random incoherence and infantile meanderings

Volume 3 ended last week. I haven’t decided if I am going to continue to waste the little bit of time I have on bubble-gum pop with practically no real redeeming value. I do enjoy watching the episodes each week (on Hulu.com) but it seems like the bit that made the first season so engrossing is missing somehow.

So I’ve been trying to work out for myself what it is that is detracting so hard. I mean, they are doing some things wonderfully right. For instance, the amount of story progression made in just a few episodes, sometimes in just a single episode, is a wonderful change from most shows. I love story arcs, but only when they get concluded satisfactorily. Which is, sadly, not what Heroes has been doing.

In one of his books on writing, Orson Scott Card said to reach into your shelf for ideas three times. The first time is a cliché and the second time is a personal cliché. The third time is something new. It feels like the writers of Heroes are only reaching up that first time. The ideas that have been ending up in the final shows are certainly not consistent with the everyday people turned into super humans base concept that the entire series is predicated on. Take the catalyst, the missing catalyst, for example.

Throughout the third volume, everyone has been fighting for control of the two parts of the secret formula. Once the two parts have been acquired, then it turns out that someone has a third part, a catalyst. And the catalyst is hidden in… (duh duh dunn) someone. The fact that it turned out to actually be exactly where everyone knew it was, was disappointing. But when it turned out to be a magical glowing mist, that basically broke the entire world construct. And they did that without a single blink. They reached up to the shelf of ideas and dropped the first one they grabbed into the soup of stories. It didn’t fit this story.

All of this just makes it really hard to continue to justify the time expense that watching Heroes is costing me. At least it is better than Sanctuary. But what isn’t?

(The sad thing is that I will probably end up watching more Sanctuary and more Heroes.  I have no scifi backbone.)