Heroes 1.20 review
Our Heroes catch-up continues, and this time Dan is drawing a few more X-men parallels too...
Taking another page from X-men lore, it’s time for Heroes to pull its Days of Future Past. Hiro and Ando’s leap in time lands them five years into the future, into a dystopian world where “special people” suffer constant persecution, President Petrelli is about to make the biggest decision of his life, and people dance around to goldfrapp in bad wigs.
As ever, not everything is as it seems, and it’s up to everyone’s favourite excitable Japanese man to try and figure out just what he needs to do when he returns to the past.
There’s a lot to enjoy here: Hiro and Ando’s “Where are they now?” tour takes some interesting turns as we catch up with all the characters. In particular, Mr Bennet, Parkman, and Nathan are all now in places we might not have expected, and each get their own badass moments.
There’s plenty of mystery as to what’s happened over the past five years, and while a lot of ideas are pure X-men rip-offs (substitute the name ‘Sylar’ with ‘Magneto’ and the parallels are…well, copyright infringements), there’s a lot left undisclosed. In some cases this is genuinely intriguing, in others it’s a bit sloppy and vague.
And as with all time travel stories, a wealth of plot and logic inconsistencies arrive. It’s never really made clear if this is an alternate timeline or what-have-you, and if indeed anything can actually be changed in the past that could stop it all from happening. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Masi Oka does a great job playing both Present and Future Hiro, which is more than can be said of some of the rest of the cast, who have a slight tendency to overplay the whole ‘I’m so hardcore now’ angle (I’m looking at you, Ventimiglia). Hayden Panetierre continues to soldier on through her scenes of constant crying and looking hurt; I can only hope Clairebear actually gets to crack a smile at some point soon, otherwise she’s going to implode into a Dawson’s Creek-size pit of perpetual mopeyness.
With three episodes to go, it’s time for Heroes to really pull its socks up and dazzle everyone. This episode is a nice precursor for what I’m sure will be some awesome fights to come, and things are very much coming to a head now. Bring it on.
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