Mr. Wizard, Rest in Peace

Don Herbert (Mr. Wizard) died yesterday at the age of 89.

I wasn't around for his first show in the 50's, but I did watch the Nickelodeon show "Mr. Wizard's World" that aired in the 1980's. I loved that show - it was great to see the different science experiments and technology bits and I think it was probably one of the things that got me interested in science and technology at an early age (leading me into the trap of Computer Science I find myself in today). In fact, I think that Mr. Wizard's World was where I first encountered the programming language LOGO, which I wasted much time with in my middle school years figuring out how to make that stupid turtle wander around the screen and draw stuff.

Honestly, I was a bit surprised to find out that he hadn't died earlier. And that he was only 89 - he must have been in his 60's when Mr. Wizard's World aired but he seemed older than that to me. Of course, most of that is probably just me getting older and realizing that, no, 60 really isn't all that old.

Heroes Finale

Okay, I finally got to see the entire Heroes season finale (and not just the last 20 minutes that I saw on Monday). All in all quite entertaining. My usual complaints hold, but the episode wrapped up the half-season quite well, closed off almost everyone's story arcs, and setup next season's first arc with a good example of how to do a season finale cliffhanger. Spoilers behind the jump...

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While I didn't care much for the character of Peter Petrelli at the beginning of the season, either the writers have done a lot to make his character more interesting, or Milo Ventimiglia's acting finally won me over. I actually believe the Big Brother/Younger Sister dynamic going on between him and Claire (Hayden Panettiere) over the last few episodes, and even though the drawn out ending sequence was a bit over the top in its shmaltz, their chemistry in the rest of the episode worked well.

What still isn't working as well for me is the character of Nathan Petrelli. I get that he's supposed to be conflicted about the whole "bomb in New York" scenario, that he's getting bad advice from people he trusts (like his mother) and that in his heart he knows its bad, but doesn't think he has a choice -- I get that and I like it in theory, but Adrian Pasdar never really sells it to me. His scenes fall flat -- I don't get the sense that he's conflicted so much as that he's completely empty, too tired to stand up to his mother and to do the right thing. And then in the end we don't get to see his conversion, just the result. This is soap opera, and for closure we really should have had a scene where Nathan puts his mother in her place, where Nathan stands up to her and tells her that he's not going to be a murderer. Instead we get a shmaltzy scene between the brothers that falls a bit short.

The other major character threads to wrap up were, of course, Ando and Hiro. And we got a mostly satisfactory wrap-up of their season-long threads (with a caveat about Hiro's "final battle" scene that I'll get to later). Hiro gets to move to the next stage of his Journey, transitioning from the enthusiastic novice he was at the beginning of the seasons to ... the enthusiastic apprentice. He averts the dark path his future self was forced to follow, and manages to take steps towards becoming the Kensai warrior that he dreamed about in his youth. In the early part of the season, it seemed like Hiro's story was one about growing up. It looked like Hiro was being setup as the enthusiastic teenager who learns that the world won't conform to his fantasy world and that there comes a time when childish things need to be put away and the teenager has to stand up and "be a man".

But they've actually taken Hiro down a slightly different path than that. Future Hiro was that Hiro who was forced to put away his "childish" things and to take the world more seriously. But Hiro has taken a different path from Future Hiro -- instead of putting away his fantasies, Hiro is finding a way to live them out. Hiro clearly is working to become his idealized version of a Kensai warrior -- a Paladin who protects the world from evil. And while Hiro has been forced to confront a world that doesn't conform to his ideas of how the world should work (notably the death of Charlie that he wasn't able to stop even with superpowers, but also his own failure to step up and be the hero he wants to be), he hasn't just "grown up" and given up to go back to Japan and use his powers to make money. Instead, he continues to grasp for the heroic ideal, continuing down a path to become a true superhero -- maybe the only one on the show who can move from being a "person with superpowers" to being a "superhero".

