I was able to watch a few more episodes of Heroes, bring me about two thirds of the way through the first season of the series. My overall impression is that the series is currently not as strong as it was in the first part of the season with the Save the Cheerleader, Save the World story-line and that the new How to Stop an Exploding Man is suffering from some pacing issues.
For one, we haven't seen the exploding man for more than a minute or two so far. For another, there's only been one new character worth talking about and one character death that was fairly stupid, But the biggest problem is that not much has actually happened compared to the first half.
Peter Petrelli is learning about control of his powers from, literally, the Invisible Man, and . . . actually that's the only story that's really advanced.
His brother is still a jerk, Nikki's story-line is circling the drain, Mohinder has had about 5 minutes of screen-time, Hiro's quest has been derailed by unneeded family squabbles, Sylar is still killing people, Claire and her friends and family had their memory wiped bringing them back to point one again though at least she found her birth mother. And no that I think about it, why didn't Claire's father order the Haitian to wipe Sylar's mind so he would forget his daughter? He certainly has no problem destroying his son's mind with his employee's power, why not an actual, you know, threat? But I digress.
This is the problem a lot of series that have a 20+ episode season have. In about the third quarter of the show, everyone stays in a holding pattern until the end because they have to save their big reveals until the final few episodes. This means a lot of stalling.
Unfortunately there isn't much for me to talk about this time except that the usage of the Invisible Man has been on of the series best decisions so far. It adds a sort of world-weary figure and guide to Peter who had otherwise been flailing around without any direction and explaining his power as something truly interesting. Where this leads I can't be too sure, but for now this has been the best development of the show in recent episodes.
Claire's mother story-line impact would have been better if her father hadn't literally reset everything to zero and have her not remember anything that happened to save her from Sylar at the halfway point of the season. I'm curious to learn more about her and her relationship to her daughter, but for now we instead involve Nathan Petrelli in another story he doesn't need to be a part of. I obviously don't find the family anywhere near as interesting as the writers do, but I'll just have to deal with this revelation and hope it actually leads to something and makes Nathan actually do anything other than be smarmy for awhile.
I guess I'll just have to see what happens next before I can say more. I do hope the season finale lives up to what they are building up to and this holding pattern is broken soon.
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