Tuesday, May 1, 2007

MOST UNREALISTIC POWER: MOHINDER'S NEWFOUND ABILITY TO GROW A PAIR: To me, Heroes has always been a guilty pleasure. Not as guilty as, say, South of Nowhere, but maybe halfway there. It basically was a fast-paced dumb little adventure featuring characters whose only complications were external -- superficial, emphasis on the super. It was not just a comic book; it was a particular kind of comic book, from the Golden Age of comic books, when you could tell the good guys from the bad guys by the attitude in their silly catch-phrases.

Well, our dumb little dreamy kid comic wants to grow up quick. You play a dangerous game when you stop dancing around your September 11 allusions and start openly appropriating the iconography of that day, unraveling your unambitious little shaggy-dog story and re-weaving it into a political ghost story. I suppose at some point under Hollywood darling Frank Miller's pen Daredevil's Kingpin stopped being a generic rackets-boss and started superintending the angel dust trade, and Batman aged from a barrel-chested deputy to a feral vigilante, so this isn't a suprise.

To do this right, Heroes can't just mature the action -- it has to give the characters some heft, some admixture of good and evil that reminds us that the consequences the characters suffer stem from choices rationally made, whether correctly or incorrectly. This episode, while maybe cheating, was a good start, showing us characters that have been good doing bad things for understandable reasons. I really hope this works, because the show could go from being okay to being really good, but it also could completely blow up. You know, like Peter.

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