The Racialicious Roundtable For Heroes 3.9
Hosted by Arturo R. García
The word has come down from Tim Kring’s ivory tower: It’s our fault Heroes has been stinking up the joint this season.
More specifically, those of us who own and actually use our DVRs. The show’s creator bemoaned the state of serialized storytelling at a screenwriters’ gathering earlier this month, because the new technology, by his reasoning, makes us dumber. Here’s a portion of his remarks:
“The engine that drove [serialized TV] was you had to be in front of the TV [when it aired]. Now you can watch it when you want, where you want, how you want to watch it, and almost all of those ways are superior to watching it on air. So [watching it] on air is related to the saps and the dips**s who can’t figure out how to watch it in a superior way.”
Yours truly is too poor and stupid to afford DVR, so I don’t understand all that fancy talk like “dips**t.” Does his excuse hold water? That’s just one of the subjects we tackle in this week’s installment of the Roundtable. Let’s get to it!
Re: Usutu. I was about to say, let’s quit while we’re ahead (nyuk nyuk) when I read an interview with writers/producers Joe Pokaski and Aron Coliete mentioning him while discussing “The Charlie Argument.” I’ll post their words here:
“This is always a tough [argument] for us, whether or not to kill a character. It all generally reverts back into what we call ‘The Charlie Argument.’ While we often hear from fans, executives, or even actors how we shouldn’t have killed her off, most of us believe that the reason she was such a successful character is because she didn’t overstay her welcome. We miss her because she left us wanting more. The German and Stephen Canfield certainly fall into that category – as for Usutu, we haven’t seen the last of him.”
Clara: If Usutu is just a plot device, than I will be very angry. As far as I can tell, that’s what he is– he’s only there to assist the other characters in all matters plot-fully convenient. He doesn’t even have to be alive! All he has to do is hop around in their dreams! I know we talk a lot about how the writers are very willing to write in ways to bring characters (mostly the white male ones) back to life, and I’m anticipating some people pointing to Usutu as one example of a nonwhite character being brought back. I disagree with that, because Usutu wasn’t brought back to life as his own character. He’s just there to help out the characters. He still doesn’t seem to have a history or motivations of his own. Tsk tsk, Heroes writers.
I’m sick of this Usutu As A Guardian Angel business. Now, if Usutu willingly steered a character towards a bad path, if he intentionally gave them the wrong advice, that would be interesting!
Mahsino: I gotta go with Clara on this – it would be awesome if Usutu were steering characters to his whim postmortem seeing as he was basically the Guardian Angel/Haitian 2.0 when he was alive. Then again, it would be annoying if he could only get a personality after death. I dunno, I just hate ghost like characters in shows (I’m looking’ at you too, Grey’s Anatomy).