Holding out for some Heroes

Wow.

That’s my first reaction to the “Heroes” first season finale.

My next reactions come from 30 years of being an off-and-on (mostly on) comic-book reader.

(Lots of spoilers in the extended section)

And yes, it’s about a day late. I don’t care.

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As high as the death count seemed, remember the classic comic book rule: no corpse, no death — and even that’s negotiable. Parkman, DL, the brothers Petrelli — I can construct various and sundry ways they survived. And the one corpse — Linderman — was a healer.

Someone speculated that the flashbacks in Sylar’s eyes might symbolize him losing all his acquired powers. That would be a good thing, making him start from scratch; he was on the verge of becoming too powerful.

Also on the subject of characters becoming too powerful, the same can easily be said of Peter Petrelli. He was on the cusp of becoming “Deus Ex Machina Man” for the show — “only two people could handle this situation — Character X, with his powers, or Peter, who met Character X six weeks ago!” (Cue flashback or file footage.) We saw just how powerful Future Peter was; with him around, other characters can easily become redundant.

One friend of mine wondered why Peter didn’t fly himself off when he started going critical. I thought about that, and I couldn’t recall a single time Peter used more than one power at a time. If, indeed, he has the “Ultra Boy” limitation, then he couldn’t have flown or teleported himself away, because Ted’s power was out of control.

The reveal of HRG’s first name as “Noah” — could that be a bit of symbolism? He’s going to gather heroes together to save them?

The show is probably the best exploration of comic-book heroes outside of the medium I’ve ever seen. It strips them of their hardest-to-translate elements — the costumes and names — and makes them just ordinary people with extraordinary abilities, yet still manages to give them extraordinary challenges.

It also allows them to have a rich history of Heroes, with at least one prior generation of super-powered people having already had their time to have adventures.

That being said, if any of them do start using names and costumes, the first will be Hiro.

The name of the Invisible Man — “Claude Rains” — was almost too cutesy for me to stomach.

That he was played by Dr. Who helped immensely.

Masi Oka is also a skilled computer animation artist, who worked on the Star Wars prequels. Just how fanboyish is it to notice that this Star Wars veteran is son of Mr. Sulu, and worked with the guy who killed Captain Kirk?