The Racialicious Roundtable: R.I.P. Heroes
Hosted By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García
The show has lost its’ direction, its’ heart, and most damningly of all, it’s lost its’ point.
Ever wanted to mourn something but just couldn’t? That’s about how I felt Friday afternoon, when the word got out: Goodbye, Heroes.
Really, nobody should’ve been surprised. Not to wish anybody out of a job, but really this show should’ve been canned after the conclusion to Volume Three, when its’ last really intriguing idea – dueling Companies – sputtered to a halt after a year when … well, when Mohinder almost turned into The Fly. That about sums it up. And it’s worth noting that we ended our reviews and Roundtables for this show in the middle of last season because readers were asking us to ditch it for FlashForward – which is a whole other matter, one we’ll discuss on Thursday. For now, though, we gather the ‘Table again, not to praise Tim Kring, but to bury a vision that started out with a lot of promise, only to see it buried in waves of privilege and peroxide.
Your first reaction to the news?
Andrea: “Oh.” Nothing more, nothing less. Because there was nothing left to the show…or I reached the last stage of mourning over it. I accepted that it was crap by Tim Kring’s design.
Mahsino: Well they’ve been threatening to cancel it for a while now, so my reaction was “Finally”.
jen*: It’s about time. That and wondering what ZQ will be doing next. (Star Trek 2 isn’t coming out fast enough for me.)
Diana: Meh. Whatever.
Which was the jump-the-shark/all-downhill moment for you?
Andrea: The show’s been a blur of Grand Canyon-jumping as soon as the second season started. With some triple-jump action over Mt. Everest when they kept killing off/letting go of characters of color, which I felt started in earnest in the second season.
Mahsino: I think the most wtf point was the fact that Peter never went back and saved Caitlin from that apocalyptic future. The whole season was based on him trying to rescue this girl he was “in love” with and by the end we were supposed to forget all about her. Also, once I started to realize that future-Hiro was never going to happen.
jen*: I second the future-Hiro realization. But I think the moment they lost me was when they killed D.L. I never could get over that. I’ve just been along for the ride ever since.
Diana: For me it was when they turned Sendhil into a bug. That was so not sexy and totally unnecessary.
What, if anything, could have saved this show?
Andrea: Tim Kring could have been an adult and apologized when the fans (especially the fans of color) pointed out that the show was climbing in the handbasket when it jainked on the storylines. Instead Kring wanted to blame the fans for setting the standard so high for his creative team. What sealed the show’s fate, IMO, was when fans of color (IIRC) stated the characters of color were disappearing, Kring’s blithe response that the show was “about the Bennetts and the Petrellis” anyway…what’s that adage about karma being a bitch?
Mahsino: If they had gone back to what made it so successful: a diverse cast of everyday heroes with extraordinary abilities. I think they were supposed to change out the characters seasonally, and that could’ve avoided the whole Benetrelli fiasco.
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