Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Heroes: Welcome to the World of Tomorrow

Remember on Alias when Sydney woke up after two years and found herself in Opposite Land? (Sloane was good! Jack was in prison! Vaughn was married! Marshall knocked someone up! Weiss… lost weight!) The same thing is true of Heroes five years in the future. Everyone is different; no two people are the same. (Apologies to Strong Bad.) As a result, the episode is extremely fun and surprising. Let's visit the heroes… of the future!

Some people are President of the United States. Nathan is trying to control the hero population. At first this means sending Evil Matt after them, but it's not really helping anymore, so Nathan's all, "What if we tried killing them all? That might work." Mohinder, his advisor, is horrified, and so are we all, except it's not really Nathan! It's Sylar, with Candice's power! Which sets up an important plot point for the next few weeks: someone has to kill Sylar before all of this happens. I'm voting for Peter, just because he has the best shot at it, and he's not bothering me so much anymore.

Some people are very tall and merciless. Matt is with Homeland Security. Which really just means he goes around arresting people with abilities and getting information out of them. And I could really like Evil Matt if he didn't spend half his time punching or tasering or killing (!) Hiro. That's never cool. Otherwise, though: bad looks good on him. I don't know that I want Matt to be bad, but I do want Greg Grunberg to consider more bad-guy roles.

Some people are no longer pretty. Peter has a wicked scar running across his face. He's also, for some reason, with Niki, who's lost D.L., Micah, and Jessica over the past five years, but is otherwise much the same, having gone back to stripping. Peter is awfully bad-ass, which looks good on him, too – I wouldn't mind seeing him turn out that way – and he helps Ando and Future Hiro get Present Hiro back. And then there's a big hero battle with Sylar, and I don't know how many times they'll be able to pull that off without it getting old, but for right now, it's still exciting.

Some people have set up a witness protection program for heroes. Bennet continues to rock, and he's rocking some thinner glasses, too. Some people have gone brunette. Claire… really doesn't do a whole lot in this episode. Except get killed by Sylar.

Some people are black-clad, soul-patched terrorists. Hiro is completely unrecognizable. And why is he so different? Because Ando died when New York exploded, and all of Hiro's fun died with him. Aw! And ever since, he's been obsessed with trying to change the past and save Ando! Awwww! You guys, I did so much "awww"ing over these guys this week that you would have thought I was watching a boxful of kittens romp around on my TV screen. I just love those two so much. As far as I'm concerned, they have one of the sweetest, strongest relationships on TV, and here's hoping Hiro never becomes the terrorist kendo master of the future. Save Ando!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that one of the strengths of the show is that unlike watching Spiderman or X-Men or any of those other comic book knock-offs, we don't KNOW who each person is going to become. And because there are so many characters, it isn't obvious who is going to become the bad ass character and who is going to become the super villian.

If you had gone back and said at the pilot that this story was about Peter, it would take a lot of the fun out of guessing each person's role. And since this future will presumably not happen, Peter may not ever become that guy.

I was also a little disappointed that they took the "mutant cure" x men plot a little too much verbatum - all they needed were the centinals - but then again everything's been done before in the comic book world.

One bit of information that you didn't mention is the strong insinuation that Hiro kills Micah at some point before the blast. I'm also sort of curious to find out how they "killed" Jessica but not Niki?

Anonymous said...

The interesting thing about this episode is that NONE of it has to come true. I personally expect that only about 10% of it will come true. It's now our fun trying to figure out which 10% or so is going to happen.

Anonymous said...

Awesome episode! But, please! Save us from a future where we have to hate Greg Grunberg (I know, GG does a great job, but it's not the same if I can't love his character as much as I love him!), Hiro loses both Ando and his zest for life, and Niki retains the worst sides of both her identities. But Peter's new look - fabulous! Let's keep the scar & the new haircut that keeps those stupid bangs out of his eyes.

So what happens to wrap up the season? Do they save the world? If so, what do they do next season? Or do they have to keep redoing the past (present?) to save the future for season after season?

tiff said...

Serious Question: How did that scar make Peter so damn ridiculously good looking?!