Heroes, Season 3

I have to admit, I want to like Heroes simply because it's a show about superheroes and, for at least a season, seemed to be doing it properly.

I think it probably says a great deal that my favourite comic books were V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns et al - fundamentally, stories about someone very unusual in a fairly ordinary world.

Heroes had that going for it, but as the population of people with powers multiplies you run into the issue of spending too little time with the characters that matter.

For example, Season three now has storylines running about Suresh, Hiro and Ando, Matt Parkman and a new female character that Hiro believes is his nemesis, about three escapeess from Level 5, HRG, the Petrelli brothers, Sylar, Mama Petrelli, Claire's adoptive mother, Claire's biological mother, another prescient painter (and Matt, and Hiro), the character played by Malcolm MacDowell, whom I have probably spelled all wrong, and a bunch of other stuff that I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around let alone caring about.

The individual stories are interesting - Sylar appears to be on a redemption arc, which could be an exceptional story, and Peter has learned Sylar's ability so now he also shares Sylar's twisted hunger. This, in itself, is cool. At last, we get to see something of what it must be like to be Sylar, but from inside the head of someone we already know. How will Sylar's demonic need to feed affect Peter? Well...

...it gets him put in a medical coma while we trot off to find out what the other eleventy plot threads are doing. This is infuriating.

Likewise, the early promise of Hiro and Ando's tale - which stems from one of those "the character has to be a moron for the next five minutes in order for this to work" situations - is on rough ground because so little time is spent with them. If you missed it, basically a time travelling Hiro sees his own apparent death at the hands of Ando. This is a wonderful idea, because the two had been inseperable and worked well together. Instead of drawing this out, teasing the breakdown in their friendship or leading us down the path that leads to either Hiro going bad and Ando taking him out, or Ando going bad, it seems to have been taken care of in about three episodes.

Damn!

There was even room for a twist there, which might have already been foreshadowed.

So, having gone from something approaching Marvel's "New Universe" experiment, we're almost in X-Men territory where everyone appears to have some superpower and no one therefore appears all that special or interesting.

It could be better. It should be better. I watch the online reruns instead of kicking the kids off the sofa and making it Monday night viewing, which should in itself be telling.