Too Many Heroes

Missing out on the season premiere of Heroes I finally caught up with it on iPlayer. Did BBC2 have some kind of recap last week to ease the audience into this third year because I didn’t have a clue what the heck was going on? Maybe I should go out and rent the second year to try and figure out how it went from there to here.

Heroes had a great first season, introducing the various characters and gradually setting up the whole “save the cheerleader, save the world” storyline with a clear villain. Obviously a drama builds on each successive year but this show seems to have exploded with the pieces landing all over the shop.

Obviously the last series was cut short by the WGA strike and never really got up to speed, but there seems to be no indication of carrying on its narrative threads. Wasn’t there something about a killer virus in the future? Didn’t some Irish lass get stranded there? What happened to all that? What about all the Company founders being killed off? And what about the character played by the actor from Alias who first appeared in feudal Japan and then popped up at the end?

Season two had caught some criticism because either Hiro spent too long in Japan or Peter Petrelli spent too long stuck in Ireland with no memory. It really became that second difficult album that didn’t quite find its groove. But it wasn’t just that they spent too much time on individual characters; it was that their stories weren’t exciting enough. It’s almost like the producers decided, well that didn’t work, let’s figure out something new.

So perhaps the real problem isn’t that they’ve taken the previous narratives back into the shop and are taking their own sweet time to strip them down to see what parts work. What appears wrong with this year is that to pick up the pace far too many pieces are on the board, especially now that this Brotherhood of Evil Mutants has been released, and there just isn’t the space to deal with all of them.

With its expanding cast, Lost still concentrates on a few characters at a time, eventually making sure that everyone gets a fair shake over the season. If Heroes continues to give its spread of characters just a bite size of screen time apiece in each episode, surely this fractured narrative will soon come close to incoherence.

Perhaps Heroes really is one of those shows best experienced on DVD where you can catch a couple of episodes on the trot, allowing it to make more sense. Because watching an episode a week, trying to work out what the hell everyone is up to, I’m not sure whether I want to wait around and find out.