Heroes season 3 episode 5 review

Are the bells starting to toll for the Heroes?

Normally I’d tell you in a roughly chronological way what happens in Heroes, but frankly I’m getting very bored with doing that. Not because nothing happens in ‘Angels and Monsters’, because plenty does. I’m getting entirely jarred by the way this season is developing, which is turning out to be worse than season 2.

Lots of unbelievable things happen this week, many of which don’t make much sense, and I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that huge chunks of it never will.

I’ve started to think back to events in season 1 and 2, and wonder why they don’t actual fit with the current story, even remotely.

This thinking unfortunately led me into a dark place, the place where Tim Kring’s characters go when he’s bored with them. I started to think about some of the ‘Heroes’ or people we’ve been introduced to that then disappeared inexplicably.

To a degree I can accept that Claude wasn’t mean to stick around once he’d taught Peter what his real power was, but once you start thinking beyond him you start asking more awkward questions. Like where’s Claire’s brother? And what happened to the Irish girl that Peter dumped in a now non-existent future, and Parkman’s ex, Sanjog (the boy who appears in Suresh’s dreams), and Hiro’s sister, and West Rosen (Claire’s boyfriend), and Micah’s entire family including Monica and his Granny. And where did Elle go?

In fact there are so many dumped characters in this show it’s hard to give much credence to new ones. In this episode a relatively new one called Stephen Canfield is inserted who can create Black Holes – how cool is that? Yes, except he’s dead before the episode is over, that’s how quickly Mr Kring got bored with him. If you start thinking about how many heroes now have the power of immortality, you begin to wonder why you’re watching.

But back to Elle, or rather her dismissal. In this episode Noah gives Claire a big explanation as to how dangerous Stephen Canfield is, and why he was kept in level 5 at the company. Except it’s total garbage because he’s obviously not a killer even if he does have a potentially dangerous power. And if what Noah said had the slightest shred of truth then why would you let Elle wander off in public knowing she has a very dangerous power when she’s a sociopath?

I’m sorry, but I get the distinct feeling that the production team now has a large and misshapen collection of Heroes plot and character jigsaw pieces that they’re trying to assemble with a mallet.

Along with the short lived Mr Canfield two other new characters are introduced, one being a ‘puppeteer’ who can control people and the other is Papa Petrelli, who is the person behind the Linderman appearances, which I’d guessed are the creation of Parkman’s father.

And for good and incredulous measure they get Hero to kill Ando. So how many episodes will that stand? Not many I’d suggest, although they’ve been entirely useless this whole season so maybe I’d be happy if they got rid of both.

The narrative of this show is disintegrating before my eyes. I can’t see how it can proceed much further before the wheels really come off, if they haven’t already.

Check out our review of episode 4 here.