Heroes: Into Asylum - Just When We Almost Forgot What Good “Heroes” Was Like…

Posted by ScuzzBuster

March 31, 2009

heroesplatelogo I’m going to commit a rare crime today, so I’ll cut to the chase immediately. I unashamedly admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Into Asylum and it didn’t take much reflection for me to realize that I had watched the best episode of Heroes by since the first season. I even hesitate to call it a fluke since it really does seem that the trend has been up recently. Into Asylum hopefully plants a seed for what could make this show successful again.

The successful formula for this episode can be summed up in the old cliché “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” In this case, simple and small is what worked. One of the grand mistakes that Heroes has been making since the first episode of Season 2 is trying to outdo itself on scale hoping to force excitement. During the course of making the conspiracies so grand and the stakes so high, the program has simply lost sight of the thing that makes any viewer tune in week to week: character drama. The most recent outing actually had focus. It didn’t jump around trying to force the entire ensemble into 44 minutes and the viewer is rewarded.

We have a few simple stories in Into Asylum:
danko Sylar making his deal with Danko to help hunt down and capture the other “Special” people. A small quaint psychological battle between these two characters settles into an uneasy and potentially juicy alliance. This is a very promising turn of events that could make up for the short-lived and mis-played Sylar/Noah team up previously. Danko immediately becomes a much more rich character now that we see him making choices out of uncertainty and desperation rather than being the overly-confident and overbearing bully.

natclaire Claire Bennet and Nathan Petrelli now have been forced into hiding. The character of Nathan has been written in such a schizophrenic manner since the first series that it becomes nearly impossible for any character or any viewer to trust or settle into any level of comfort with him. However, forcing him into hiding with his secret revealed we can trust that not being caught is at least in his best interests whether he really cares about protecting Claire or not. Now we force Claire to play off of Nathan as her biological father rather than continuing the emotional ping pong match she’s been playing with Noah. I’m still not sold on the direction that they’ve taken Nathan to this point, but it’s hard to really judge at this point. I will be severely disappointed if he’s back in Washington with all this forgotten in a couple of episodes.

peteangela Angela Petrelli is now on the run as well. She suddenly becomes much more interesting now that there’s an emotional investment in her secrets. It seems that they may actually flesh out her 2-dimensional baddie character and make her more rich and interesting in the same way that they expanded on Claire’s adoptive mother. We now have a stake in wanting to find out what she’s about, what she’s really running from and what her ulterior motives are, good or bad.

Noah Bennet and Danko. They’ve played this right over the past several episodes and for the time being I’m actually committed to see how this chess match between the two characters plays out, especially now that we know that Danko is going to be secretly tapping Sylar in an alliance that we know can’t end well for him. Better yet, we really for the first time in a while have a genuine sense of unknown about Noah Bennet. What is he really attempting to achieve? Who’s side is he on at this point? Is his main motivation still to protect Claire? It seems for the time being that he’s working for our genetic misfits as he tries to secretly subvert the plot to catch the others. But does he really care about anyone besides Claire at this point?

Simple. Direct. Intriguing. Into Asylum created its drama almost exclusively from character development. Rather than making a blatant and overbearing spectacle, the powers that were used by our characters were simply there to advance their development and their goals.
Ultimately, we disposed of the silliness and eliminated the need to make excuses to cover for overtly bad logic and science and simply focused on the people and the potential pitfalls and positives of the choices they are currently making. In addition, there was almost no filler. This episode worked top bottom.
I’m pleased to give Into Asylum a huge thumbs up. Hopefully this is the beginning of trend rather than the end of one.

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