As soon as I started blogging for Geek Speak last year, I wrote weekly episode reviews for Heroes, until the writer’s strike forced season 2 to end early. I had every intention of doing the same this year, but while I’ve watched every episode so far this season, I haven’t been able to bring myself to write reviews because, frankly, I’ve found it very painful. I know some fans are really enjoying it and I didn’t want every week to be a list of complaints.

I haven’t given up on the show, and after this week’s episode “Villains,” I finally feel compelled to write again. And yes, there will be some complaining, but with deep sympathy for what Tim Kring and the producers of Heroes are trying so desperately to accomplish.

Kring got a lot of flack for the slow-as-molasses pacing last season, myself included. We wanted the show to propel forward from the season finale, but instead, it felt like it started all over. Kring realized the error of his ways and tried to appease us. If they want fast pacing, he probably thought, we’ll give them fast pacing. If they want complexity, by God we’ll give it to them.

Can anyone say pendulum swing? Yes, last season we were bored, but at least our characters weren’t (usually) acting out of character. Good storytelling isn’t that simple. If the recipe needs more sugar, you don’t poor in the whole bag– you keep putting in a little more until you get it exactly right. This year, Heroes has sacrificed meaningful, character-driven stories for the sake of action, pacing, and “complexity.” The complexity I enjoyed in the first season was that of the characters– real people having to deal with uncontrollable powers, a company that wants to control them, and a sense of duty to change the future because they’re the ones with the ability to.

There’s been some of that this year. But for the most part, the “complexity” is in trying to keep up with waaaay too many characters and subplots, to the point of nausea. Entertainment Weekly had an opinion article a couple of weeks ago, saying that one of Heroes’ biggest problems is that it has “too many heroes.” Yes– the show seems incapable of keeping anyone dead! I think the producers are so loyal to their long-term actors that they can’t bare to let anyone go. Ultimately this leads to having characters with nothing to do, and then they end up with forced subplots.

This is also why some characters are acting out of character. Suresh really had nowhere else to go as a character (as much as I used to love him) so the writers decided to turn him bad. But not subtley, over the long term. They suddenly gave him this obsession with having super powers, which he NEVER had before, then contrived a eurika moment so he could conveniently figure out how to give himself powers, then inject himself and become a monster who kidnaps and experiments on people.

That’s not depth. That’s just forced storytelling.

Sylar has been handled a little better. The writers wanted to give him more depth and give him the opportunity to turn good, and while it looked forced at first, they’ve been really taking their time to make us believe that he isn’t just evil, but that he has an addiction to stealing powers. We saw a scene in the future showing him completely rehabilitated and with a son– that’s a future we hope will happen for him, and we look forward to seeing him get there. But it can’t happen in a couple of episodes. Real people don’t change that way, and characters need to progress. Plots have twists, but chraracters don’t.

“Villains” from this week was really rather brilliant. It went back to events during the earliest episodes of first season and gave us more “pieces” to the puzzle, mostly about Sylar, L, and the Petrellis. I say it that way because these pieces obviously weren’t always meant to be there, but they do fit rather nicely, and they make a lot of this season make more sense. Nathan and Peter’s father were dropped in as the big bad for this season out of NOWHERE, and we needed these flashbacks to buy his deep intigration into the plot. This also helps Sylar’s progression to be more believable, and I really love the idea that Noah and the Company are responsible for Sylar’s condition and his killing spree in season one– if Noah hadn’t interfered, he would have stopped after his first kill.

So I hope this episode is a good indication of the direction for the rest of the season, a direction, I hope, that will be less sporatic and more about the motivations of the characters. I’m tired of trying to keep track of who stole who’s powers, who lost their powers, and especially who’s RELATED to whom. I almost stopped watching in the first episode this year when it was revealed that Petrelli is Siler’s mother. I know the show is a comic book, but all these soap opera coincidental familial relations are too much, even for me.

The same thing happened last year with “Four Months Ago.” This show doesn’t seem to start making sense until one episode goes back in time and gives us all the pieces we’re missing. But why are we missing them in the first place? It just makes me aggrevated, not more interested. I’ve said this in probably half a dozen blogs, but good mysteries allow the viewer to discover things along with the protagonists. They shouldn’t hide things from the viewer that the protagonists already know. If we already knew these things about the Peterelli family, the whole season so far would have been easier for me to swallow.

But as I said before, I have a lot of sympathy for Tim Kring. He did something remarkable with the first season– he made an entire television series in 24 episodes. From the first episode, it’s a show that feels like it’s been on forever. It knew exactly where it was going, and when it was over, it didn’t have any more story to tell. But it was popular, and it had to continue, so it did. Heroes has yet to prove to me that it still has something interesting to say that it didn’t say first season– people are still painting the future, and our heroes are still trying to stop bad futures from happening. Until that formula can change– as soon as Heroes stops tring to recreate what it had in that first season– it will never be as fresh and as innovative as it was when it started. And that’s a hard goal to achieve.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Waaaay back in the summer, I wrote a little blog about John Romita’s “brand new Spider-Man villain,” Anti-Venom. It sounded like the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. It looked like the dumbest thing I’d ever seen. Recently, I read Amazing Spider-Man 568-570 (haven’t pick up the final couple of issues of the arc) and I’m changing my tune. Anti-Venom turned out to be pretty cool.

 Back in the summer, we only got a couple pieces of info on this guy. We had John Romita’s drawing, which, despite that it’s beautiful art, looked like yet-another generic symbiote. And we had the name, Anti-Venom, a laughable idea that screams “we’re all outta ideas” when it’s read out of context. I wish the press releases had given us just a little more to go on, or not mentioned it at all, because Dan Slott and John Romita really surprised me. And considering how disappointed I’ve been with Marvel lately (though I’m waiting for the trades to read ANY of Secret Invasion, so don’t rake me over the coals if it’s good… I just had major issues with Civil War) that’s really saying something.

 I won’t spoil too much because I want to encourage fans to read this arc, especially those who haven’t been reading Spidey for a long time, and fans of Venom, Carnage, and black costume Spider-Man. In a nutshell, Anti-Venom isn’t just another symbiote. It’s Eddie Brock, who hasn’t been Venom for quite a while. Mac Gargan, the Scorpion, has been merged with the symbiote lately, and since Brock lost it, he’s discovered the symbiote left him with cancer.

Eddie has been working with a mysterious  man who runs a homeless shelter, trying to do some good before the cancer kills him. People keep miraculously getting healed at this shelter, and the same thing happens to Eddie– when this guy touches him, the cancer is eradicated, but it also seems to be placed with something else.

Suddenly, he becomes Anti-Venom, and he’s really more of an anti-body. Eddie now has the ability to eradicate his old symbiote, which he tries to do as soon as it attempts to merge with him again. He also tries to do the same to the traces of the symbiote left inside Peter Parker… the problem is, he might also eradicate the very radioactivity that gives Parker his powers!

I guess I should have known that Romita wouldn’t work on anything as silly as what Anti-Venom originally sounded like to me, but like I said, after Civil War and killing off Captain America, I haven’t been able to put much past Marvel. And this isn’t nearly as brilliant as the original black costume and Venom stories, but it’s certainly well-written and worthy of the team that worked on it. If I had known Anti-Venom was going to be Eddie Brock, I never would have written that other blog. It’s great to see one of my favorite characters doing something intersting again, and thanks to this arc, I’m finally putting Amazing Spider-Man on my pull-list for the forseable future.

Also check out Venom: Dark Origin, a new five-part mini-series that tells Eddie Brock’s past from childhood, and gives us the Venom saga completey from Brock’s perspective.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan