Does Heroes need an endgame?

“If there’s not any endgame, we’re in quicksand. We take one more step, and we’re still there, and there’s no way out” Richard Shelby
There has been a lot of criticism aimed towards Heroes Season 3 (and so some extent ever since the Season 1 ending left fans a little unsatisfied). Mostly I tend to disagree with the harsher criticisms,  I do admit though Heroes has fallen from its promising start, it’s gone from being amazing to being simply great. Whilst there are often plots I find irritating (seriously what was the point of Hiro and Ando’s Indian trip?), there are those that I equally find fascinating (the rise of Nathan as the bad guy, the very scary Hunter and his role in capturing those with abilities).

The viewers (both critics and fans) have vented their own frustrations in articles and online. But my only fix for the show is pretty simple, it needs an endgame.

Lost suffered many of the criticisms that Heroes did in its S2 and first half of S3 but then Damon and Carlton decided the show was definitely going to end after season 6, they streamlined the seasons to 16 episodes and began with the game changing season 3 finale their rise to the top of TV excellence. Sure the plots are still a little too complicated for viewers but with each episode we get answers, we get closer to the end, we know it’s not going to be cancelled mid-season leaving us all wondering what the point was.  Lost though has its advantages of Heroes, no matter how its achieved the endgame ever since Jack woke up on the island was the ultimate fate of the characters, the escape from the strange magical dangerous place of all of the survivors and answers to what the hell was going on in the first place.

Heroes has no obvious endgame, each volume has been about avoiding some kind of disaster, the explosion of NY, the release of a deadly virus, the ability for everyone to well have abilities but can the show really continue this way? It’s a show about superheroes but on the whole they don’t act very much like Superman or Spidey even Batman.  So maybe it’s a show about ordinary people instead – yet they seem to get themselves into way too much trouble and can’t seem to hold down those day jobs before the next drama hits.

Maybe there is a secret endgame, maybe with Heroes it’s been there all along, the future Hiro and Ando saw in Five Years Gone can never be stopped, time-travelling cannot save the world. Much like with Terminator, no matter how hard you try to stop the apocalypse the universe just course-corrects itself, little changes may happen but everyone is a slave to the future, its already been written. The future seen in Volume 3’s I am Become Death was just a variation of the FYG future, Nathan again as president and Peter again considered a terrorist. With Volume 4 we see the older Petrelli brother political career rise and rise, to the it seems the inevitable conclusion he will become president and those with powers will be hunted.

Now I think the only way they can stop this future for good and for the show to move on from the apocalypse and mayhem it keeps trying to avoid is for the characters to do the one thing they have been fighting against. Expose what they can do to the public. Not allow Nathan and the Hunter to imprison or vilify them but to show everyone else the next stages of evolution do not need to be scary or harmful.  I’m not saying they should don lycra and capes but instead of this fear that the public won’t accept them maybe they should take that risk.

Then the show can move on, it can be about characters lives and dealing with the public knowing what they can do, mixing real life with this fantastical almost magical way of living.  The show could stop being about a giant plot arc and more about humanity itself. standalone episodes could become the norm, and characters could drift in and out without having to be killed off.

I’m not saying making it less sci-fi but make it more real. If I woke up with the ability to fly it would send me through a whirlwind of emotions, denial, madness, possibly alcoholism, and then acceptance. and what we are really missing with Heroes is seeing a world in which being different doesn’t have to be the end of your life.

So Heroes endgame should be more like a game changing move in chess, the end of volume 4 should shake everything up but not via deaths or explosions but with something much more subtle.

Tags: heroes, lost