Heroes / Heroes Reborn: Discussion Thread

[Sylph]

Oh, she's working with Green on Kings. Good riddance.

[Sylph]

Another disappointed viewer.

[DavidEvanSmith]

We're assuming it's genetic. I've been wondering about this a lot too, and I've wondered why there's no correlation between Nathan/Meredith's powers and Claire's, yet Matt Parkman's powers seem to be derived or an extension of his father's powers.

We finally learned OFFICIALLY that Angela's powers are premonitions, but that doesn't correlate to Nathan's flight, Peter's mimicry, or apparently Sylar's "seeing how something ticks". I've always thought that Peter and Sylar reflected the good and the bad nature of the same ability, so it's interesting that they seem to be related now.

Micah's ability to talk to machines doesn't seem to relate to DL's phasing powers or Niki/Jessica's super strength.

Perhaps if a person only has ONE special parent (we know nothing of Matt's mother), the powers derive from them (as Matt's did), but if they have TWO special parents (Peter/Nathan/Sylar, Claire, Micah), the powers are more random and original?

I want to know what it all means for Nathan's two sons with Heidi (who, as far as we know, is human/ordinary/without powers)

I HOPE DL's mom had powers cause she was a fun bitch! I got the feeling with Nichelle Nichols's character (Monica's mom?) we were going to get into some New Orleans voodoo because she just looked creepy, but they never went there.

I was interested in DL only so far as he was originally painted as this bad guy (before we met him onscreen), but turned out to be the most fair and level-headed of them all. I liked the struggle when Micah accused him of being a "bad guy" in an early episode, and then he went and saved the lady from the burning car on the Nevada roadside.

LOVED Simone, and miss her. She was very much the heart of Season One for me.

But I LOVE Maya's power! If they really got into it, and she learned to control it... I was talking to my Heroes buddy about her, and I was thinking maybe this "death force" inside Maya isn't her power, but rather a parasite or living entity in and of itself, and her "power" is the ability to control it. She and Alejandro shared that power. When it went out of control, they clasped hands and Alejandro seemed to absorb it, which tells me it's a force separate from Maya. She gets upset, and can't contain this force anymore, this black death, and it starts infecting others, until she reels it back in. People that receive it can't handle it because they are "normal" or "human" and so they die from the strain on their ordinary body.

What they need to do is get Maya around some other characters and see what happens. What would happen if Peter went near Maya? Would he absorb the "force" from her, and would she be free of it? Is it a being that needs a host body, and gravitates toward people with abilities? I'd love to see more with this. The kind of thing I mean is like that black costume from Spiderman comics and the third movie.

There's potential there for Maya, but she's being wasted with Mohinder.

But WAS Simone human? I got the impression that the entire generation in that picture of "The Twelve" were special people with abilities.

Bob Bishop

Charles Deveaux

Kaito Nakamura

Maury Parkman

Angela Petrelli

Arthur Petrelli

Victoria Pratt

That's seven of the twelve, and I don't recall them establishing who the others were.

We know that Kaito Nakamura said he was waiting a long time for a Nakamura to "ascend" (display an ability), and never thought it would be Hiro. But we never learned what Kaito's ability was. Bob had the midas touch, Maury was the Nightmare Man, and we don't know what the abilities were for Charles Deveaux, Arthur Petrelli, and Victoria Pratt. But if all those people DID have abilities, why couldn't Simone have been special too, but maybe she never knew before she was killed. It could be the ticket to bringing her back from the dead! I miss her too.

I get nervous about Kristen Bell's expendability too. Love her, and want her to be a regular. She seems like the most well-received character from Season Two, from everything I've read/heard.

[Sylph]

Spoiler :

[Skin]

I disagree. I thought Simone was rather dull. I liked Isaac and Peter much better seperate from her and I felt that she droned out some of the better qualities in the men when she was around them. Isaac was much more tantalizing to watch aswas Peter when they weren't around her and had their own objectives and agendas. I will say that I think Kring was way too quick to kill off characters in season one. I felt that Ted, Eden, Isaac, Candice and Charlie were all notable examples of this case. He killed off so many characters with soo much potential.

I think Peter and Claire were the heart of the series for me at that point. But then Peter got stupid and Claire got boring in season two. I think they're both back on track now. I know people love Hiro but I personally find all of his storylines to be an immense waste of time and space.

