TV Shows I'm Watching - Heroes (Episodes 21 and 22)

Episode 21 - The Hard Part - ** out of 4

Major plot points discussed below...

Sorry it's taken me a while to write up this review, but frankly, after watching episode 21 I really didn't feel like saying too much about it. After the great time travelling episode, Five Years Gone, this should have really pushed the story further, built up the momentum, and tripled the suspense. Instead, The Hard Part fizzles, spending time on boring subplots that feel completely rushed.

Hiro and Ando return from the future knowing that Sylar has to die. Conveniently it's not too hard to find him (he's just cleaning up in the bathroom), and after a near miss, they follow him to his mother's place. While there, Sylar becomes the star of his very own After School Special when he realizes that no matter what he does his mother can't be happy unless he's the best. In other stories......Claire and Peter talk a lot, Matt and the gang (Sprague and Bennett) head to New York, Nikki/Jessica finds out Micah is in New York, and Micah waits around for Linderman (presumably because Malcom McDowell couldn't make a guest appearance this week).

The only somewhat interesting subplot involves Mohinder and the little girl Matt Parkman rescued way back in like episode two. Turns out the little girl has SUPER POWERS!!! (which marks the fiftieth time a character we didn't think had any powers turned out to....have SUPER POWERS!!!) Regardless, the little girl can locate anyone in the world by just thinking about them, but she's dying from the same disease that took Mohinder's sister. So, Mohinder, under the supervision of Eric Roberts, makes it his goal to find a cure!

My biggest problem with this episode is that it's just too much in one episode. I know that Heroes prides itself on not being like Lost, and that the writers promise to constantly move the plot along (which.....despite their claims...they do even less than Lost, but that's another rant for another time), but there's such a thing as suspense! In this episode two major stories are introduced and solved by the end of the episode (Sylar and his mom, Mohinder and the disease). There's no suspense, and no chance to become emotionally invested in either story because they're over and done with just when they start to get interesting.

Sylar suffers the worst. He starts to develop a moral crisis about killing off most of New York,
and visits his mom. I know you have to see the human beneath the monster, but this whole subplot just grated on me. Having never seen Sylar's mom before the poor actress has to try and go from sweet woman, to overly critical mama, to awe inspired proud mother, to terrified ma, to violent mom in the span of maybe fifteen minutes. When the end of this storyline finally hits home, there's no emotional impact because the woman we are supposed to care about was nothing more than a plot device so that Hiro would feel bad about killing Sylar right away. Argh!

The Mohinder story is a little better. At least we've seen the little girl before (if only for a minute), and there is some nice dialogue between the two, but there's not a single moment where the audience is allowed to believe she will die. One minute she's sick and Mohinder is frustrated, the next minute he found the cure! It's not a last minute cure either. He just comes up and says, "hey, by the way, I found the cure". Hurrah?! ? Why introduce a dying child if said child doesn't at least flatline once?

It's sad to say, but this third last episode really is filler.

Episode 22 - Landslide - ***1/2 out of 4

So....in order to combat last episode's filler status, Landslide throws in at least four or five major plot developments.

By my calculations three characters are dead, or dying. One character, Sulu, made a grand return. Nathan's wife managed to walk again. Nathan won the election. Lots of people pointed guns at each other. And Sylar menacingly stood over New York.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, but shouldn't at least one of the events in this episode happened a whole lot earlier? In these 42 minutes there's at least four episodes worth of material. It's more frustrating because the last episode was so terrible.

Regardless, this one is good, and once again my love/hate relationship with Heroes crosses over into love territory.

I think what works best is that we're finally seeing all of the storylines collide as the entire cast arrives in New York. Even though this episode is busy, the fact that all of the characters are together at least makes the overall story feel like it's moving somewhere. In previous episodes, there was a feeling that things were jumping around too much because the characters were connected only by the thinnest of threads. Here, it starts to feel like the plot is taking shape. One character's actions now directly affects anothers'. Parkman and Bennett help out DL and Niki, moments after talking to Claire and Peter.

And it's fun seeing how these threads connect. Everyone now has a purpose (even good ole Niki!), and the show feels like it has stopped wandering aimlessly. The deaths at the end are shocking, and should shake things up in the next episode.

Hopefully now that Nathan has won the election his character will be in a position where we will be able to do things. It's an exciting development that should put his character into more dramatic situations than he has been in.

I still have a few gripes. Apparently, Sulu is such an amazing teacher that he can turn his son Hiro into a killing machine over the course of an afternoon. Although, because it's Sulu and he's wielding a samurai sword I wasn't too upset. And is there a sale on psychic car flipping stunts that I just haven't noticed? While it was thrilling to see Sylar take on the police to get to Radioactive Man, did it have to be exactly the same way Magneto took out the police in the last X-Men movie?

One episode is left!