Heroes

Heroes was a TV series created by Tim Kring that aired from September 2006 until February 2010. It was written by nerds for nerds about X-men-like people who spontaneously developed abilities as a sort of next phase of human evolution.  It had it's ups, it had it's downs.  Most of all, it had Sylar (played by Zachary Quinto), one of the more fun villains I've seen anywhere for a while.

The show had a heavy story-arc-based (for people who's favored story element is plot) that began quite auspiciously.  Many people agreed that the first season, though it seemed to stall out in the middle, was excellent.

If you were like me, you kept waiting for the series to get better as the characters tried to figure out what was going on.  The Company, in particular, had a lot of potential as a big bad organization that tracked down people with abilities and either experimented on them, hired them, or... well no one ever really found out.  Like Lost, it had a bad habit of making the veiwer ask more and more questions every episode and answered those questions... sometimes?

I liked it because I found a lot of the characters to be interesting.  There were a lot of characters, too.  The Petrelli family, a central family in the series, was huge and kept getting bigger.  It nearly became bloated to the size of the Gray/Summers dynasty of the X-Men comics.

Unfortunately, the series didn't do well because the creators kept pandering to the audience and overlooking avenues and possibilities that I thought would be cool in favor of listening to the louder fans.

Besides being sorted into seasons, the series could also be divided into its five "volumes" each volume comprising of and completing an over-arcing story of some kind.  Some of the stories were excellent.

Volume One: Genesis (season one) was great. It was all about stopping New York from going nuclear and revealing these special people to the world.  It introduced the Petrelli family, Mohinder Suresh, Mr. Bennet (the man in the horn-rimmed glasses), and Hiro Nakumara.  All of them were series regulars until the end in one way or another.

Volume Two: Generations (season two which was a half-season due to the writer's strike) had two story lines: one consisted of trying to find and stop someone who was killing the original founders of the company and the other consisted of trying to stop the Shanti virus which would become an epidemic.  In the end, both story lines were finished simultaneously because the person killing the company and spreading the virus were the same.  It was also, in my opinion, the beginning of the end of the show.

Volume Three: Villains (the first half of season three) began with the assasination attempt on Nathan Petrelli.  However, the main story was another two-pronged monster.  One arc focused on the release of the more powerful people from Level 5 who also happened to be mostly sociopaths and... well, "villains".  The other focused on another organization run by a character thought to be deceased which aims to create a formula that gives normal people the same special abilities that the characters of the show has.  It floundered and flopped like a fish on the shore.  The only good thing about it was Sylar's arc which was extremely confusing and weird.

Volume Four: Fugitives (second half of season three) is basically the fall-out from Volume Three. Basically, having failed to give the world superpowers, Nathan Petrelli has a snit-fit and decides to round up everyone with abilities, getting a bad-ass normal extremist to lead the whole thing and send everything to hell.  I found it to be highly interesting, but after the previous Volumes, I was feeling jaded and somewhat pissed off that something with so much potential could go from great to utter crap in no time flat.  Again, Sylar was something of a saving grace until the end.

I didn't watch Volume Five: Redemption.  I will eventually, maybe even in the next week and I'll do a thorough review of it then, but not right now.  For one, I'd have to slog through all the other volumes so I could understand what's going on.  If I ever watch Volume Five, I'll have a nice review dedicated to just it.

Would I suggest you watch it if you've never seen it before?  Well, only if you like comic books because there's a heavy comic book influence.  Or if you liked Lost because it took a lot from Lost.  Otherwise, I'd tell you to go watch something of higher quality, like the Batman animated TV series from the 90s.

Sweet Dreams!