Heroes Gets an “Oh Snap!” for Cold Snap

Posted by ScuzzBuster

March 24, 2009

Cold Snap is Bryan Fuller’s first full writing credit since his return to Heroes this season. He’s on the rebound since his show Pushing Daisies was put six feet under. Fuller’s influence was apparent with the multitude of Star Trek references. However, fans hoping for an overnight cure for bad and mediocre Heroes for the last two years are a little overly optimistic. Fortunately, the show has been slowly showing some signs of life more recently and while Fuller’s return is welcome I’m certainly not hanging the hopes of the show on one man. I do feel that in the course of the show, Fuller has demonstrated that he understands many of the elements that made the show so succesful early in it’s run, perhaps even more so than creator Tim Kring himself.

First, I’m still completely impatient with the Hiro and Ando storylines. I understand that they have been reduced to comic relief, but at some point if you’re going to make them characters that actually contribute they have to be taken somewhat seriously. In season 1, it really seemed to work. They gave Hiro a great storyline through his time travel experience falling in love with the tragically doomed waitress that year, you’d think that would have helped the character mature.
However they’ve taken Hiro and made him more and more childlike and idiotic. Cold Snap wasn’t so bad in this respect. It tells me that they are either going to try to re-involve Hiro and Ando in some meaningful way or tonight was just a fluke. Whatever the case is, if they continue to play Hiro and Ando into these outlandish scenarios totally disconnected from the main plot it’s never going to improve. I may be in the minority here, but I still believe that the most interesting Hiro that we’ve had over the first three seasons was the bad-ass, samurai, alternative-future Hiro.

Also, there was a startling discovery about Noah and Claire Bennet this week. Per my wife, who’s pre-married last name is “Bennett” I have misspelled Claire and Noah Bennet’s last name in every single Heroes article I’ve written this season. I can handle this in one of two ways, I could go back and edit every article I’ve written or simply acknowledge here that I’m a hack. Since from day one of the launch of Deviant Knowledge, I’ve never made any claims not to be a hack, we will all have to settle for that solution. I will also make a weak attempt to place some of the blame on my spell checker, which does not see “Bennett” as a misspelled word, but red flags me every time I type “Bennet.” There it goes again, damnit!

I almost forgot to mention about the Bennets, Jack Coleman has really done some outstanding work since the launch of the series as Noah Bennet. It’s been extremely easy to overlook his work in the midst of the train wrecks that the majority of season 2 and season 3 episodes have been, but by some miracle, we’re at least seeing some consistent movement in his character in one direction. Noah Bennet has been one of the best and most promising characters in the series since it’s start–not to mention one of the only characters WITHOUT powers–and I really believe that one of the things that the success of the show hinges on is how it handles the “Horned Rimmed Glasses Guy.”

We can’t discuss Cold Snap without discussing the long awaited return of Micah Sanders. When I say “long-awaited” of course I am long-awaited by Noah Gray-Cabey, who plays Micah Sanders. In the current U.S. economic climate, I’m sure Noah was ecstatic at the prospect of a paycheck again. To give the show credit, we were set up to have “Rebel” be a returning character and I had Micah pegged a mile away. Okay, maybe not a mile. It was more like 10 yards away as soon as the ATM starting talking to Ali Larter. Glad to see Micah hasn’t taken that damned backpack off yet, though! I’ll give the show a pass on this one, now that Cabey is a little older, we may get a more interesting character out of him.

We also get the astounding revelation this week that Tracy Strauss’ true identity is Zan from the Wonder Twins. Anyone that grew up in the 70s or 80s knows the teenage members of the Superfriends. Zan could transform into ice or water on command. Zan and Jana would click their magic rings together and Zan would say something like “Form of…AN ICE BRIDGE!” and whaddya know, he would turn into an ice bridge COMPLETE WITH A WINKING FACE. That was cheesy as hell…now I’m talking about Tracy’s ice face winking. THAT was even cheesier than the Wonder Twins.

For my next trick, I’m going to nitpick this week’s Heroes Logical Lapses! Now for the two or three of you that may read my Galactica and Lost reviews, you’re probably going to start lambasting me for overlooking tons of logical lapses in those programs over the years. In my defense, there is one major difference that allows me to overlook many (not all) of the lapses in those two programs: Battlestar Galactica and Lost are both shows that have maintained a very high quality over four or more seasons. Heroes is a program that maintained very good to high quality over one season and has been sloppily written and consistently mediocre since. So Heroes doesn’t get all the same passes that those programs do, and in fairness to the those programs, Heroes makes silly logical and scientific lapses at an alarmingly higher rater than those programs.

• Logical Lapse 1: In the Coma Room, all the heroes are being kept immobile by some mysterious sedative being pumped into their lungs through tubes in their noses. Now, I’ve been sedated many times for surgical procedures or just through voluntary doses of alcohol. Let me tell you, there is no sedative on the planet powerful enough to keep you unconscious and/or immobile yet leave you perfectly awake, alert and mobile THE MOMENT you yank the tube out of your nose. There wasn’t even enough time for whatever gas was being pumped into their noses to clear their air passageways. Okay, whatever advances the plot, right?

• Logical Lapse 2: This lapse was just plain sloppy writing. What do you usually do when you want your child to stop watching television? Apparently, Hiro’s reaction is to bend over and YANK THE DAMN PLUG OUT OF THE WALL rather than just turning it off. Crap writing folks. It only makes sense because they had to have the TV unplugged for them to recognize the Parkman kid’s power. They could easily have gotten around this. They could have turned the TV off normally and had the kid be just smart enough to reach for the button to turn it back on forcing to Hiro to actually unplug it. In fairness, it may actually have been shot that way and edited for time. The way it ends up on screen though it just ends up being a cheap plot device that makes no sense.

I’m going to finish this week’s Heroes review with an extreme rarity, a well-deserved compliment for a job well done to the program for a specific sequence. A couple of months ago I bemoaned how completely numb and apathetic I was to Daphne’s apparent death. By this time, the show just had no resonance with me as a human being anymore. Cold Snap, however, moved me emotionally for the first time since season one and the death of Simone resolving the Isaac, Peter, Simone love triangle. The handling of Daphne’s death (apparently) with Parkman giving her the “illusion” of a happy ending was handled beautifully and effectively. Kudos to Heroes for giving me the first great moment in the program in a long time. Of course it is with extremely cautious optimism that I hope that it won’t be the last before the end of season 3.