DonnaK:  Warnings as per usual…..

**SPOILERS!!!! SPOILERS BELOW!!!! EVERYTHING BELOW THIS IS A SPOILER!!!!!!**

On Monday nights Jim and I watch both Heroes and House. Every week it’s the same ritual. I ask him which one he wants to see first, he says he doesn’t care, and I proceed to put on House first because I adore that show so much. Things went the same way this week - I asked, he didn’t care, so House was up first and Heroes followed. However, after this week’s Heroes Jim turned to me and said “Can we stop watching Heroes so late? It puts me in such a bad mood that now I’m so pissed off I don’t want to go to bed.” I had to agree - I was so angry after last night’s show I wanted to punch walls.

I think that kind of sums thing up rather nicely. Heroes is starting to suck again so badly that we can’t stand to watch it too close to bedtime because we end up ranting and raving at the idiocy of the show for so damn long that we can’t sleep. And when a show gets you this fucking angry time after time after time… well… I can’t see having that show in my life for much longer. I’m seriously - I don’t know how much more of this inconsistent, sloppy, messy, going-nowhere bullshit I’m willing to take. I keep watching it for the five good minutes or so that I know will be in any given episode, but it that enough? I don’t think so.

So why am I so fucking tired of this shit this week? Fuck lists, I’m just going to lay it all out for you and you can tell me if you agree with me or not.

The biggest question going into this season - what will happen when Peter touches Nathan? Would he automatically sense that it wasn’t Nathan or does Peter have to actively search for powers in order to take them? We all waited to see how Heroes was going to resolve this dilemma. We watched when Peter shook hands with Samuel and didn’t feel nor take Samuel’s power. We watched him take the super speed of the other carnie with a quick touch, but it was made clear that was deliberate. So when Peter finally did touch Nathan it wasn’t a surprise he didn’t feel Sylar’s powers - he wasn’t looking for tem. Peter’s ability to absorb a power had been made an ACTIVE one, one he needs to willfully activate in order to take someone else’s powers.

So… can someone please fucking explain to me why Peter, with no intention of taking or even looking for powers at all, absorbed Emma’s powers when he saved her life? He wasn’t looking for powers. He wasn’t trying to take powers. All he did was catch her from walking in front of a bus. There was no active movement on his part to take her powers… mainly because he didn’t even know she had a power. We know this latter thing is true because when he tried to run fast and couldn’t and instead saw sound he was stunned and surprised. This means Peter’s power this week was a PASSIVE one… which negates EVERY FUCK THING that happened last week with Nathan and the week before with Samuel. They took a perfectly plausible explanation and made it ridiculous for no good reason whatsoever.

My gods I’m so tired of this. I’m tired of this stupid, lazy writing that sets up very important rules and structures one week and then turns right around and breaks them the next. It’s sloppy, it’s lazy, and it could all be avoided. The problem is that no one seems to give a shit that expecting us to blithely follow along even when things make no fucking sense like the rules of Peter’s power is downright insulting. It’s insulting to me that the writers don’t think I’m smart enough a viewer to notice these glaring errors. It’s insulting to think I’ll just keep writing them off and not expect the writers to, oh, I dunno… DO THEIR JOBS. It’s this kind of lazy bullshit that doomed Volume three and much of Volume four, and it’s already casting a pallor of doom over Volume five.

Also… can we have some damned action already? Hey, I get that we’re trying a “return to normal life” angle, but that doesn’t excuse lingering on plots points and scenes for far too many precious minutes that could be better spent on other things. How long was that scene with Peter and Emma at the piano? Hey, I get it - they can both see sound as color. Did we really need four fucking minutes of watching the semi-cool color effects to get that point across? Of course not. That’s time that could have been spent in a more useful way, especially when you have this many front-burner storylines and characters. Wasted time will be one of the many deaths of this show.

And while we’re talking about wasted time, can we PLEASE GOD PLEASE get a moratorium on the Claire storyline for a minute? Last week both Buzzion and I said we know we can’t have every character in every episode, which is of course accurate. Except that rule doesn’t seem to apply to Claire, who has been a lead in every episode of this Volume. Even when we didn’t have Claire in college (which is about as interesting as watching paint dry), we had Claire with Daddy giving him life advice. I can’t get away from this girl and yet her storyline is absolutely the most boring story of this Volume thus far. So why? Why all this emphasis on Claire? Yes, I liked the little revelation that the sorority chick was in the Carnival and Gretchen wasn’t the evil bitch we all thought she was. But I’m sorry, that little pop of a moment wasn’t enough of a pay-off for making we watch umpteen minutes of sorority speed dating. Sorority speed dating. On Heroes. Seriously? Where’s Parkman? Where’s the Carnival? Where’s HRG? Where’s Tracy? Where’s Hiro? Anything would have been preferable to the endless bore that is Claire in college. Isn’t this show supposed to have some action in it? Where the fuck is it? Scattered here and there in bits and fragments that aren’t long enough to matter or interesting enough to get my attention? NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

However, there was something that was beyond good enough this week that I have to halt my tirade for a moment and give some serious kudos. The storyline with Sylar this week was EXCELLENT and Quinto was simply superb in these segments. Quinto is a nuanced enough actor to have remembered how to play not Sylar or Nathan but Gabriel, and Gabriel he was when he was being interrogated in the station. He nailed the character dead-on and I was totally convinced with his mental confusion and loss of identity. It was a beautiful job by Quinto, and the end payoff with Sylar joining the Carnival was simply marvelous. However, the writers couldn’t even let this lovely storyline play out without inserting a fair amount of ridiculousness. Why would Ernie Hudson’s cop character pull a gun on an obviously hurt, bloody, mentally confused man wandering in the road? Sylar looked hurt and in need of medical attention, not arrest. And why would this cop continue to push so damn hard to have Sylar committed before learning anything about him or what had transpired with him? And how is it that this cop could be present in the room during Sylar’s psych evaluation? That’s not even legal, guys. Nothing about this cop’s behavior made any sense - it was all deus ex machina to move the scenes along.

And if you get right down to the meat of it all, that’s the overarching problem of Heroes. They write these inconsistencies, these pieces of fluff and nonsense, this laziness because it’s convenient for them. It’s convenient to just throw Cliche #14 at a situation than try to resolve it rationally. It’s easier to just change rules around than try to work with the rules already in place. It’s easier to just coast along and not try to develop anything challenging, interesting or sustainable. It’s easier… but it isn’t better. It’s eminently frustrating because each and every one of these problems I’ve been railing about could be fixed so easily. If the writers would just sit down and think for a minute instead of pulling out there Big Book of Cliches none of this would be happening. These are fixable problems… it just seems as though Kring and the writers don’t WANT to fix them, and that just makes me angry. I don’t know when these writers will realize that taking the easy route out is the exact wrong thing to do, because gods know it’s not due to lack of feedback or the ratings dropping like heavy stones. When Kring and the writers decide to stop pulling easy cliches out of their collective asses and actually do some real, challenging writing they’ll get some respect from me, but not a minute before.

For the Sylar segments alone I’ll give this a two out of five. It should really be a one-and-a-half, but Samuel showed up enough times for me to leave it at a two. However, this is a really bitter two star rating from me. There may not be many more Heroes reviews because I don’t know if I want to keep wasting my time and energy on a show that gives me so little. So tell me, Heroes… is taking the easy way out worth losing your fan base? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you keep going in this direction, and I doubt I’ll shed a tear when the show finally gets canceled.

What a shame and a waste. *shakes head*