SNARKING HEROES (Spoiler Post)

Somebody needs to smack the writers of Heroes on the nose a couple of times with a rolled-up copy of the X-Men. For serious, they're phoning it in this season like never before. Say guys, let's give Sylar AND Peter the Tragic Vampire Curse of Can't Stop Killing, aka the hunger.

The HUNNNNGER!!!!!!

So now the hero and the villain are going to switch places and we can wank away about the nature of good and evil as it pertains to fairly bland rich kids on a rampage? Oh god, they'd better not. Maybe the guy who plays Sylar can pull off a redemption plot, but making Peter Petrelli an angsty psychic vampire is like sticking fangs on a block of firm tofu. Oh, the menace.

I'll be honest. I lost interest in the Sylar/Peter dichotomy thing way back in Season 1. Part of that is that Peter is just uninteresting as fuck to me. All he does is the same stuff everyone else does, only whinier. There are ways to do a "Hoshit, Vanyel Has Every Single Talent There Is" plot well, but this isn't one of them.

Sylar scraped by because at least he had the decency to kill the original owner of each ability, so it would be unique to him from that point on. Once he got to the character, that power was off the board for anyone else--until Peter comes along and makes an emergency backup and pushes the power inflation up another notch.

I appreciate that they were trying to build them into a dark side/light side nemesis affair, but there's nothing fresh in that dynamic that I want to explore. Also, Peter's God Moding spawns way too many cheapass plot twists (time travel! Telepathy! ANGST!) and keeps Peter and his various sexy-scarred future-clones at the forefront of the story where I can't reasonably ignore them. I'm vastly more interested in the other characters who struggle to master just their own individual talents.

Here's why it annoys me. Currently, three characters besides Claire now have the healing factor (going on two, but I haven't seen the end of this episode yet). But Hayden needs screen time, so now she's special! She can't die. (Except for in the first season where saving her life was kind of the entire point.)

Don't even get me started on the Gives Powers formula, the Takes Powers Away formula, the Bad CGI virus, the magical reappearing/disappearing apocalypse, or the way guys keep flying around with blonde women in their arms. Someone still isn't over their high school sweetheart dumping them for the quarterback and it shows.

And triplets! Triplets for everyone. Sure can't get enough of those constantly respawning Ali Larters. I'm calling it right now: by season 4 they're going to be quints.

All in all, Heroes has been a decently fun waste of time, but the flaws are starting to really clunk.

Oh, who am I kidding? We all know that if I had free reign to fix this show, I would probably rename it HIRO AND ANDO DO AMERICA and the whole thing would take place during Mardi Gras so all the girls could be topless except for shiny plastic beads. I have no room to throw stones.

EDIT: Finished the episode. All I have to say is, three fucking characters now have the ability to permanently copy everybody else's talents? What the fuck is this shit? I feel so stupid for liking this show right now.

the vanity-dance of the digital dickweed II

ARGH NOW HEROES HAS THE BLIGHT.

People's faces are so Gaussian Blurred they no longer even look human. And it's still just as random as Stefan Sonnenfeld's butchery of Sweeney Todd; every five seconds a random patch of pores and laugh lines will briefly reappear.

Sylar's forehead looks like Barbie's cooter, for fuck's sake. How is this not a direct violation of the Geneva conventions!?


Photoshop: Just because you can, doesn't mean you oughtta.