WRITER: Michael Green DIRECTOR: Paul Shapiro
CAST: Masi Oka (Hiro), Milo Ventimiglia (Peter), Adrian Pasdar (Nathan), Ali Larter (Niki), Greg Grunberg (Matt), Jack Coleman (Mr Bennett), Hayden Panettiere (Claire), Santiago Cabrera (Isaac), Sendhil Ramamurthy (Mohinder), Leonard Roberts (D.L Hawkins) & Matt Lanter (Brody)
Peter is given an important mission from a future-Hiro, while Nathan discovers the blackmail plot over his political campaign. Meanwhile, Matt uses his mind-reading ability to solve his marital problems...You can't deny that Heroes is fast-paced. We're only a measly five episodes into the show and already it has more stories and characters than a Medusa has snakes. But while its sprightly pace and multi-plotting is commendable, it also lacks discipline; with sloppy writing and illogical moments threatening to trip it up.
Hiros contains quite a few plot contrivances that raise their ugly heads, most memorably when Nathan escapes the clutches of Mr Bennett by flying off into the air, only to land outside a diner in the desert and be witnessed by Hiro. The unlikeliness of their chance meeting requires suspension of disbelief (which I'm prepared to grant), but what follows amounts to a deadly sin of storytelling: Hiro somehow manages to speak near-perfect English to Nathan!
Did I miss something? It was established that Hiro is Japanese and totally unable to speak the lingo, hence his wranglings with the New York police, or the fact he couldn't leave an understandable message for Isaac on his phone. But, all of a sudden, with his friend/interpretor Ando absent, Hiro is practically fluent!
It's clear the writers just couldn't be bothered to keep up the subtitles, or have Hiro speak through an interpretor to other people, so they decided to have him develop pidgeon-English to save time. Well, okay guys, but surely this was a problem for the character that should have been identified in the Pilot? You don't see the producers of Lost suddenly making Jin drop the Korean because it causes them a writing headache, do you? No, they effectively use it as part of the drama.
It's things like this that makes Heroes look bad. By essentially admitting a mistake and trying to change it (and hoping nobody notices!) it just makes the show look half-assed. If this is the relaxed attitude the producers take to storytelling, why should I have any faith in them being able to handle the more complex plots in the show?
Hiros (a title that makes no sense; being just a pun on the show's title and a character's name) is a fairly entertaining installment. Stuff happens. Stuff always happens in Heroes, even if it's at the expense of believability. Here, Mohinder disappears from the story because he doesn't believe Peter's story of clairvoyancy, flying and time-control. Erm, is this the same guy who spent the first four episodes trying to track down people with such abilities? So why is he so skeptical about super-powers now? He lectured a class on the likelihood of this stuff in Genesis, regaled Peter with his beliefs in a cab once, and even narrates the show as a true believer! It doesn't make sense to me. It just seems that the writers wanted to get rid of Mohinder and leave Peter to go it alone. Fine. But in doing so they've sacrificed another character's credibility.
Other lapses of logic are abundant: Hiro goes to Vegas with Nathan (leaving his friend Ando behind without even saying goodbye!), Ando arrives at Niki's house asking for her help (he's a client of her webcam shows) with no explanation given about how he knows where she lives or what help he would possibly need, Hiro can't drive a car because the manual is in English(!), and Matt uses his mind-reading skills to foil a robbery (but tells the robber to leave his gun behind, whereby he picks it up and is assumed to be a robber himself by all the customers -- a case of mistaken identity that also happened to Hiro in episode 2!)
The overall impression of Hiros is of strain. The show is beginning to crumple under the weight of its self-imposed fast pace and multiple stories. It would be advisable for the writers to start focusing on just a few characters each week and slow things down a tad. At this rate, Heroes is going to rattle along at top speed and burn itself out prematurely, as the writing increasingly bends or breaks its own rules to suit current situations. Only a few of Heroes' characters actually act plausibly, most just do whatever's necessary for the plot to move on...
Heroes is still good fun, and I'm interested to see where it's going, but it's quite embarassingly flawed at times, and that's a great shame because it has huge potential.
