Heroes season 3 episode 15 review

Last week I was genuinely impressed with Heroes. Both metaphorically and figuratively the show was a plane falling from the sky, hoping that someone on board would pull it out of this dive and avoid the unsightly incident when it became ‘as one’ with the ground. Given how well it turned around many aspects, it never actually crossed my mind that how well that episode worked was entirely accidental.

I was so wrong!

Before this episode starts the plane crashes, and that seems entirely fitting for the story it presented, because Heroes isn’t back on course, it’s six feet under (and not in a positive ‘Alan Ball’ written way).

Before I start to eviscerate Trust and Blood, let me just review where the problems with Heroes are, and why I thought that some of them had been fixed. The issues as I, and others, saw them, was that the Heroes became disconnected from reality; they didn’t have jobs or visible means of support. But there were also too many of them, and many had stupid numbers of powers. When you blended in a plot that was going in circles, clunky dialogue and clichéd performances, the end result wasn’t pretty or even watchable.

Last week’s story gave them jobs again – hooray! And the plot went in a single direction, not fifteen unrelated ones; for a brief moment things looked promising. And then in the first five minutes of this junk, all that got undone, and we went back to Heroes-the-morons mode, where people do irrational things and it’s all disconnected from any form of reality.

It starts with Nathan talking two days after the crash to someone on the phone, who at the end is revealed as Angela. This time, jumping around added nothing, and I’ve no idea what it was supposed to achieve. We then return to the aftermath of the crash where the heroes are being hunted down by the 2D character they call the ‘Hunter’. An air strike comes and destroys what’s left of the aircraft, although no heroes we know appear to be missing. Given the condition of the plane, this seems unbelievable.

Parkman, Mohinda and Hiro are playing the three stooges for the ‘A’ team, and in team ‘B’ we have Tracy and Peter, who are all dressed in stylish orange, this year’s new black. How they’re all not shot in the first five minutes, I’ve no idea, but they escape the highly trained people with guns somehow.

Parkman is in Pre-cog mode following imaginary Usutu, who, for whatever reason, still seems to think his name is ‘Pak-man’. Maybe he’s colour-blind since his head was cut off. I didn’t see any blue pills, or Binky and friends.

They come to an empty trailer and Parkman steals some crayons and draws pictures of what goes wrong next. We’re told it’s cute Daphne being shot, but the picture looks nothing like Daphne whatsoever. Actually, it looks like the drawings of Claire in season one, which didn’t look like her either as I recall. They head back to the crash site, because that’s where the picture says that whomever-girl gets shot.

Meanwhile, Daphne finds Ando in Japan and brings him to the crash site so she can get shot, it seems.

Tracy and Peter are having more luck, and at least bag a couple of bad guys, so they don’t have to wear a colour that clashes with almost all accessories. They plan to get Nathan to come to them, so he can lie to them in his best political style. Claire is captured and tells Nathan and Noah what she thinks of them both just before Daphne turns up and takes her to where Parkman, Mohinda and Hiro are, near the fakest-looking rock in the history of modern TV.

If you were wondering, Hiro has no power, nor a real explanation of why. He warbles on about getting a sword again, forgetting that in season one the whole sword thing was a wild goose chase for power coming back. Peter has been power limited, in the only remotely clever thing that is in this story, he can now only have one power at a time. As he only has one power, we can remember what it does. Smart plan!

Then Daphne gets shot, and dies. She was so cute and pouting, yet her power was too useful, so she had to die, I say. I’ll miss her, but she can be cute on another show, I’m sure. I never bought that she liked Parkman, anyway.

Parkman goes mental, probably because the plot never actually let them have sex, and he makes one of the Hunter’s men turn on the others and kill them. The Hunter turns up, kills his own man, and captures Claire – because she’s the one that always gets caught; it’s in the rules.

After this we get into an exceptionally stupid subplot where Sylar is looking for his father and ends up with a young sidekick, Luke Campbell, who can microwave people and, more usefully, ready-meals. Dumb.

Tim Kring, THERE ARE TOO MANY CHARACTERS! Yes, you killed Daphne off, but you added a new one immediately! The end result, based on my maths, is that there are STILL TOO MANY CHARACTERS! You had a plane crash, and you killed nobody!

I hope Star Trek is good, because Zachary Quinto needs to get out of this show fast. Someone might be crazy enough to demand a fourth season.

Nathan is lured to Tracy and Peter and smooth talks his way to Tracy giving Peter up, except he’s lying as usual and tries to take them both into custody with the many troops he mistakenly brought with him. This makes Tracy look utterly naïve and stupid, because it’s not exactly like she doesn’t know what a snake he can be. She gets captured and subsequently drugged for export to Mutant-Gitmo, but Peter takes Nathan’s power and flies away to meet up with the others. They plan to hide and strike back, although they seem a little sketchy on the details of how you get along when you can’t have a job, a car or a mobile phone. Ah…details…you hate them don’t you, Tim?

Thankfully, I left lots of details out, because, frankly, giving them to you wouldn’t make this any less a mess than it was. All that’s required now is for the next episode entitled Building 26 to find out if A Clear and Present Danger really was good completely by accident and if this story was representative of the rubbish we’ll see from this point onwards. The dialogue in this episode was awful in places, which makes me think I already know the answer, unfortunately.

This one left me with a headache, humming Going Underground by The Jam.

Check out our review of episode 14 here.