with this guy later".

Sometimes TV writers may even decide at one point "Now we're gone too far with making this guy multidimensional and sympathetic, let's now go in the opposite direction and show that he's an eeevil monster!" It's happened before on some TV shows...
 
First season of Heroes was great. After that? Crap. They lost me mid-season 2 and I never looked back.

But then, that was about what I expected, back during the "Heros is the BEST SHOW EVER!!!!" silliness on this board a couple of years ago. :lol:

As soon as I saw the end of season 1, I knew they were done.

*Spoilers from season 1 ahead!!!!*

Once you give a single character the ability to absorb all the other heroes' powers like they did with Peter Petrelli....and you kill off the evilest villain ever (Zach rocked!), only to (gag) resurrect him for the next season....you have already jumped the shark.
 
^ wow, i had no idea of any of that. i started with season 3 b/c that's all that's available on hulu :p ended up being quite happy with that, after spending a couple days figuring out who everyone was. seemed decently self-contained and i most likely won't be hunting down 1 and 2 for catchup. esp. after reading this description. some shows do hit their stride in their 3rd or 4th seasons. (let us take a moment of silence for the TOS season 4 that could have been.... ....thank you.)

definitely gonna give season 4 a try. my little crack about the writers was mainly to bouy up an otherwise serious-sounding comment. it all seems pretty frenetic, but i was willing to be forgiving for two reasons: 1) coming into the middle of something like that, ya can't expect everything to instantly make sense. and 2) as someone already said, it makes it unpredictable. and to my mind, weird and quirky, which is just how i like my media. part dark, part funny, part drama. sure! gimme all ya got.
 
Sylar didn't die. He was pulled off of Kirby Plaza by Betty/Candice/Michelle and was in pretty bad condition when we first saw him in season 2. And it's not like they left the ending of How To Stop An Exploding Man thinking that Sylar wouldn't come back (did you miss the bloody trail going into the manhole with the cockroach crawling on it?).

That's hardly jumping the shark. And resurrecting the dead is a common practice in fantasy storytelling--especially television. Have you ever seen a Joss Whedon show? His shows make Heroes look frugal with bringing back the supposedly dead (Darla wins at 4 deaths and still appeared as a ghost).

And they've fixed Peter's absorption problem now. He can only take one power at a time (which actually works for me). Peter finally came back as a character, IMO, in An Invisible Thread where he outsmarted Sylar by taking his shape-shifter ability and became President Worf. Probably his second best moment after "save the cheerleader, save the world".

Season 3 was awesome (hands down my favorite and the most consistent). It also had the best finale of the 3 (and I liked all 3 of the finales).
 
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1. Sylar did die. The fact that they decided he didn't REALLY die once season 2 came around was exactly the thing that was lame.

2. Yes. I have seen Joss Whedon's shows. All of them. But even in Whedon-world they never definitively killed off a Big Bad, only to bring back the same exact Big Bad the next season. They gave us a Bigger and Badder NEW Big Bad...but they did not spend an entire season gunning for ONE Big Bad, defeat him, and then reset the thing at the beginning of the next season with a big fat "Never Mind".

I loved Sylar...but they never should have made us think he was DEFINITELY dead at the end of season 1. They closed that storyline and gave us closure on season 1...and then because they didn't have anything else, they reopened it by saying "Well, okay...he wasn't REALLY dead!"

It completely eliminated the season 1 finale payoff!

The cliffhanger from season 1 was NOT "Did Sylar really die????" When we left our heroes at the end of season 1, he was dead...and the cliffhanger was the Petrelli brothers and the big 'splosion in the sky. THAT was the cliffhanger - not Sylar!

You don't do that sort of thing when killing off the villain is THE central focus of an entire season of a show!

You can get away with un-deading somebody when that somebody is a hero of a show (like they did with Buffy)...but you don't do that with a villain you spend an entire season trying to defeat...and DO successfully defeat in the final episode.

3. I don't know about 'fixing' Peter. I tuned out before they 'fixed' him.

Not sure how they can reconcile that with the fact that at the end of season 1, he could have several powers all at once....but whatever.... :lol:

He was my favorite character in season 1...but then they did that stupid storyline him with him at the beginning of season 2, and they lost me.

When they lost me on Peter, they lost me on the show, because he and that artist guy they bumped off during season 1 were my two favorite season 1 'good guy' characters (Sylar was a favorite too, of course). Artist guy got killed, Peter's storyline got FUBAR in season 2, and Sylar got killed and un-deaded. Bleh!

Claire's dad was probably my next favorite...but he didn't hold enough interest for me to keep watching, just for him.

So that's why I quit.

I'm not one of those people who keeps watching a show I don't like, just so that I can sit around and bitch about it year after year on TrekBBS. Life is too short. So I stopped watching about mid-season 2 after it seemed like they had no frakkin' clue what they were gonna do with Peter...and that Mexican storyline started gettin' on my last nerve.

Never looked back. Until this thread. :lol:
 
Again, I ask: Did you miss Sylar's blood going into the manhole with the cockroach crawling on the cover? It was the final shot of the season for a reason.

Season 1 DIDN'T make it "DEFINITELY" clear that Sylar was dead. In fact, they showed the exact opposite IN SEASON 1 at the end of the same episode. It wasn't a surprise.

And I think you missed the part about Sylar being thrilled that Peter was the villainous bomb instead of him. Sylar ultimately wasn't the villain of the season.

If anyone was the villain of season 1, it was Adam, Linderman and Angela planning to blow up NYC. Sylar wasn't exactly fond of that plan, but hopped on it because he thought it was unavoidable and it would work to make him special. When he found out that Peter was the bomb, he jumped on the possibility of himself becoming the hero by killing Peter. Hiro stabbed Sylar, so Nathan had to come in and get burnt to a crisp while saving Peter (and of course, to make up for the fact that he, Nathan, was initially going to let the bomb happen).

