Spoilers for "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I teach my daughter never to talk to strangers...Oh, "Heroes," you had me, and then you lost me. After last week's unreservedly strong outing, we get an episode that had me counting the minutes till "Journeyman" came on. (Blog post on that to follow later today after I finish watching it; sacked out halfway through.)
If the theme of last week's episode was fathers and children, this week's theme was "with great power comes great gullibility." The plots all moved forward, but all depended on characters -- primarily Maya, Peter and Mohinder -- being foolish enough to put their trust in the bad guys, all while ignoring the protests of characters they should trust more.
Obviously, we have more information than the characters in the show do -- and, in fairness, it's still not completely clear what Company Bob's intentions are (though if he's made a face turn, then it's HRG who looks the fool) -- but the entire episode, and much of this season, falls under Ebert's Idiot Plot rule, where the only way the story works is if as many characters as possible act like idiots. I gravitate towards stories about smart people, which is one of the main reasons why HRG and Nathan (remember him?) are among my favorite characters on this show. Mohinder and Peter have always shown themselves to be vulnerable to whatever svegnali crosses their path, and it annoys the snot out of me.
As Peter's powers expanded last year, we talked a lot about how the writers would need to be careful or else he would render all the other characters useless; turns out their solution is to once again make him a moron. So maybe he doesn't want to listen when the Joanna Cassidy character accuses Monroe of being the one trying to release the virus, but when Monroe unties her binds entirely as an excuse to kill her when they could have easily left her tied up and unharmed, that should have been a big flashing danger sign.
(Hiro doesn't come off looking so smart, either, by giving vengeance as his reason for wanting to fight Kensei/Monroe; given that they did have several marvelous team-ups in the past, and that the Cassidy had already accused Monroe of wanting to release the virus, even Peter might have been willing to listen had Hiro played that card. Probably not, though. This is Peter Petrelli we're talking about.)
I could talk in more detail about the rest of the episode -- about how the pay-off to the Monica/Micah story next week better be pretty sweet to justify her not kicking some gangbanger butt upon being discovered, how I really like the work Kristen Bell is doing and wish we were getting a lot more of her, how Mohinder and Parkman must employ the least reliable babysitter in New York -- but I just want to wash the taste of idiocy out of my mouth after that one and get back to "Journeyman," or something else I might genuinely enjoy. Blurgh.
What did everybody else think?
No comments:
Post a Comment