I think he was the only thing that made her interesting and I got more spark from Mohinder/Maya then anything she had with anyone else during her entire time on the series.

I love that they are fleshing her out and not making her this sociopathic barbie character she was in season two. But I don't see much for her to do. I think the appeal of her character was the fact that she was bad and that she was evil but at the same time bubbly and carefree.

[Toups]

http://torrentfreak.com/heroes-causes-bitt...nt-boom-080924/

‘Heroes’ Causes BitTorrent Boom

Written by Ernesto on September 24, 2008

Two fresh episodes of the US hit series ‘Heroes’ were released Monday night. In the day that followed each episode was downloaded well over a million times by BitTorrent users all over the world, making it the busiest day ever on many torrent sites.

heroesAn example of the BitTorrent traffic boost was reported yesterday, as Mininova got 10 million downloads in a single da. A record breaking figure, in part thanks to the debut of ‘Heroes’ and several other shows. Other BitTorrent sites report a similar increase in traffic.

It’s Heroes that breaks all the records though. Our statistics show that, across all BitTorrent sites, the two episodes from Heroes’ season opening were downloaded well over a million times each - in just one day. The vast majority of the downloads come from outside the US (92%), where shows usually air weeks, months or even years later.

The show was downloaded the most in the UK (15%), where the official season opening is scheduled for October 1st. Canada, France and Australia complete the top 5. Although most TV-broadcasters won’t be happy to read these figures, one could argue that BitTorrent has actually helped TV-shows to build a stronger, broader, and more involved fanbase.

Jesse Alexander, the executive producer of ‘Heroes’ told TorrentFreak that he thinks this is indeed the case. “People watching shows such as Lost and Heroes on BitTorrent is the present world reality. TV networks have to recognize this, give their viewers more ways to interact with the shows, and find ways to generate revenue from every member of the global audience,” he said.

Let’s hope Alexander will be heard in Hollywood. Below is the TV-show download chart of the past week, Heroes is not included in the list, but it will surely appear in next week’s chart.

[DavidEvanSmith]

Well I guess we have different interpretations!

For me, Simone was the heart because she was the skeptic who learned to believe. She was struggling, her father was dying, it seemed he was all she had, her boyfriend was on drugs and she had given so much of herself to him and gotten hurt so many times, she was so cynical about life because life hadn't given back as much as she'd given to it, and Peter came into her life and gave her back her hope, her belief in a bigger picture, that there was a place for everyone in the grand scheme, that everything had a purpose, and in Peter's quest to discover what his contribution was supposed to be, Simone started seeing the world through Peter's hopeful eyes. And unfortunately it was Isaac and Peter's weaknesses that were Simone's ultimate undoing.

Claire, for me, represented the angst of the show, the ultimate teen, feeling like a freak and an outsider, wanting a normal life, etc. Having big ideas about who her parents were and making a discovery that made her feel like her whole life was a lie. She wasn't really kept in the dark about being adopted, but it seemed every interaction in the Bennet family was laced with lies. GREAT family dynamic.

Hiro represents the coming of age for me. He's very much the wide-eyed naive child who is giddy to have a power to play with and it makes him feel like a grown-up, and he is the one who really embraces his abilities and thinks of them as a great gift and great responsibility. He's like any 7 year old who would run around with a towel around their neck pretending to be superman. He reads all the comic books and grew up wishing he was in them... and now he is. The coming of age is where he sees the consequences of his powers and the powers of others, the way it corrupts (like with Sylar, Nathan, or now "Future Ando"), the way it kills (Charlie), the fact that things ARE more real than the comic books. It's taught him a lot of hard lessons about life. It's changed his perceptions. He suffered the loss of his personal hero, Kensei, by realizing the man wasn't who Hiro was raised to think he was. It's made Hiro grow up and made him a little colder, a little wiser. But still hasn't killed his faith and hope.

I pretty much like all the characters, because these powers all seem to highlight a great struggle for the people that wield them.

[JackPeyton]

The reason i LOVE Hiro?

He LOVES his powers.

[Sylph]

Were some of you shocked when you found out that Damon Lindelof "invented" Nathan Petrelli's ability? I was. It was long time ago when I read about it, but it really freaked me out - it foreshadowed all the problems that Kring had in the second and so far in this, third season.

