Tim Kring: “I’m so sorry.”

[bryant]

I paraphrase his remarks on Heroes. What he actually said was “romance isn’t a natural fit for us,” and “We took too long to get to the big-picture story,” and “We made a mistake.” I.e.: the Claire storyline sucked, and the meandering around sucked, and season 2 in general has not been good.

This is true. I noted a while back that the problem with season 2 was that it’s very much like season 1. That worked for season 1, because they were introducing the world and building our relationships with the characters. But now we have relationships, and we are unhappy to see them neglected while yet more characters are introduced.

There appears, however, to be hope.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Comments

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

The most recent episode of Heroes was pretty good. That, or I've become so inured to low quality that even a slight uptick gets my attention.

[death-by-monkey.livejournal.com]

Yeah, huh. I finally just watched Monday's ep and I have to say, I'm pretty inspired by the last couple minutes of it. Here's to the next few episodes continuing to get better.

[thebitterguy]

The big problem being that they have, what, three more episodes before they run out?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

One thing about "Heroes" that's just like DC/Marvel is that female characters fare badly. I should write up my own rant about this.

[kodi]

Yeah, the feeling I get is that females get to pick from three roles: evil patsy, damsel in distress, or stalking/murder victim. Most females in Heroes are so excited by these choices they pick more than one! I don't know, maybe I need to look through the cast and see if I can recall a time when a female character did something heroic (for definitions of heroic not including suicide.)

[kodi]

"A buildup of intrigue about these characters and the discovery of their powers." Does Tim Kring actually watch television? Are there real humans whose favorite episode from a series is "That one where they introduce all the characters!"?

Also, wow, there are a lot of episode 7 spoilers behind that link.

[bryant]

Whups, sorry. What with being behind and all I lost track of where realtime was.

[kodi]

I wasn't really complaining, so much as I was surprised that he would load an article so heavily with spoilers when it's basically a plea for all the people who gave up on the show 3 episodes ago to start watching again. It's almost like he's giving people permission to just start with episode 8, because they didn't really miss anything. Or, again, perhaps he is not actually a human who watches television.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Actually, yes. Meeting the characters for the first time on ensemble shows or movies is tremendously entertaining for me. It's one of the reasons I love all movies about getting a crew/team/band together for the tournament/heist/whatever.

I love origin stories, and snappy character intros, and I agree with Kring that it was a good feature of season 1 that they couldn't replicate (at least not at the pace they've been doing it) in season 2, now that the rest of the basic universe has been established, because people fill in the blanks so much faster.

[kodi]

I love origin stories, because things happen in them. I just don't get excited about "Hi, I'm Flying Kid. You're a robot!"

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

Too late, in my case. This season was bad enough that all the flaws I could overlook last year overrode what little pleasure I got from this season's episodes, so I just stopped watching. If it gets markedly better, I'll return, but otherwise I'd rather suffer from the flu for a month than watch another one of those gawdawful episodes.

[death-by-monkey.livejournal.com]

I was talking with another fellow Heroes and Lost watcher about this season of Heroes and remarking how so far, this season of Heroes feels like the first half of the last season of Lost. Things just feel like they're dragging on and going nowhere fast.

I'm going to be pretty disappointed if it takes Sylar and the Wondertwins the entire season to get to NYC. They feel like Heroes' Paulo and Nikki to me. I say kill 'em off as soon as you get the opportunity.

[vampyrusgirl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's my problem, too. Deal with the characters and storylines we know, and stop with the new characters, please! The most interesting story line so far, the Sylar one, has been largely ignored, and there are about 1000 simultaneous plotlines!! It's driving me nuts, but I'm sticking it out, hoping, and waiting.

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

It misses two big parts of season 1, which the ET article gets to: the overarching plotline and the cliffhanger endings -- that is, it is missing both strategic and tactical suspense.

(in particular, the overarching sense-of-doom that in season 1 was established almost immediately, with Hiro's jaunt into the future when New York was vaporized. As Hitchcock said, you can show fifteen minutes of two men talking over coffee, and have the audience on the edge of their seat the whole time -- but you first have to show five seconds of a man setting a time bomb beneath their table.)