But alongside Hiro is Ando. And in this episode Ando shines. At the beginning of the season, Ando is Hiro's fairly shallow friend who was just along for the ride. By the finale, Ando is a hero in his own right. There have been glimmers of this all season, especially in the "dark future" episode, but by the finale Ando has moved to a new level of heroism. He knows that he will die going up against Sylar but he also knows that someone has to do it and he's convinced that Hiro won't. Even at mid-season Ando would have been hiding in a closet from Sylar, but Ando's journey is also well underway, and even without powers Ando is now ready to do what he knows is right regardless of the threat to himself.

Besides Hiro and Ando, it was the "secondary" characters that made this episode shine for me. The D.L./Nikki/Micah parts have been dragging me in more and more over the last half of this season. Where in the first half of the season I was bored with the D.L./Nikki/Jessica arc, these last few episodes have really drawn me in. Nikki no longer seems like a total victim -- and in this last episode we get some evidence that maybe she's finally integrated Jessica into her personality and is ready to claim her powers for herself. Micah has rapidly become one of my favorite characters -- I'm a sucker for characters who can talk to machines anyway, and Noah Gray-Cabey does a great job of playing the kid as someone who is more worldly than he seems. I really hope that Molly Walker sticks around next season, because having another kid character around may encourage the writers to do more with Micah and his family.

Among the other "secondary" characters, the interaction between Bennett, Parkman and Suresh was well done, even though they didn't get a lot of screen time. I continue to especially like Bennett, though I wish he were still a "villain" in the story. "Heroic" villains have a long history in soap opera, and Bennett was a good candidate at one point to be the sympathetic, near heroic villain. He had strong motivation for what he was doing, but was still willing to be utterly ruthless in carrying it out. He's softened into a more standard "hero" mold at this point, and it would be difficult to see him pulling a "Magneto" and switching to the other side again. Both Nathan Petrelli and Malcolm McDowell's Mr. Linderman characters were also good candidates for the role of sympathetic villain, but Linderman went over the edge too soon, and like I said above, Nathan fell into the "frozen tool" mode until the last five minutes of the final episode, so neither one of them ended up being that character in the end.

What about the villains that we did get? Well, the Conspiracy has at least two living members remaining, though they appear to be on opposite sides from each other. Hiro's father Kaito seems to have solidified as Hiro's mentor figure and a nice counterpoint to Peter and Nathan's mother Angela in these final episodes. Kaito takes Hiro under his wing to teach him what he needs to do to save lives while Angela works hard to convince Nathan that the upcoming cataclysm is inevitable and needs to be exploited. I suspect that Angela Petrelli will continue to be working behind the scenes to manipulate things, since the evil mastermind is a standard device of both superhero comics and soap opera.

We also got a foreshadowing of a villain to come next season. Molly Walker tells Parkman that there's someone worse than her Boogeyman out there, someone who can see her when she uses her powers on him. Given that her Boogeyman is a guy who killed both of Molly's parents and ate their brains while she hid under the stairs, this guy better be nasty. I'll be disappointed if we get a so-so villain next season that turns out to be Molly's Nightmare.

And of course the final villain: Sylar. In the end, Sylar was underwhelming as maniacally insane villains tend to be. Just as it's difficult to use the Joker in a lot of stories, it was obviously hard for the writing staff to focus on Sylar as the main villain all season. While he starts as Suresh's snipe to hunt, and took on the role of Hiro's Questing Beast at various points in the season, by the end of the season Sylar has quite obviously become Peter Petrelli's arch-nemesis. And this was clearly no accident -- Sylar is clearly a "dark" version of Peter. Not only does he have a twisted version of Peter's powers, he has the same motivation behind his actions. Both Peter and Sylar are wrapped with their respective insecurities and mother issues, driving both to become the men that they are. While Sylar's insecurities push him to become a psychotic killer, Peter's send him in a heroic direction to prove that he is worthwhile. And their mothers even had opposing influences on them, with Sylar's wrapping all of her hopes and dreams into her son and Peter's writing him off as worthless before he's even had a chance.

