Lost vs Heroes

Heroes is definitely my wet dream of a show. I've said it to friends and my wife: if I came up with a show, it might look just like this. I don't love every character, but none of them drive me nuts. Given the subject matter, the plot is remarkably internally consistent. This is a primary rule: you can be as ridiculous as you want with your premises, so long as you supply verisimilitude. Smallville drove me nuts, for example. Last season, Clark (Superman in his late teens/early 20s) reveals his love and his "secret" to Lana. She is killed. He convinces his dead father (don't ask) to undo it; he does, but he says someone has to pay the price. Clark's father, due to Lana NOT doing what she did, ends up in a circumstance where he dies instead, when he would have lived.

The thing is, before that, Clark's father had "saved" Clark, and he told him: you died because you didn't listen, and now someone else will pay the price in your stead because you're too important. "Someone close to you". That someone turned out to be Lana. Clarked begged off - not Lana. So it was his Earthly father instead. Okay. But Clark remains idiotically convinced that his telling Lana caused her death, when it most assuredly did not. And now her death was averted because his father was taken instead, and he refuses to tell her now, and she ends up with Lex Luthor. Doubleewe Tee Eff. Bee. Bee. Queue. It is nearly impossible to imagine someone in Clark's position not realizing: hey, my father died and took her place. Her death was fated for my mistake; he told me that in advance. But now my dad paid. And damnit, I can't undo it - but now I can tell Lana without her dying.

But no.

The show is rife with inconsistency like that. There's this willfull character/plot ignorance.

There's twists like Lionel Luthor trying to hook up with Clark's widowed mother. He's clearly NOT reformed, yet he also makes an attempt to sacrafice himself to save her (apparently). Could he just want into her pants? It makes no sense. He could have any number of hot chicks. He clearly has disdain for morality, but it's also always for selfish reasons. That is, he's not evil to be evil, he's just sociopathic, entitled, and supremely self centered. For him, it's all about having a metric fuckton of money and power. His relationship with Lex is multifaceted, but it's always so dry, it's hard to puzzle out. He seems to save Lex periodically, even though it seems fairly certain he tried to kill him once too. He is Lex's rival for power in many things, and claims and occasionally acts like he wants his son to fill his shoes, but he doesn't actually ever give anything in terms of information or advice that would give Lex a real edge. If anything, he just prods him with a bit of mockey.

Enough about Smallville.

Heroes. So, it's mysterious, but it continues to reveal. It has a plot, but the plot has a clear arc. There are many subplots, but the overplot is clear: NY is going up in a nuclear cloud if the Heroes don't stop it. Along the way, we see characters develop (personality and powerwise). Some of them we still need a lot more to see a full picture. Nathan Petrelli, for example, is probably the show's most inconsistent character, although last week showed an interesting side of him. Previously, he seemed to be fairly amoral and completely self-centered. Then you see he was going to try to prosecute Linderman. But now he's in bed with him. But clearly his self-interest is deep seated: he FLEW out of his benz while driving, ending up safe but letting his wife crash and be paralyzed. I have the feeling some critical future plot stuff may hinge on Petrelli/Petrelli interaction.

Hiro is awesome, of course. Not only is his character endearing and consistent - just a wide eyed idealist who wants to fill the shoes of Heroes that were fiction before this burst of evolution, we see this future him, this foreshadowing where he's hip, carries a Katana, lost his accent, and is generally looking badass. What a fascinating evolution. We're not likely to ever even see it on the show, but it's sure interesting.

Bennett - his evil to good business was a bit of trickery on the part of the show creators/writers. But it was good. In the end, you can see how he wasn't necessarily the bad guy. Clearly his methods are somewhat of the end-justifies-the-means version; like forcing Isaac to paint Claire by shooting up heroin. And yet, when you contrast him to the driven and clearly insane and ludicrously dangerous Sylar, well - it feels a bit like ordering the assassination of Hitler. Is it immoral? Maybe. I'm not sure if I'm an absolutist. I wrote an essay in college which rejected hedonism and relative morality in general, but I'm not sure if some branch of utilitarianism has crept over me since then. Let's ask this question: you can hook an innocent child up to a device. It will deliver almost infinite amount of pain and suffering to them as they grow older, and about when they reach adulthood, they will die and need to be replaced by another suffering child. However, through some mechanism, this sacrafice will keep the entire world healthy. Disease and hunger will be literally eradicated. Is it immoral to do this to a child? What if one volunteers? What if it was an adult, and they volunteered? Or going back to Hitler, if you could return, and cap Hitler in art school, would you, knowing you'd save at least 35 million lives? (Or, perhaps, unchecked by Germany, Stalin would have steamrolled a slew of countries and killed a lot more than the 3 million or so he did kill.

I'm Mr. Tangent tonight. But Heroes has this verisimilitude. You see people behave, week to week, in a generally consistent fashion. They manage to surprise you and yet remain in the spirit of that consistency. I think the more outrageous your premise, the more critical the verisimilitude is. That is, you must make it so that viewers (or readers, or players, depending on the medium) can put themselves in the shoes of the characters, imagine themselves in those circumstances, and then BELIEVE that they would act as the characters do. You can have pronounced character flaws that the viewers would never imagine themselves having, but they can imagine SOMEONE having them, so it's okay. Sylar is believable. Especially now. Hiro is believable. Peter is believable. The hardest person to "believe" so far is Nathan, but part of that is because he's so damn cagey as a character, there's not a lot of ways to show why he's doing what he's doing. There's nothing blatantly inconsistent. Really, my major issue is with his total nonchalance with his power. He flies -- apparently at supersonic speeds -- and seems to think that despite the fact that he and many others with powers and popping up, that his destiny is to run for public office in the pocket of a criminal. Hrmm.

The great part, however, is I can see Heroes ending. I'd like to see the nuclear plot end this season, and a new one quickly get introduced. Alternately, they can cliffhang this season, wrap it early next season, then spring into a new plot. But I think a full season is about the maximum duration of a plot. Re-use the characters, not the plot. I don't want the SHOW to end, just the story arc.

Anyhow, regardless, one thing I can wholeheartedly agree on: Heroes is excellent. Characters, plot, writing, consistency, genre - it's seriously not the sort of thing I expected to see. So far. But then again, Alias was this good for a season. That was JJ Abrams work before Lost. Heroes still has to get more track record before I call it the best show ever. But it is noticeable how my drive to watch Smallville is starting to slack off. Heroes: filling the soul of my inner comic nerd. And it is so much more satisfying than Smallville. I hope Smallville improves but I have to say: Clark, I don't need you any more.