In stark contrast to season 1, Heroes ' later additions often felt one-dimensional. Maya and Alejandro, for example, were little more than a traveling plot device designed to augment the arcs of Sylar and Mohinder, rather than vital characters in their own right.
Without that necessary injection of interesting new blood into the Heroes cast, season 2 came with a sense of staleness. There's nothing more frustrating than watching a gripping season of TV, only for the developments witnessed during those many viewing hours to be undone further down the line. This is precisely what Heroes season 2 is guilty of, winding multiple character and story arcs right back to the beginning with a soft reset.
Audiences had delighted in watching Peter Petrelli's growth from an unsure dreamer hospice nurse to the man with all the powers. As fantastic as this evolution was in Heroes season 1 , the series had written itself into a corner by over-powering its protagonist, and the chosen solution was to have Peter lose his memory, forgetting the impressive array of powers he possessed. This certainly pared down Peter's abilities, but it also made the character a completely different entity compared to his season 1 self, and many viewers might've felt like they were watching a stranger, rather than Heroes ' leading man.
Another example of Heroes season 2 undoing the work of season 1 is in its apocalypse story. Heroes ' debut season began with a vision of an apocalyptic future and chronicled the subsequent attempts to prevent that reality from ever happening, leading to an uplifting finale when the crisis is eventually averted. Rather than focus on a new threat, the "Generations" storyline recycles that same idea.
Peter has a vision of a second apocalypse in episode 6, and the remainder of season 2 is spent striving to prevent that future from happening. Not only does this feel repetitive, but it also renders the efforts of last season pointless.
In fairness, Heroes ' season 2 woes were not entirely of its own making, as production fatally collided with the Writers Guild of America strike. Many TV shows and movies were negatively impacted by the strike action, including Lost and James Bond's Quantum of Solace , and Heroes certainly didn't escape lightly. Originally, Heroes season 2 was divided into 3 volumes: "Generations," "Exodus" and "Villains. This upheaval is apparent in how abruptly so many of Heroes ' second season story arcs come to an end.
With Sylar left weakened, the Nightmare Man is set up as Heroes ' next major villain and the ominous build-up begins promisingly, with Molly playing the creeped-out child role to perfection. However, this baddie is dealt with in disappointingly quick fashion over the course of only a handful of episodes, wasting a character that had the potential to run for the entire season. In a similar vein, the Heroes season 2 finale sees Peter Petrelli and his team attempt to prevent the release of a deadly virus, but the story's big climax ends with Peter simply using his telepathy to catch a falling vial.
Problem solved. There's no comparison between this short-term, piecemeal storytelling and the gradual crescendo of season 1, where every episode was heading towards the same end goal. Beginning four months on, we pick up with the heroes having gone their separate ways - irritating given that it took an entire season to bring them together.
Instead they range from the mundane to the ridiculous as Nathan Adrian Pasdar wallows in guilt, Micah Noah Gray Cabey goes to live with his aunt and Peter Petrelli Milo Ventimiglia becomes embroiled in a wearisome amnesia scenario involving Irish gangsters. The greatest indignity is saved for Hiro Masi Oka , who slips from star to afterthought, stuck in feudal Japan trudging through a protracted subplot that should have been wrapped up in a couple of episodes.
Why did everybody need to lighten up? Well, io9 's Charlie Jane Anders probably hit the nail on the head when she wrote that with its third season, Heroes "was just trying so damn hard. The theme of the third season was "Villains," turning its more heroic characters into jerks and Sylar into a good guy.
Once again, an apocalypse was introduced right away, this time the Earth exploding from the inside. They tried to rekindle the urgent suspense that permeated season 1, but it never materialized.
Rather than believing what they were watching was terribly important, viewers watched actors trying very hard to convince them that everything they said and did was terribly important Part of the reason Heroes failed to impress after its first season is that afterwards, the show never seemed to know what it wanted to be or what to do with itself.
In Heroes ' first excellent season, its characters learned to cope with their new abilities. Once they couldn't get any more from "How do we deal with these powers," they moved on to "how did we get these powers" by creating X-Files -esque conspiracy backstories for older characters like Angela Petrelli Cristine Rose and Hiro's father Kaito Nakamura George Takei.
In other words , Heroes was a show about people with powers freaking out about the fact they had powers, and it never figured out how to be a show about anything but that. Think of Marvel's Fantastic Four when they first emerged from their rocket crash back in , with each of the quartet panicking in their own unique way as their respective abilities emerged.
Now imagine if the entire narrative history of Fantastic Four was just those four characters still at the rocket site, freaking out about their powers — that's Heroes in its entirety. Ordinary people made extraordinary by superpowers and in a constant state of needing to chill out about it and move on. A frustrating comic book trope is the flip-flopping of popular supervillains. One of the biggest superhero movies of — Venom , originally one of Spider-Man's darkest villains — is a perfect example.
If a supervillain gets popular enough, the comic book companies either make them good guys, or at least make them straddle the fence between Justice League and Legion of Doom. There's nothing inherently wrong with redeeming a villain, but when you make a villain become a hero, you risk eradicating exactly what's so engaging about the character.
Sylar became another unfortunate member of the funnybook flip-flopping fraternity. Zachary Quinto masterfully played the chilling and terrifying villain Sylar of Heroes ' first season, but his alliances became more fluid as of season 3. When he was captured by the clandestine organization known as the Company, Angela Petrelli convinced Sylar she was his mother.
After some road trips, Sylar went back to the dark side, only to then go back to the good guys again by the end of season 4, helping against Samuel Robert Knepper and his carnie villains. By making Sylar flip-flop, the writers of Heroes gutted the proverbial goose of its golden egg. While Sylar was just straight-up bad, there was no scarier villain anywhere on television.
Sometimes you've just got to keep the bad guys bad. Sylar may have been Heroes ' best bad guy most of the time , but when it came to the good guys, Masi Oka as the wide-eyed innocent Hiro was one of the best reasons to watch the show. While most of the show's good guys came off as much as victims to their new abilities as they were beneficiaries, Hiro was the Billy Batson of Heroes — a boy though grown with his dreams of superpowers magically fulfilled.
Watching the first season of Heroes , viewers loved the sweet and lovable Hiro and couldn't wait to see him finally meet up with the show's other protagonists and prove himself against Sylar.
During the battle against Sylar in the first season's finale, Hiro finally fulfilled the prophecy found in the pages of a comic book and ran Sylar through with his sword. But before any of the other characters even had time to ask who this Japanese guy was who came out of nowhere and stabbed a dude, Hiro was hurled through the air and teleported to 17th century Japan.
That time jump back to Japan — or at least the amount of time Hiro spent there — was a mistake. It kept Hiro away from the rest of the show's protagonists, and it didn't entertain on its own.
Heroes creator Tim Kring said as much when talking to EW about the failures of season 2, admitting Hiro's adventures in the past should've lasted no more than "three episodes. Speaking to GamesRadar at 's San Diego Comic Con about the release of Heroes Reborn — the miniseries set ten years after the conclusion of Heroes' fourth and final season — Heroes creator Tim Kring said the show never should've been canceled.
Contrary to the numbers , Kring claimed Heroes' fourth season was a spectacular success. He said the problem was that Heroes ' low ratings weren't an accurate gauge of its viewership. Heroes Reborn 's failure to impress could give you good reason to doubt Kring's postmortem assessment of Heroes , but he thinks the poor reception to Heroes Reborn has less to do with the show's quality and more to do with audience expectation. Death was too cruel.
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