TV Musing: God is a character in Heroes. And he's crap.

I've been enjoying this series of heroes more than the woeful second series, but in Arthur Petrelli they have made a hideous error.

Be wary of plot spoilers as I explain exactly what I mean:

In the excellent (IMHO) first season of Heroes the only major downer was the fact that every time DR Suresh came on screen I fell asleep, but in creating the big baddie for season three we've reached a new nadir in lame duck scripting.

Arthur Petrelli is ridiculous - a character who is ten times more powerful than anyone else, can do virtually anything and is indestructible. Take this week's idiotic example - a character has shot back in time to obtain something crucial to the silly plot and succeeds, promising to protect it and finally believing in himself - only to lose the crucial thing literally three minutes later to, you guessed it, Arthur Petrelli. Arthur has not only shot back in time to the exact spot needed, but steals the magguffin, throws the character off a building after taking away his powers (a particularly tiresome impotence metaphor) and teleports another away. He then shoots back across time to gain his victory.

You may have spotted the logic error here. Of course, there's no reason he couldn't have just jumped back to earlier and taken the thing from its original owner without any fuss at all but that would be too lacking in tension for the scriptwriters - they want to make the whole thing as wretched as possible, seemingly. The thing is, if you are going to have an all powerful psychic time traveller with super strength, invulnerability and telekenesis you have to explain why he doesn't just take everything he wants all at once rather than ponce about doing things only AFTER the "Heroes" think they've succeeded. I mean, what's the point of hanging about?

The problem with the decisions they made in designing this character is that since he is essentially immortal and all powerful it takes a plot crowbar method to dispatch him. Another irritating thing is that he is the king of the deus ex machina moment (a particular dislike of mine) - a wonderful method for lazy script writers to move the plot along is to just have him magically turn up whenever things are too enjoyable, or the "good guys" have the upper hand and mess it all up. Just crap.

Plus since anything involving the Petrelli family is rubbish by definition, the fact that we've jumped from three of them to four then five then back to four is just dopey. Especially since even an American Producer must realise that we tune in to watch Ando and Hiro or maybe the Bennets or even the nice Parkman/Daphne stuff. Does anyone really tune in for the sole purpose of watching the latest instalment of the soap opera surrounding the whiney loser family?

Their solution - split Ando and Hiro up! That'll have us watching! Gah!

I will watch til the end of the season anyhow, I just think its rubbish and now I have it off my chest.

Til next Time!

A