[EricMontreal22]

Sylph--I hadn't heard that, although I know Lindelof and Kring are friends. Can you give more details?

[Sylph]

It's all connected?


Fans say there's evidence that ties 'Lost' and 'Heroes' together, but creators don't buy it


By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff | March 4, 2007

Across the Internet, the screen-grabbing obsessives -- the ones who deal in frame-by-frame analysis of ABC's "Lost" -- were getting in a lather about the NBC hit "Heroes." It had to do with a brief scene a few weeks ago, when Nathan Petrelli, the caddish politician who can shoot into the air like a bottle rocket, grumbled about what might happen if word got out about his powers.

Officials could "round us all up, stick us in a lab on some island in the middle of the ocean," Nathan said. And within nanoseconds, the clarion call clanged out in cyberspace: "Heroes" mentions island! It must be a reference to "Lost"!

Yes, "Lost" and "Heroes" air on different networks, tell different stories, and exist -- as "Lost" producers point out -- in totally different time frames. (The "Lost" castaways live, after all, in the fall of 2004.) But to their most devoted fans, the shows have come to represent a sort of yin and yang of serial TV, in constant battle for the title of the Mystery Show That Does It Better.

"Lost," the word goes, is deeper and more cinematic; "Heroes" is pulpier and better-paced. And the way fans sometimes talk, there seems a cosmic cyber-wish for the shows to somehow merge -- to meld into a single supernatural drama that doles out questions and answers in acceptable weekly doses.

Indeed, some seem to believe it's already happening. One fansite, darkufo.blogspot.com, has posted pictures of a "Gannon Car Rentals" brochure, held by Hiro in "Heroes," and Hurley and Claire in "Lost." It also shows off photos of a suncatcher in the background of a trailer in "Heroes," and a similar, fleeting image from a torture video in "Lost." Some fans have noted casting coincidences: Greg Grunberg, who plays Matt Parkman on "Heroes," had a short stint as a doomed pilot on "Lost."

And on a recent Entertainment Weekly blog, Jeff "Doc" Jensen half-jokingly floated the idea that the Dharma Initiative, a fictional company in "Lost," created the super-folks who populate "Heroes." (He added, "Oh, like they would ever admit it if this were true!")

A vast conspiracy? That would be wish-fulfillment at its most geekishly appealing. So it might cause disappointment, in certain circles, to reveal that the heads of both shows claim absolute ignorance.

"Really?" said "Heroes" creator Tim Kring in a telephone interview last week, when told about the eerily-similar car-rental brochures. Then he quickly came up with the same mundane theory that "Lost" executive producer Carlton Cuse had suggested a day earlier.

Some fictional names, Cuse explained, have been cleared, for legal purposes, for use by TV studios: Oceanic Airlines, featured prominently in "Lost," also turned up in the movie "Executive Decision." So it's not such a stretch to imagine that a pamphlet for "Gannon Car Rentals," preprinted and free of legal strings, might have wound up in the hands of the "Heroes" prop department.

"Sometimes," Cuse said, "a rental-car pamphlet is just a rental-car pamphlet."

As for that suncatcher? Nothing intentional, producers swear. But the thought of a link gets Kring talking a bit like a fanboy himself. "That's fantastic! That's so great!" he said. "What if this is sort of happening on some sort of bizarre cosmic level, and we're not even aware of it? That's the best conspiracy."

It's not that there aren't connections between "Heroes" and "Lost"; there are deep ones, in fact. But they generally have to do with the trajectories of Hollywood careers and the legal vagaries of show business. In short, they're less about international mystery and more about "Crossing Jordan."

That's the NBC medical-examiner drama that Kring created; it premiered in 2001, and had on staff an up-and-coming young writer named Damon Lindelof. Toward the end of the third season, Lindelof recalls, he asked permission to meet with "Alias" creator J.J. Abrams, who had an idea for a show about a plane crash on a desert island.

As Lindelof recalled last week, Kring "was incredibly gracious," and helped Lindelof get out of his NBC contract and become a co-creator and executive producer of "Lost."

And, a few years later, when Kring was working on a pilot about genetic mutations and superpowers, he called his old colleague Lindelof to bounce off some ideas.