So the arch-nemesis setup is there, and the writers teased the ongoing fight between Peter and Sylar a number of times over the season: Peter and Sylar's first confrontation in the High School locker room, Sylar "killing" Peter in Suresh's apartment, the "Days of Future Past" flash-forward that ends in a showdown between Peter and Sylar, all of them teasing the fact that it comes down to Peter versus Sylar, and Sylar seems to be the stronger one. The final battle between Peter and Sylar should have been a phenomenal one.

But it wasn't. Part of this is the inability of anyone on the show to choreograph a decent fight scene. Three punches is not a fight scene, folks, even if you're throwing in some "beat down" sound effects to make the whole thing sound like the actors have super strength. And a guy holding his hand out looking constipated is not that dramatic either, even if it's supposed to be him using telekinesis. Ripping a parking meter out of the ground with telekinesis and using it to beat the other guy is fairly dramatic though, and a nice nod to the source material, so points for that bit.

But more importantly, the Sylar/Peter battle fails to be dramatic because it also has to be the Sylar/Hiro battle and Hiro HAS to strike the killing blow to complete his story arc. Hiro's journey into heroism was set up by the writers from the beginning to have HIM confront Sylar in the end, and without that confrontation Hiro's seasonal story arc does not get closure. So now there's a conundrum that the writers have created for themselves -- both Hiro and Peter have to defeat Sylar to bring their story arcs to a close. And when faced with this maze that they've written themselves into, the writers punt -- Peter beats on Sylar for a while and then Hiro strikes a killing blow, and the final result is not really satisfactory for anyone. They tried to have their cake and eat it too, and instead BOTH characters arcs end up being weaker because of it.

And I suspect that the writers realized this, which is part of the reason why Sylar's body disappears in the end down into the storm sewer. Defeated by Hiro, Sylar gets away so that sometime in the future he and Peter can finally have the confrontation between arch-nemeses that they should have been able to have here. Or at least I hope something like that is what the writers are going for, and that they weren't just having Sylar disappear mysteriously as a genre convention (though I'm sure that was at least part of the reasoning as well).

I will say, the final three episodes have me looking forward to next season already. Hiro's little "Quantum Leap" moment at the end of the episode, as well as the title of the next volume (Generations), suggest that we're going to be getting some "historical perspective" on the world. I suspect that this will tie into the Conspiracy, which is probably somewhat damaged by the actions of our protagonists but definitely not broken. There were still a lot of goons in that building, Angela Petrelli is still alive and well, and Nikki left Candace alive (if beaten). There's plenty of opportunity for the remaining Conspiracy members to make a comeback (and plenty of opportunity for some of them to become sympathetic villains).

I'm sure we'll see Sylar again, despite his limited usefulness as a maniacal supervillain. I'd like to see Sylar partnered with a mastermind. Sylar by himself is only scary to the point that he outpowers the heroes around him. His plot device telekinesis powers are supposed to make him scary, but really just make me feel like the writers are cheating. He's not a planner or a thinker, he's a predator, and as a story element he'd be more useful as a weapon at the end of the leash of a mastermind that could control him instead of as an independent. Plus, now that we seem to have a group of heroes together, having a group of ruthless villains willing to have Sylar as one of their own would be a good counterpoint.

My hope is that the creators will retool some things in the summer break. Most importantly I hope that they ADD MORE ACTION. At this point the show is now clearly a superhero soap opera, drawing on a long tradition of superhero soap opera that stretches back through Claremont's X-men to the Lee/Ditko Spider-man and the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four. But you need to go all the way with it -- if you're going to do it you need to put in some real fight scenes. Go hire some folks who worked on Buffy or Xena to help you plot these things out. Trust me, it'll be worth it. The next time I see a fight between Peter and Sylar it better be dramatic, damn it.

Secondly, I hope they have more romance on the show. For a soap opera, there's been surprisingly little romance. Since D.L. actually seems to have survived, and Jessica seems to be out of the picture, the Nikki/D.L. relationship can be explored without worrying that its going to turn into a "plot hammer" moment as Jessica tries to kill D.L. and run off. I don't mind tension in a relationship, but I'd like it to be interesting tension and not just "tension to further the plot" tension.

