Just a quick impression of HEROES REBORN. First, we caught the earlier HEROES shows on disc, so we know, sort of, what’s going on – we were disappointed by the cancellation after the Carnival volume, so we were looking forward to it.
I was disappointed.
Scope
First, the sweep of the new volume was appropriate to the overall arc of the show. The focus is on people with amazing powers; it’s appropriate they face a challenge of amazing magnitude. We saw that in the earlier incarnations, as they faced a corporate government bent on imprisoning them, a rogue power of nearly insurmountable capabilities, and another gone shrewdly mad.
Now the world itself is ending. That’s a worthy problem.
Characters
But the characters … are not quite as interesting. Most of the old cast is just gone. A few are brought back, but play only small, supporting roles – Claire, who could heal any injury, appears only as a corpse. This is the new generation of Heroes, and while they may start off interesting, I suspect they didn’t receive as much creative, organic attention from the writers as did the first couple of crops of Heroes. For example, a married couple who loses their son in a disaster attributed to the Heroes (also known as Evos) begin hunting and killing Heroes …. until one day the husband begins exhibiting powers.
It could have been interesting. Questions of bigotry, the value of the Other, even of redemption, could have been fruitfully explored – although the time pressure of a natural disaster does make such explorations a little more difficult. The fascination exerted by the character of Sylar in the earlier shows, for example, was multiplied by sending him on a solitary quest where he explores his powers (he can understand how things work), his family history, and the nature of random violence and how it can rebound upon one’s head. His clashes with other Heroes, his powers, the actions he takes and his character evolving over time – and the actor who portrayed him, Zachary Quinto, let’s not forget – all served to make him a fascinating, popular character. That complex, yet organic, journey from violent madman to something much like a real Hero, in an arc spanning multiple volumes, really served to tie those early volumes together, while asking and exploring questions concerning how morality binds even the most powerful of Heros as well as men.
But in Reborn, this man (Luke Collins) and wife (Joanne) hunt Heroes, killing with no warning – she shoots them between the eyes with such accuracy you almost wonder if she has powers, too – in vengeance for their dead son. But then his powers begin to manifest, and does she kill him for being a Hero? No, no. Of course not. He gets to leave. Menaced, of course. But she’s too heart-broken to kill him, or have him around.
Predictable. The bane of bad drama. And then he confesses that he never enjoyed killing the prey, he just did it for her. Again, it’s no surprise. Ah, the guilt! He’s one note, and because the time arc in this show is just a few days, Luke really has no time to further evolve in response to what has happened to him. In the end, we can’t tell if he loves her or not anymore, and he ultimately kills her when she nearly destroys the last hope of mankind. I shrugged. His final sacrifice was predictable from the plot – not from his power, which was not explained in sufficient detail to suggest, even in retrospect, that he could do what he did.
And what of Quentin, a nerdy man, and his sister Phoebe, a dark Hero working for the antagonistic side? He at least surprised me with a nifty bit of betrayal, but in the end, after a bit of impotent shouting, his shooting of his own sister betrays the most powerful message of the series: how do people who may be somewhat different live together? There is no creativity in his responses, nor can there be, as the crisis is upon them and will wait for no one. In the end, there’s hardly any lesson which can really be drawn from the shooting.
Casting
Jack Coleman as Noah Bennet, perhaps THE mainstay of earlier volumes, returns to anchor this show, and while his character is no longer as ruthless or amoral, he retains his charm and his knowledge of Heroes in general. Angela, Matt, René (aka The Haitian) also appear, so we know they are solid; we know their history. The newer characters vary, some projecting useful ambiguities, others more one-note, whether a shortcoming of the script or the actor is not entirely clear to me.
But what I found particularly interesting was the visual casting. As dull as the character of Joanne Collins, the vengeful mother, might have been, she has tremendous visual impact, with a unique face highlighted by a hairstyle which, in her grim mood, makes her an agent of Hell, yet when she smiles it merely appears outré; indeed, her husband almost didn’t seem to measure up to her (however, judging purely on looks is certainly a faux pas). Molly Walker, a Hero with a location capability, is both attractive and unorthodox in appearance in a manner accentuating her role. Oscar, a Hero who causes selective memory loss, is delightfully cast and clothed; I was slightly heartbroken when Vengeful Mom catches up to him. Katana Girl looked, appropriately, like something out of a cartoon. The new Master of Time and Space is also quite striking, as he was in ONCE UPON A TIME. This may be a problem for this young actor, as he tended to either look fiercely pouty and sarcastic, or slightly puzzled; there was little nuance.
Characters
In the end, none of the new characters really stood out for me as characters in themselves. To a large extent they fulfilled functions of the plot, rather than intelligent agents caught up and, sometimes, struggling against that plot. Compare to previous volumes, where Matt fought mightily to remain a policeman, despite whatever advantages his mind-reading might bring him, or what the plot might require of him. Or Sylar, who cut a vast, bloody slash throughout the series as a chaotic creature learning the ways of life as only he could – and bedamned if agents of Primatech, or the government, are after him – they are brushed aside so casually they don’t even always die. That is a lovely, delicious disdain for the plot.
