Four Things Wrong With Heroes

 I recently spent way too much time watching all four seasons of the show Heroes.  The show, while not the worst ever, has plenty of things wrong with it.  I could have talked about the gradual decline in quality of the show, how none of the season endings had a satisfying payoff, how they overused cliffhangers at the end of episodes, or how Claire's high school drama storylines often brought down whole episodes.  Instead, I'm going to focus on four somewhat smaller annoyances that bugged me.

 

How do they know The Haitian is Haitian?

In season 1, Matt Parkman recounts his memories of being kidnapped by the company, and says that he remembers some Haitian guy at the bar.  That Haitian guy was, of course, Rene the Haitian, but it leads to a very important and irritating question.

How the fuck did Matt know that Rene was Haitian?

Rene wasn’t speaking French or Haitian Creole, the official languages of Haiti.  He was not enjoying a dish of diri kole ak pwa with lots of peppers and herbs, as Wikipedia claims is a traditional Haitian dish.    And he wasn’t telling everyone about Wyclef Jean or Jean Baptist, two famous Haitians.  He was sitting at a table, staring, and doing magic stuff.

Call me crazy, but if I were to see The Haitian on the street, and felt the need to describe him, I would describe him as black.  Maybe I would have a strange feeling that he was Caribbean and describe him that way, but that is doubtful since he did nothing to indicate he was from there in this hypothetical situation.  Now, perhaps I was feeling risky, and I wanted to not only say he was Caribbean, but I wanted to say he hailed from the island of Hispaniola.  This would be a preposterous thing to assume, of course, but perhaps I was feeling particularly bold that day.  Even on my most bold day, however, I would stop there.  I would not have the gall to say that not only was he black, Carribbean, and from Hispaniola, but that he was from Haiti and not the Dominican Republic.  That would be too bold, and too crazy an assumption for me to make without knowing a single thing about him.

Maybe they didn’t want a character who was LAPD referring to someone as a “black guy” for fears that the viewers would assume he was racist and part of the Rodney King beating.  But at least that would be more realistic than me seeing an Asian fellow and knowing immediately that he was from the city of Korla in the Xinjiang autonomous region of China.  It is simply preposterous, and distracted me for the next several times I saw Matt Parkman.

 

What happens to the nice Irish girl? 

In season 2, Peter heads to Ireland and meets Caitlin.  After a bunch of people die and whatnot, they go to Canada and then to the future where everyone is diseased.  In the future, Caitlin and Peter become separated, so Peter cannot transport Caitlin back to the present.  Peter then goes on a path to change the future and make sure the disease outbreak never occurs.

Oh, just one thing.  That nice Irish girl Caitlin who Peter fell in love with and went on an adventure with?  She never came back to the present.  She was taken away, and likely put into quarantine for a long time.  But it’s ok, because Peter changed the future, meaning the future he traveled to and ditched Caitlin in doesn’t exist anymore.

So what the fuck happened to Caitlin?

The show never addresses this again, because it’s totally possible for someone to fall in love with a girl, leave her stranded in the future, and never talk about her again.  I know that I once fell in love with a girl, but she was arrested on a trip to Mexico and I just never talked about her again.  No, wait, that never happened because I’m not an awful person or a poorly written television show (also because I made the story up).

It would have been nice to have the disappearance addressed just a little bit, so we could know what the hell happened to her.  But instead, they decided to be dicks and blink one of their characters out of existence because they really like time travel but only if it’s simple and they don’t care about inconsistencies or consequences.

 

He’s good, He’s Bad, He’s good, This is Ridiculous

The show is called Heroes, and it clearly has villains, but most of these villains spend some time being portrayed as one of the heroes.   Sometimes this is good, and for the last few seasons sometimes the best part of the show is seeing Sylar battle his consciousness and seek humanity.  But sometimes it makes you just want to give up watching because they flip flop so damn often and the changes are unrealistic.

Like I said earlier, it’s sometimes nice to see Sylar being the good guy.  It gives his character depth, and makes the audience hopeful that he might redeem himself.  But sometimes they decide to say fuck it to developing a character and just decide that a villain is going to be uncharacteristically good this episode or a hero is going to be uncharacteristically bad.

Look at Mrs. Petrelli.  Most of the times, she is written as a bitchy WASP who is willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of people for her half thought out plan that doesn’t really make a lot of sense.  Obviously we are meant to hate her when she is plotting mass murder and not being a good mother.  But other times, such as the episode where they go to Coyote Sands, she is painted as a sympathetic figure, and the audience is meant to see her as a good person.  This is ignoring that she is the same woman who tried to explode her son in crowded NYC, and who is constantly manipulating people.  She doesn’t go through any big changes, she has the same personality, the writers just decided to make her a good person for this episode before eventually letting us go back to hating her.

They do this for many characters.  Peter is usually good, but sometimes he is an emo asshole.  Noah Bennett is portrayed as a cold blooded killer for a few episodes, and then they decide to include a sob story about him to make us feel like it doesn’t matter that he kills and tortures people.  Nathan can somehow go to wanting to risk his life to save his brother to creating internment camps for people with abilities in about 30 seconds flat.  Sylar goes from finding love and learning to not kill people for fun to killing the girl he loves on the beach for no apparent reason.  There are numerous examples, and they are all just weak, manipulative writing.

Just to be clear, I’m not opposed to characters changing or having their true intentions/motives hidden.  I am against when a character seems to change from a heel to a hero or vice versa for no real reason within the story, making it clear that it was just the writers forcing a character to change who they are in order to fit them neatly into the storyline.  Heroes does a whole lot of forcing characters’ personalities, and the inconsistencies make for viewers having less of a connection with these characters

 

Not enough Hiro

This one speaks for itself.  My favorite parts in the first season came from Hiro and Ando’s comical adventures.  Hiro is infinitely charismatic, and provides almost all of the show’s comic relief.  Seeing Hiro celebrate is always rewarding, and seeing him outsmarted by the African psychic twice was one of the show’s best moments.

But unfortunately, his involvement in the storyline seems to continually die down, especially after the early second season.  It is possible that he didn’t lose much screen time, but rather that they stopped giving him such light hearted adventures and instead made him go through some heavier emotional things, most of which really didn’t have a payout worth sacrificing such a great character.

Honestly, I would have been more than happy seeing Hiro having minimal character depth throughout the series.  Some is certainly appreciated, and I did like the show exploring the relationship between Hiro and his father.  But if his sole purpose were to embark on more lighthearted adventures where he could be silly, I would be perfectly satisfied, and I’m sure viewers would have been as well.  In a show with no other funny characters, where everyone is always super serious and melodramatic, Hiro and Ando served well as mood breakers that lifted up the show.

Quite simply, Hiro is everyone’s favorite character, and he deserved much more screen time than they gave.