Heroes: Villains – Season Premiere Review

Oh man. What the hell? I thought that they were going to bring Heroes back with a vengeance for Season 3?!? Everything we heard in advance was promising, right? “Villains”! That sounds cool! We get some Villains to counteract our Heroes this time around. Man, I couldn’t have been more excited to fall back into this show after a disappointing second season.

So why did I turn it off after just one hour of the two hour season premier event? To put it bluntly: it sucked. Not “Season 2 sucked” either. A whole new level of Not Good TV: The Season 3 Suck. It’s bad. And from what I can tell, it’s only getting worse.

When heroes first premiered, it was so promising, so engaging. “What would happen… (wait for it)… if REAL people… got superpowers!” What do you think? Huh? Huh? Well, for one season (or maybe just 3/4ths of one season) it worked to satisfy our collective curiosity.  But let’s all remember: this is TV. Sooner or later, “real people” are going to start acting like “stupid mothafuckin’ people”. Just look at The Real World. That show had “real people” for about 3 seasons. And then “stupid mothafuckin’ people” for about 40.

Heroes is no different. Things started going south for me well in advance of the unpopular Season 2. Peter “Little Nicky” Petrelli, early in Season 1, has visions of blowing up New York City as a human bomb. He doesn’t know what it means. But he knows it’s coming. All the signs point to it. So what does he do in his journey from Real Person to Stupid Mothafuckin’ Person as the season progresses? Well, I’ll tell you what he DOESN’T do… get his ass out of New York City! That season finale to Season 1 was freakin’ Ewoks, man. Ewoks! And for those of you who don’t know Geekscape Talk, here’s the listing in the Geekscape Dictionary:

Yeah. The end of Season One was Ewoks. The Second Season was… I don’t know what it was. But at least it was only 11 episodes of I don’t know what it was. And hey, it ended on a cliffhanger: Nathan, Peter “Twitch” Petrelli’s politico brother, gets shot at the podium during a news conference.

So Season 3… Villains. I was so damn excited! Let’s start The Spoiler Warning. But trust me. This is beyond spoiling.

We start out with our first Villain in the opening moments: Evil Future Peter Petrelli from Season One’s best episodes (aka “We’ve never read Claremenont and Byrne’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past” 2-parter) running through what is said to be 4 Years From Now and ending up at the other end of a gun being pointed at him by… FUCKING WAIT FOR IT! Dark Claire! How bad ass is that!?! Why would we ADD new “Villains” when we already are paying THESE guys!?! Well… because the audience is already WAY tired of “these guys”. Peter… well… I’m sorry, Milo. But the Little Nicky lip stretch and “the twitch” do not constitute either desperation or thought in this viewer’s eyes. They constitute epilepsy. If I saw someone on the street with mannerisms in any way close to what I’ve witnessed Peter doing since the beginning of Heroes… I’d call 911. Or I’d try and trap him in my magic Little Nicky flask. And this season, the promise is that you’ll be exposed to this twice, with normal Peter (who soon gets trapped in someone else’s body) and Bad Peter. I’ve got news: he’s been pretty bad all along.

What about nice, real American girl Claire? Where is she? Well, she’s spending the first third of the episode with a newly annoying single-note Sylar recreating (or actually just insulting the HELL out of) John Carpenter’s sequence from the first Halloween film. Yeah. She runs into a closet and ties it closed while clutching a butcher knife. “Hey! We did an homage to geek culture!” No. You hit Geek Culture over the head and tried to steal its lunch money. We hate you. Am I alone in wishing that Sylar had died at the end of Season One? Am I nuts in thinking how great an opportunity it would have been to inject the show with some new energy?

Tim Kring claims to not having read any comic books when developing the ideas in Heroes. Then why does it all seem so tired and derivative? Why is this show losing steam and viewers as fast as The Flash? Why are you punishing me? You want to hear stories about “real people getting powers”? Stan Lee and Jack Kirby beat you to it by over forty years. Peter Parker, Bruce Banner and Matt Murdock are real people given extraordinary powers. What the audience wants to see, especially after a summer featuring Iron Man and The Dark Knight, is something fresh. There was nothing fresh about where Heroes was headed last night.

