Not very super Heroes

Here’s a riddle: Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) and Adam Monroe (David Anders) stand in front of a reinforced steel door. They need to get inside to save the world, but how? Whatever will our protagonists do?

The answer is to realize Peter has the ability to walk through walls, and let him waltz on inside. Problem solved, crisis averted, score one for the good guys.

But, as fans of Heroes know, that’s not how the NBC show’s season two finale decided to do it.

Inexplicably, Peter stuck out his hand, grimaced, and tried to open the door telekinetically. Bolts flew out. Peter’s nose began to bleed. He still didn’t stop and just walk on through. Peter, walk through the door. Peter? Peter! Come on, man!

Well, whatever. He blew open the door in time, saved the world and onto season three we go.

Or onto season three they go — that episode marks when I stopped watching.

When a sympathetic major character (Nathan Petrelli, played by Adrian Pasdar), who we’ve spent two years getting to know, is shot in the chest and my response is “oh well,” there may be a bit of a disconnect between the show and its viewers. (It was obvious he wasn’t going to be dead forever — they just needed to inject him with some deus ex machina and he’d be good as new — but still.)

So I skipped season three, and apparently things got worse. Characters’ motivations and reasoning for their actions changed on a dime; the writing hit new lows; Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka) was still an insufferable man-child.

But season four was on its way and series creator Tim Kring claimed for what seemed to be the umpteenth time that the Monday-night show was going back to a more character-driven drama, which is what made it so good in  early on. He even wrote the first half of the season four premiere. And the season’s arc was supposedly going to involve carnies! It seemed promising, so I tuned in on Sept. 21.

Keep in mind I watched the episode with very little knowledge about what transpired in season three. I knew there was some guy named Emile Danko (Zeljko Ivanek), who was evil or something, and I knew Peter’s dad turned out to be evil or something, too.

It actually threw me off, then, that I understood so readily what was going on. Sure, that Danko fellow showed up, and a few other things were mentioned that I had to try to piece together, but for the most part every character was unnervingly similar to what they were two years ago.

Hiro is still an annoying brat with sweeping, childlike concepts of what his “fate” implies; Claire (Hayden Panettiere) is still trying to live a “normal life,” now at Unrealistic University with an amplified stereotype of a roommate; Peter is still trying to fight the good fight, now as a paramedic; and Noah (Jack Coleman) is still running around with a gun, protecting his family, etc.

These characters are wholly defined by a singular trait. Every action they take is a function of this trait, and every action is performed while the character tells the audience explicitly what this trait is.

The worst offender is, of course, Hiro, with constant explanations of his next move aimed at no one in particular. It’s insulting.

That said, I’d be remiss not to mention that Heroes’ awful dialogue has not changed one bit.

Everything these characters say is posited as so important, yet nothing is ever truly said. They talk in such general, grim ways that it makes me yearn for characters to just switch gears and start talking about Madonna. Or Lady Gaga — maybe that’s more topical. Really, anything to quell the show’s ridiculous self-seriousness would work just fine.

There were one or two rays of hope in the premiere, but then again, there always are in the Heroes universe. The carnies story line needs to develop, but I’d like to see where they take it — they weren’t portrayed as overly weird or overly silly, so there’s potential.

Then there’s the interesting slant on Matt’s (Greg Grunberg) battle with Sylar (Zachary Quinto), who is apparently inside him (I missed out on the scene where it happened, but I’m sure the sequence was thrilling). Treating his mind-reading powers like a drug addiction — Matt attends a support group for users — and having Sylar appear to taunt him like the devil on his shoulder is a neat way to delve into the characters. Hopefully, the show sticks with it.

But Heroes has had many of these good ideas in its run, and more often than not they’re discarded in favor of less exciting characters doing inane things. The season four premiere was exactly what I expected: As much as the characters move around and the show tries to shuffle them up, they never change as people. How fun can that be to watch?

So, Heroes: I’m still unconvinced. Until next season, when I once again pray for a return to form, I’ll remain one of the disappointed fans you lost along the way.

jwolper@umd.edu