Heroes is definitely one of the biggest shows to hit our screens in recent times. I think Survivor South Africa may have been bigger, but the interest in Heroes far outweighs any other drama show that I can think of.
Now that the first episode has come and gone, how did it fare? Well, one of the things that a pilot episode needs to do is establish the setting and the characters, and I think it’s fair to say that Heroes succeeded there.
One of the things I was wondering about was how they were going to explain everybody’s powers. It appears that they’re opted for the explanation that the powers are the next stage in human evolution.
While evolution doesn’t quite work that way, it’s a sufficiently plausible pseudo-scientific explanation, which also worked for X-Men. So I’m happy with the writers going that route, even if they did perpetuate the
myth that we only use 10% of our brains.
Onto the characters. I think a good job was done in introducing them, as they all got decent screen time, and we also learnt a little of their back stories.
One thing that struck me as being different from a standard TV show is that there was no single storyline to drive the entire episode. Usually you’d expect there to be a main story which is the primary focus of the episode and comes to some sort of resolution (or lack of resolution) by the end, while in the meantime other plot threads are advanced.
With this episode of Heroes that didn’t happen, and the structure was more like that of reading a book. The episode could be regarded as the equivalent of a chapter with numerous scene changes, and things not being wrapped up by the end of the chapter.
This episode was the first of a two-parter, so they could just be adopting this approach initially and then returning to a more traditional one in future episodes. I'd prefer it that they don't, as I enjoyed the way it was structured.
The episode ended on a fairly dramatic note, as one of the ways to ensure that people continue watching is to end on with a cliff-hanger. But I’m pretty sure we’ve all watched enough TV to know everything’s going to work out all right – it’s highly unlikely that they’ll give a character that much screen time only to kill him off in the second episode.
What’s more interesting that the cliff-hanger is the nature of Peter’s power. I think the writers did a good job of leading us to think that he would be able to fly, but we saw that this wasn’t the case and that it was actually Nathan who could fly.
I did have my doubts about Peter’s flight capabilities as it would then have seemed that he had two powers, namely flying and dreaming. We now know it’s not the former, so that leaves the dreams that he had of flying.
I don’t think that it’s some form of divination, as that would mean that there would be two people able to see the future in Isaac and Peter. So it must be something else, even though at this stage I’m not sure what it could be. The only thing I’m certain of is that it will be revealed eventually.
Heroes certainly shows a lot of promise, and I would say that it almost lived up to all the hype. Almost, because while I’ve seen the opinion expressed that it’s the best show ever, it’s going to have to take a lot to supplant a certain show set on a space station as far as I’m concerned.