HEROES Explained!

[sinanju]

It all makes sense if you simply think of the characters as chess pieces being moved around the board. Pawns, knights, rooks and whatnot--even queens--don't do things for their own reasons. They go wherever the player/writer needs them to go accomplish his own ends. In the case of Heroes characters, any motive we ascribe to their behavior (or even motives they claim for themselves) are simply camouflage for this basic approach.

Season one was Tim Kring explaining to viewers how the pieces move. There were pawns (Matt, Mohinder), Bishops (HRG, the Haitian), Knights (Nathan), Rooks (Angela), even Queens (Peter, Sylar--insert your own joke here). Then he described the winning condition: Save the Cheerleader, Save the World. Clearly, in this analysis, Claire is a King--capture the King and you win the game.

Alas, in S2 Tim simply reset the board and played the game over again. The fans found that boring.

So in S3, Tim decided that a game of SPEED CHESS (move the pieces faster, faster, faster! Slap the clock!) was the answer.

But the pieces (characters) are still blatantly moving at the behest of the player (writer), so internal motivations are irrelevant and often contradictory.

Comments

[fallenpegasus]

I read a great analysis of bad SF, specificically picking on the Thomas Covenant books as the worst example of this. Whenever the story talks about The Force or The Power or the Balance or whatever it is that demands things to happen, just mentally substitute "The Plot" and it all becomes clear.

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The thing about Heroes is that the writing is so egregiously plot-driven. Yes, the writer naturally wants events to be exciting and dramatic. But the characters don't. Characters, if they're like real people, want to solve their problems as quickly, easily and safely as possible, with as little drama as they can manage.

It is the writer's job to forestall the quick, easy, safe solution and thus force the characters into dramatic action. But the Heroes writers do so by making the characters aggressively stupid, so that they ignore the easy, safe solution. They forget that they have powers, or use them ineffectively; they never ask the next logical question, or fail to insist on useful answers on the rare occasions when they do ask; they never talk to one another, even their alleged allies. It's maddening.