If you didn't get to Four Months Ago... in season 2, you might be not be understanding the end of season 1 matching up with the beginning of season 2.

Think of Sylar like how Spike was set up as the villain of BtVS season 2, only to get trumped by Angelus and you find out that Spike isn't at all fond of the big evil plan for the end of the season to the point of helping the good guys for his own selfish reasons. Sylar wasn't the season villain and was even ready to jump in as the savior of NYC for his own selfish reasons. Adam, Linderman and Angela were the season villains.
 
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ya know what this sounds like? borderline personality disorder. they never really figure out who they are, but adore being the centre of attention and especially if it is in a dramatic scene. all they really know is that they need to feel special. hmph.

it's so fun psychoanalyzing people who don't really exist! yay! :):shifty:
 
My principle criticism of the show is its tendency to recycle the same powers in different characters for no particular reason because it can't carry on the plot without those powers - prophecy and time travel can be quite annoying if overdone. Still the show has a lot to commend. I think its worth watching just for Hiro but yeah, Zach or Sendil are pretty good eye candy.
 
Crusher Disciple said:
I really don't give a s*%t about the plot. I just want to see Zach walk around in that wife beater and look all hot and stuff. :devil:
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Here! Here!

It really is too bad that the show got so off it's track. Season one truly was epic (mho). I mean, even just the "Save the cheerleader, save thw world" was sooo comic book perfect.
 
*raises hand grudgingly* I'll suffer for the head slicey pretty-pretty through next season. And while I'm griping, where's Monica? :scream:
 
I am in love with Zachary Quinto now, but not because of Star Trek. Watching the movie, he did a really good job but I was more enthralled by Zachary as an actor after watching a few interviews of him. The guy is freaking smart, hard-working, and he is cute to-boot. And he's hilarious.

So yes, I do watch Heroes just for Zachary Quinto. But I also know why he likes doing the show: because of what it's about and the questions it explores. I got hooked on Heroes about ten minutes in and forgot I was watching it because of an actor in it and got into the stories & ideas of the show itself. I think it's very adequate that he did Star Trek as Spock, in retrospect, because it fits him. Star Trek (all the series) is actually very comparable to Heroes in some aspects.

He was inconsequestial to me before and during the Star Trek movie, it was after that I started liking the work he's involved in.


He's also the head of a small indie production company, which is teaming up to do graphic novels. Awesome much??
 
Crusher Disciple said:
I really don't give a s*%t about the plot. I just want to see Zach walk around in that wife beater and look all hot and stuff. :devil:
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lol

Seriously though, I watched Season 1 when it first came out and I didn't think Sylar was dead at the end. It looked to the other characters as if he had died, but not to the audience. That was supposed to be a cliffhanger. At least that's what it felt like to me.
 
Oh, you know they're going to redeem Sylar.
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Yes and no. Sylar will be both utterly destroyed and redeemed.

My pet theory: Nathan-Sylar absorbs "splitting into two people" power from some random mutant, and Sylar-Sylar splits off. Nathan-Sylar realizes this confirms he is Sylar, but still having Nathan's mentality, is battling against that. Sylar-Sylar fights Peter in that battle royale we've been expecting since S1 and Sylar-Sylar looks like he's going to kill Peter but Nathan-Sylar kills Sylar-Sylar in order to save Peter, thus permanently removing Sylar-Sylar from the storyline (and Quinto from the show).

They've made him almost more of a tragic character now than a villain. That's not poorly written. That's called character growth.
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It's not character growth because they're not going in any direction with the guy. They're flailing around incoherently. Is he tragic? Or is he a crowd-pleasing simplistically eeevil killer? It depends on what you want to see, I suppose. But I have no motivation to delude myself into seeing things that aren't there. If the writing is bad, I'm not covering for the writers. I'm digging in my heels and demanding better writing.

Does Darth Vader ring a bell?
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As another largely-botched writing job on a villain? Yeah, I see the connection.

I totally suspect that Micah's "you could save us all" was there for a reason.
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They've thrown all sorts of crap into the storyline and mostly they forget it. Hey remember when Sylar lost his powers and was still evil? Then later he lost his powers and was instantly good? Remember Claire's magic blood?

This stuff is just a trick writers use with serialized shows, throwing out "hooks" for future use. The good, careful writers make sure to use most of the hooks and they figure (correctly) we'll forget all the ones that were never followed up on. And try to keep track of hooks, so that they aren't blatantly inconsistent. The Heroes writers need to get a lot more disciplined about their hooks. Most of em don't catch any fish, and instead get all tangled up with each other.

Sylar is only a mask for Gabriel to hide his insecurity with being the watchmaker's son who became a watchmaker, whose only ability that was ever truly his was being able to fix watches. Sylar likes to put on other people's personae (amassing their abilities is all about that) in an attempt to find what makes himself "special", IMO.
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Which is inconsistent with the idea that he can wipe out all the other powered people and become special by default. He isn't looking for anything special in himself, he just doesn't want to be reminded that he's not special. Or wait. Maybe he can be special by imagining himself as part of a powerful family or group. Or maybe he's just a psycho who would kill people regardless of having powers. Or is he an addict, who gets "high" from absorbing powers? Or did Mommy screw him up psychologically by pushing him too hard to be special?

You can believe any of these explanations, and more, based on the evidence of the show. I've never seen a more impossibly garbled and incoherent character on TV than poor Sylar. This is what happens when the guy in charge doesn't really nail down who a character is, from the start, and lets a staff of writers all come up with their own mutually-contradictory explanations, or change the rationale depending on the demands of this week's plot.
 
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