"We had a couple lunches, had a couple beers, he would talk to me about some of the ideas he was having . . . sort of pick my brain," Lindelof said. To good effect. It was Lindelof, it turns out, who suggested the plot-twist ending of the "Heroes" pilot: That idealistic Peter Petrelli, who believed he could fly, should plummet off a building and be rescued by his brother Nathan -- who actually could. (It was Kring, Lindelof said, who added the idea that Peter has powers, too.)

For the most part, Lindelof said, he offered generalized advice about the overarching truths he had learned after the first season of "Lost." The show aired for two seasons before "Heroes" joined the NBC lineup and became a breakout hit, routinely topping "Lost" in the ratings.

"Don't be afraid to make it really expensive," Lindelof said he told Kring. "Don't be afraid to have a large, sprawling cast. Don't be afraid to kill people off."

And Kring said the success of "Lost" made it easier to pitch and plot his own ambitious show. "Lost" pioneered the model of a "parity" pay scale, which made a large ensemble cast seem more affordable. And the scheduling woes that have angered "Lost" fans made Kring extract a promise from NBC: set the schedule in stone. Knowing he would face a pair of six-week breaks, he said, allowed him to plot out a couple of mini-cliffhangers.

But the conceits behind the shows are different, too, Kring said. And because he's not locked in space or time, he has the easier job. "We're not positing the central mysteries that you have to wrap a story around," he said. "It frees us up to tell a story at a different pace."

Lindelof and Kring haven't talked shop in a while; both say they're immersed in their own shows. But the brain-power link between the series has continued. Writer Jesse Alexander moved to "Heroes" from "Lost" (he knew "where the bodies were buried," Kring said). So did writer Jeph Loeb , a comic-book veteran who has known Kring since the '80s, when he co-wrote the movie "Teen Wolf" and Kring wrote the screenplay for the sequel, "Teen Wolf Too."

It was Loeb, Kring notes, who wrote the "Heroes" episode that featured Nathan's desert island speech. So it might have been a shout-out, Kring said, to his former colleagues on "Lost."

Lindelof didn't take it that way. He's a comic-book aficionado himself -- he wrote the graphic miniseries "Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk" -- and said he thought that was a reference to Genosha , an island in the Marvel Comics books where mutants are exiled.

"It didn't even occur to me that it was a wink-wink to 'Lost,' because our characters don't have superpowers," he said.

Then there's the recent reference to "fish biscuits" -- the unappetizing food that Sawyer gnawed in an outdoor cage on "Lost" -- on Hiro's fictitious blog on the NBC "Heroes" website. Here, Kring claims ignorance, as well. He doesn't write the blog. But it was probably a pop culture reference, he says. Which makes him wax a little philosophical.

"We've often asked ourselves the question -- and this is something that a lot of people never think about -- does 'Heroes' exist in the same world that 'Lost' does?" he said. "In our world, do Claire's friends watch 'Lost' on television?"

And if the characters on "Lost" exist in the world of "Heroes," the chance for a TV rendezvous gets even more complex. Getting them together, after all, would require a trip to the past.

It could only be done by Hiro, the "Heroes" character who has the power to bend time and space.

And Lindelof has a thought.

"If there was ever a crossover," Lindelof said, "he would pop up, appear on the beach for, like, two seconds. He'd look at Hurley and he'd say, 'Hello,' and Hurley would say, 'Hello,' and then he would disappear again. And that would be it."

Cuse, Lindelof, and Kring all agree that's unlikely to happen. The shows are produced by different studios and networks -- all with different lawyers -- and the paperwork hurdle would likely be insurmountable. But Kring, for one, says he loves the idea.

"If we could talk them into doing it," he said, "we'd do it."

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2007/03/04/its_all_connected/

[Sylph]

He said this?!

[JackPeyton]

I *DO* want to see the bulid up. The discovery. Them dealing with it.

If this show was more about adrenalin than about the char's layers i would hate it. And im sure im not the only one.

The entire first seasonw as all about build up, these people, them finding they have powers and dealing with it. Thats what made it amazing.

[Sylph]

I do too, but apparently he thinks I don't. 

[Toups]

What an intense episode!

My jaw dropped with little Noah died and then it dropped even further will Sylar will KABOOOOOM!!!!!

Present-Peter now has the hunger. Did he kill future-Nathan?

I liked seeing a brunette badass Claire - it was quite sexy.

LOL at Matt following the turtle.

I loved Nathan's "Superman" save. LOL

Woohooo.....Sark....I mean Adam's back!