Heroes: Shades of Gray - Bryan Fuller Tries to Stop the Bleeding.
Last Monday, I was simply too apathetic to say anything worthwhile about Heroes. I guess the only thing less inspiring than watching an inexplicably terrible new episode of Heroes each week was watching a totally mediocre episode. I guess if you don’t hate it and you don’t love it, it’s hard to muster enough motivation to even discuss it. I’m not going to wax poetic about Shades of Gray, the first episode on the books with Bryan Fuller back in the Heroes writers’ room, but I’m not going to tear it to pieces.
Unfortunately, the most emotionally inspiring moments in Shades of Gray for me still came from the new trailer for Star Trek. I’m not going to fault this episode completely for that since I’m a Trek geek at heart. I will completely sidetrack this review at this point by pointing out that there was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation also entitled Shades of Gray, and ironically in that case that TNG episode was considerably more terrible than this episode of Heroes.
To be reasonable, I think it’s worth noting that I believe the upswing in Heroes really started before tonight. I’m going to keep a little hope that it doesn’t lose any steam now that we seemingly have concluded Sylar’s quest to find his father.
So let me talk about what seems to be the seeds of good. First, I’ve held pretty firm this season stating that I believe that the character they’ve done the least damage to over seasons 2 and 3 has been Claire Bennett. Now this isn’t to say that the Cheerleader has been a source of any real entertainment, but I do believe that they’ve at least positioned the character to have some sort of realistic personal conflict between a moral obligation to do good versus the want to have some sort of normal life. 
In this respect, the only character that’s really gotten more interesting since season one has been Claire’s mother played by Ashley Crowe. It doesn’t seem like they are going to move Sandra Bennett’s role forward very much past Shades of Gray, but I do think that Crowe’s great performances this season have been one of the few bright spots in the program and worth a mention, especially since the character was an inconsequential set piece in season one.
With the most recent episode we’ve seemingly reached turning point for Claire Bennett. No longer under political immunity from her father Noah, she now seems to be in the hands of her biological father Nathan Petrelli. But this brings us this ugly and irritating ping-pong match they’ve played with Nathan all this time. In this constant expressed “theme” of moral gray areas that Heroes has tried to express since the start, Nathan has always been either black or white. He’s either good or bad, and the writers have seemed to think that when you average the two, you get gray, when in reality all we’ve gotten with Nathan is a different color hat for him to wear each week. No consistency and seemingly no justifiable motivation for him when he bounces back and forth between the two. They’ve pretty much reduced Nathan to a plot device and they did it again tonight.
The next question that really has me intrigued yet worried at this point is where do they go from here with Sylar? Even through seasons 2 and 3 they’ve managed to at least generate some intrigue with the character though they certainly have been clumsy with their development of him. They’ve managed to take a serial killer and make him a sympathetic character, which is interesting, but now that we’ve completed his quest to find his father do they simply drop him back into bad guy mode? Hopefully they won’t drop the ball because some of the best character moments and well written scenes all year have involved Quinto’s Sylar and they continued this trend tonight when he finally confronted his father, played by John Glover.
Even though I think the show is taking some slow steady steps toward repairing itself, I was still shocked by the announcement this week that it had indeed been renewed for a fourth season with a minimum 18 episode order. First, the ratings have simply continued to plummet since the end of the first season. It’s probably a sad statement for NBC to note that it still remains one of its top rated dramas. I’m wondering though if this vote of confidence in Heroes by NBC is more of a vote of confidence in Bryan Fuller returning to try to recapture some of the magic and originality of the initial season.
Two weeks from now we’ll officially get to see Fuller’s first official writing credit for season 3 with Cold Snap. I’m not very hopeful that this will be a notable turn around for the show. So much damage has been done to the majority of the characters as well as the current muddled and mostly uninteresting story arc that if this ship is going turn course it’s going to be a slow, wide turn to get back on course. Personally, I think the key is for the show start thinking small. Let’s spend some quality time exploring characters, relationships and moral questions rather than miring itself down in grandiose conspiracies and the evil, mustache-twirling bad guys of the week.
That’s really all the baloney I have to spill about Heroes this week. To break with my usual “TV Review” format I’m not going to pull out a silly bullet point list of observations about Shades of Gray. However, I will end this with my usual “This Week’s Spinoff Idea.”
This Week’s Spin Off Idea: New Heroes! Rather than a spinoff, how about giving this show a big kick in the ass by wrapping up this horrifically ugly place that season 2 and season 3 have taken it and reset these characters and themes from the word go. I think we’re beyond the point where Peter Petrelli can simply wake up in a cold sweat to suddenly find out that all of the past two seasons have been a dream, but lets to do something that in a reasonable manner can help us forgot about all this nonsense and put these characters back to some starting point that will allow us to have an intriguing story and drama written around them. I’m cautiously hopeful for this, but in honesty, I’m still not very optimistic.
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Tags: Heroes, TV Reviews
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One Response to “Heroes: Shades of Gray - Bryan Fuller Tries to Stop the Bleeding.”
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March 11th, 2009 at 7:39 am
So, I’m still not watching heroes but the more I see of the Star Trek movie the more excited I get! The extended trailer that was shown before the Watchmen just made me think even more that this movie could be pretty damn good.