Heroes no more

Just as Heroes Season II is finally hitting its stride, the Hollywood writers strike may cut it short. The producers are shooting an alternative ending that could air in early December, finishing the series half way through. That would be a shame, because this series is pacing itself pretty much like the last one. Both started slowly, with disparate characters wandering around doing lots of exposition but not much plot. Then the first narrative arc took off, feinted left in the middle of the season and revealed the real drama which peaked in the season finale. You really need the full dose for the plot to culminate. And the hotness. Twenty-odd episodes of hotness.

The stories in Season I took a while to get moving, but the buddy pairs of Hiro and Ando, and Nathan and Peter were the beating fraternal hearts of the whole enterprise. Season II started off with these couples broken up, possibly forever. The Gay Dads, Mohinder and Parker should have been played for gags, but their creepy little daughter made that tricky. If Interview with a Vampire taught us anything, it’s that a little girl with a head full of adult teeth are downright sinister.

Meanwhile, Hiro was poncing around under cherry trees in medieval Japan while Ando minded the keiretsu. Peter was blown into a million pieces over New York and Nathan grew an unflattering beard to show how unhappy he was about that. The writers forgot the golden rule of buddydom; the hotness of two guys is far greater than the sum of their individual hotness.

That said, I don’t think a single episode in Season II has gone by without a completely gratuitous shot of a shirtless Peter. For which I am extremely grateful, albeit a bit concerned that Milo Ventimiglia has clearly spent the whole summer lifting weights to the point where he no longer has a discernible neck. He was absent for the first couple of episodes before turning up in the studio backlot known as “Cork”.

Henry’s already pointed out how lame the actors’ Irish accents were, but the lack of research and the bogus plot details were just as jarring. Like the security goons who chase robbers while firing guns at them. Anyone who’s being paying even a little attention to international news in the last 10 years knows that getting the guns out of paramilitaries’ hands has been a bit of a big deal. Do they think we let rent-a-cops run around with pop guns? Even the police in Ireland don’t carry guns, except for a few in the Special Branch. And then there was the rain. Apparently, someone told the props people that it rains a lot in Ireland. It does, just not the tropical torrents they kept pouring down the windows. Anyway, in this week’s episode, Peter mislaid the whiny ‘Irish’ Caitlin in a plague-ridden 2008. I hope she catches it.

My other hopes for this series; Claire ditches her sinister little boytoy, West; Nikki does us all a favour and permanently joins DL (though not before getting it on with Nathan one more time), the ineffectual Mohinder properly joins the dark side because he’s got nothing better to do, Sylar cuts his losses with the tedious Mexicans, that silly blonde girl becomes a real villain and not just a brat, and Adam; lots more of Adam. He was a pleasant distraction while riffing on Paul Bettany’s role in A Knight’s Tale, but he is deliciously hard done by as a 500 year old villain. (“Villayn!”) Oh, and I’d like Nathan to get a haircut and grab back his mojo.

In short; more plot, less characters, less shirts.