In addition, there are other couples on the show that we need to get back to now that the "exploding man" plot is over. Parkman's wife Janice is still alive, he has a kid on the way, and we don't know if it's his or not. Bennett's family is still alive, and he needs to make amends for turning his wife's brain into swiss cheese (if he can ever do anything to make amends for that). And maybe we can get a love interest for Hiro -- the Hiro/Charlie romance was fun and cute, even if it was tragic in the end. I'd like to see Hiro in a timelost romance. It would be a good fit for the character and would make for some good drama.

Finally, I want to see better villains. Sylar was, on the whole, mostly boring this season. It's not Zachary Quinto's fault, he was just working with what they gave him for the character and psychos just are hard to keep interesting over the long haul. Villains with more depth, with more reason to be ruthless killers and thieves than just "he's crazy" would not only make the show more interesting, it would be true to the show's roots in both soap opera and superhero comics.

Thoughts on Superhero Television

As I noted in the comments on slugboy's post below, I didn't get to see all of the Heroes finale last night due to a personal conflict (The Lovely Wife and I were attending our final childbirth class -- apparently we've passed and we'll be allowed to have the kid. Hooray!). I'm going to catch the re-run on Sci-Fi Friday night and I'll post something about it after that. Suffice to say, though, that slugboy and I have fairly different views on whether Heroes is a good series or not and, maybe, what makes good superhero television. Personally, I'm looking for a good soap opera with some decent fight scenes in my superhero TV. For me, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was my Platonic Ideal of superhero TV -- overwrought drama, witty banter, and well-choreographed fight scenes. A close second are the Xena/Hercules franchises, which don't have quite the level of overwrought drama, but make up for it by being campily weird, highly mythic, and having some awesome fight-scene choreography. Heroes comes in at a tier down from these two for me -- very enjoyable overall, and a great way to spend an hour of TV-time with The Lovely Wife (who I think sometimes enjoys it even more than I do) but the episodes always leave me picking at ways that they could have been better. In that way it's a lot more like X-Files or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for me than anything else -- always so close to the target, but not quite there.

The main way that Heroes lets me down week after week is that the fight scenes are so damn bland and they rely to much on the "cut-away/cut-back" method of not showing the fight scene. Sure, it saves on the special effects budget, and used sparingly it can be really dramatic, but not if you use it for every single damn fight. And next season I want to see some more romance, dammit. You can't do good soap opera if you don't have love triangles and families in tension over their son/daughter dating someone they don't like. So in short -- more soap opera and better fight scenes would go a long way to improving the show overall.

However, thinking about the half hour of Heroes that I did get to see last night: I really think that as much as I like the movies, the Spider-man franchise would work much better as a serialized TV show than it does as a movie franchise. All of the annoyances that I talked about earlier are due to the restricted format of the big-budget action movie. Move the series to a 24 episode season and all of those soap opera elements can fall out naturally instead of feeling like they were forced in with the plot-shoehorn. You'd have to work at it to make sure it didn't turn out like Smallville, but Spider-man starts with a natural advantage over Superman in the soap opera department -- he was a soap opera character at his inception. Forcing Superman into a soap opera role feels wrong because his world is not a soap opera world. Spider-man's is, and a show that understands that and plays to that strength while throwing in crazy villains for him to fight week after week could be awesome.

Of course, the SFX could never be as good as the big budget action film FX, and to a large extent Spider-man needs those SFX more than, say, Superman does. You can fake super-strength pretty easily, and flying is apparently easy to do nowadays even on TV. But the webslingning that Spidey does in the movies is some fairly complicated CGI, and I'm not sure you could do Spider-man justice without having those large setpiece battles over Manhattan -- he can only fight in so many old warehouses and alleyways. But if that problem could be overcome, Spidey would be a great candidate to move to the TV.