Remember that in the current day, the time elapsed between Season Two and Season Three is the length of a single gunshot into Nathan Petrelli’s chest. We find out in the opening minutes that the shooter is Future Evil Peter, shooting his own brother before he can reveal the existence of super powered Heroes living among them, which would later cause their kind to go into hiding, persecuted by society. You’ve never read an X-Men comic book? REALLY!?! You’re setting yourself up for some serious backlash. Perhaps if Tim Kring had read a comic book, it would have helped him avoid the pitfalls that comic book storylines usually fall into, mainly long droughts of originality.

The silly just gets sillier as we catch up with our good buddy Mohinder and our favorite illegal immigrant Maya “The South of the Border Stink Eye” Herrera. Mohinder has just dropped Heroes Detector Molly (and the requirement of having an extra cast member in this already bloated cast) off and is ready to go back to experimenting in order to cure Maya of The Stink Eye. The good news is, in the length of time it took for Nathan Petrelli to get shot, Maya has already been cured of most of her accent and has discovered American Apparel. She’s decked out in it from head to toe. We might as well call her Tiffany Stink Eye from now on. She’s 100% Anglo, baby. And Mohinder’s such a good guy that Season One and Two’s moral compass, upon discovering a break through in the super power formula, not only ignores Maya’s request for a cure but INJECTS HIMSELF WITH IT LIKE A DRUG ADDICT TURNING HIMSELF INTO “DAVID CRONENBERG’S THE FLY-HINDER”! What is going on!?! Are you sick of this show yet!?!

But what about Hiro? Where’s our loveable racial stereotype? If Maya can be cured of her rich accent from Season Two, can Hiro be cured? Well, we don’t know, because he’s in Japan with Ando discovering his dead father’s locked away formula and then letting it get swiped from him by a brand new Villain. That’s right! We FINALLY get a brand new Villain! And she’s… ANNOYING AS HELL. She’s a Flash-style Speedster with the attitude and attire of a NYC bike messenger. It makes sense, right? Well, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet, Mr. Kring. Everyone wants to hit NYC bike messengers with their cars and hates them. And not in a “she’s a villain and you’re supposed to hate her” kind of way. More like in a “I just think everything about that person is forced and sucks and I would rather see their head go under my tire than continue to deal with them” kind of way. And what’s wrong with her neck? Why is she twitchy? This isn’t The 5th Element. Here, acting like that is just annoying.

With promise like this, I couldn’t wait for the rest of the Villains to show up. But by the end of the first episode, all we get is one of Ma Petrelli’s nightmare visions and Nathan finds God. Ugh. Did anyone else groan at the News Reporter saying “all over the news AND Youtube”? What the hell!?! NBC Universal, the makers of Heroes, owns Youtube, but when more people are watching Youtube than are watching this Ewok’ed-ass show, do you REALLY need to advertise here?!?

Lame duck all around, I say. The episode ends with a familiar style Mohinder narration. But this time around, the Ewoking has matured to full on Prequel and the writing is SO overdone that it’s almost unlistenable. It’s like a retarded kid riding a jackhammer trying to read a haiku off of a street sign a block away. I tried listening to it while watching images that didn’t evoke anything in me and all I got were phrases like “The Eagle Clam Chowder Sprays Power Down Deep In All Of Us While Getting Pleasure On The Matterhorn”. You laugh. But this phrase is actually BETTER, LESS OVERWRITTEN and MAKES MORE SENSE than anything in the actual voice over!

I think it was time to walk the dogs. But wait! They’re going to hit you in the head with a SECOND EPISODE now that you’re SO PUMPED from the lackluster first! And this episode… we really DO mean we’re going to give you Villains. Honestly. Check it out: all of the Sector 5 villains have escaped! Look at all, uh, four of them. No wait! Don’t go! One of them is Nicki! And she, in the time it took Nathan to get shot, went from being blown up in a house to being the lover of a rich socialite with a Southern accent! How CRAZY is that! That’s CRAZIER THAN THE MOST RANDOM THING YOU’VE EVER SEEN ON LOST, RIGHT? Wait! Come back! Another FULL hour of this pain!

I clicked off the TV set, and Heroes, for the final time and stepped out onto my street. My dogs’ eventual dumps were miniscule in comparison to what I’d just witnessed. All I could think, watching the little guys work them out, was that for some of you, it’s going to be a very long season. Just not for me.