In REBORN, the exigencies of a civilization on the edge of destruction gives a universal and irrefutable motivation to the characters, and they respond as they must. This sounds like good drama, and it is not: the responses are logical and predictable. Great if you’re a logician, bad if you’re a dramatist, as the audience wants a topping of surprise to surmount their logic: not just a nod, but a blink-blink, then the nod, then a good Hmmm. Remember the Eclipse that slowed speedster Daphne Millbrook down to a crawl (actually, back to her crutches)? That was a Hmmm! moment.
Not that the writers don’t try, for there are competing solutions to the dilemma: Erica Kravid is a woman hell bent on using the raw power of the Heroes to jump a select group of humans to the future, and there they’ll rebuild. She’ll stop at nothing, I tell you, nothing – and so she becomes broadly predictable. Everything is sacrificed – morals, family, anything – to achieve her goal of saving the humans and obliterating the Heroes. One of the interesting facets of the earlier volumes was the obscure nature of the motivations of the antagonists, thus making questionable the limits on their actions. What was the purpose of Primatech? What was the goal of the government? Even the Carnival was not entirely clear as to the limits. But Erica, she’s saving humanity, so she thinks – although it’s not entirely clear how she knows a catastrophe is on its way.
The competition is more interesting: Angela prophecies two young Heroes will save the day. At least there’s some vagueness, some questions. And at the climactic moment, there’s some clever use of the Master of Time and Space. But in the end, an artificial problem is inserted into the plot, requiring the noble sacrifice of a character. Unnecessary, and a loss of an emblematic character. In the end, I wonder why the Master of Time and Space didn’t simply move the Earth out of the way, and then return it when the danger had passed? He could have called on Ando, the supercharger from previous Volumes, for help – or any large number of Heroes could have been called on for assistance.
Perhaps the most interesting character is a Marine, decorated for bravery which he never earned, who is closest to the old Ando and Mohinder characters in being a man desiring powers of his own; he designs and builds a powered suit, reminiscent of Ironman. He shows some range of emotion, but the writers never really explore the character; indeed, at the end the suit is gone and he’s exercising his EMT training instead. Did he discard it purposely? Did the writers just grow tired of someone who dressed a little like a Mexican wrestler?
But I had almost forgotten: Erica’s hit man, Harris. This is a character positively wreathed in mystery, someone who can clone himself easily and quickly, and has real fighting skills. What binds him to Erica? Is he a machine or a Hero? He becomes a force of Nature, something unnegotiable, and even when a clone destroyed, you know it’s not the end of him, just a cessation. He becomes a source of tension who is, unfortunately, lost at the end of the volume.
In the end, the tide of the plot comes washing in and the characters are caught in the riptide, pulled remorselessly into the service of helping civilization survive. No more semi-comic relief (think Hiro and Ando from previous volumes) to highlight the plot. Just ominous old nature, out to do us in again.
Plot
Which brings us to this plot. Or have I harped too much? Let me pluck a minor chord, though, as in the first couple of episodes, the time travel and forced amnesia of Noah injects an enjoyable complexity and mystery. Why did Noah forget the death of Claire? Wait, why is René trying to kill Noah? (Hey, is that a plot hole? I can’t think of why he would have … since René reappears as a good guy.) What sort of Power requires this other guy to wear a Mexican wrestling costume? Will it be kitsch or parody or – oops, that was a lot of blood.
But, as previously noted, it all became predictable. As our doom becomes imminent and the world begins to break down, one of our saviors is menaced, yet again, this time by Phoebe, who holds her above an abyss, and all I could think was, don’t let her scream, let her say something witty about this being dashedly irritating, or something equally out of character.
Nope. It was a screamfest.
Special Effects
Adequate. Awesome storm. I will register a complaint that the fighting capability of Katana Girl was … visually suspect. Ragged. Unconvincing. She needed a better fight choreographer.
On the other hand, seeing a flight of monarch butterflies on an ice field in the Arctic was effective.
Powers
And no review of a Heroes Volume is complete without mentioning new powers, which in this one ranged from vaguely and disappointingly formed (so what is the world saver doing, exactly? When she works with the other world saver, what is going on, exactly? How does being the Master of Time and Space make it possible to generate a force shield? Compare to how Peter Petrellli’s power to steal other powers was used to temporarily defeat Sylar, a very logical and yet possibly non-obvious application), to Phoebe’s ability to suppress powers around her (sort of a walking eclipse), to the outré ability to insert a human being into a computer game – or take a computer game character out of the game and insert into reality, which was fascinating, if incredibly silly.
In The End
I think the major mistake of this new volume was to have the threat not be human or Hero based, but be a natural disaster. It brooks no negotiation, moral questions, or anything else of real interest. There’s some interesting questions about how to survive it, yet HEROES is not about surviving natural disasters, or how to be superhumans – it’s about how to be just people, struggling with problems both old and new. The real antagonist of this volume, a natural disaster, compresses and nullifies the subplots, the thematic explorations, all the little details that made previous volumes more interesting. No more hard driving senators with hidden powers, obscured government plots, or family spats more deadly than most small wars. We just need to get the kids to the town in Angela’s dream before Erica’s solution becomes permanent. All the other bumps in the road were just … bumps in the road. Does civilization end in this volume? Of course not. Angela told us it wouldn’t. And where would the next sequel go?
Dramatic tension? Nolo contendre. The costs of losing to this antagonist were … too absolute.
