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It's like the show is just trying to annoy me
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xparrot thoughtfully reminded me of TelevisionWithoutPity, which means I've been reading Heroes recaps over there, and all I can say is THANK GOD I DID NOT WASTE ANY MORE OF MY LIFE ON THIS SHOW. It's too late not to have been at least somewhat traumatized by season three, but I can only imagine the sky-high blood pressure that would have ensued from watching my favorite character die and then get impersonated by my least favorite character FOR AN ENTIRE SEASON. I really have no words for this. Well, I do have a word, and that word is WTF.
ETA: Wow, I just skimmed the highlights of the last few episodes and that was traumatizing in almost every conceivable way. XD Show, why did you start out so good and end up sucking so bad?
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comments.
xparrot thoughtfully reminded me of TelevisionWithoutPity, which means I've been reading Heroes recaps over there, and all I can say is THANK GOD I DID NOT WASTE ANY MORE OF MY LIFE ON THIS SHOW. It's too late not to have been at least somewhat traumatized by season three, but I can only imagine the sky-high blood pressure that would have ensued from watching my favorite character die and then get impersonated by my least favorite character FOR AN ENTIRE SEASON. I really have no words for this. Well, I do have a word, and that word is WTF.ETA: Wow, I just skimmed the highlights of the last few episodes and that was traumatizing in almost every conceivable way. XD Show, why did you start out so good and end up sucking so bad?
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/362954.html with
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...yeah, I totally want to go read the recaps now. Ahhh, TWoP!
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hahaha, that's a good point about Zachary Quinto needing a replacement while he's off being famous! Yeah, it appears that Nathan's actor played Sylar for a lot of season four, at least judging by my spot-reading of the recaps.
Incidentally, I really enjoyed ZQ's Spock when I saw the movie (pre-Heroes) but I ran across a picture of him the other day and my automatic reaction was "AAAAA! SYLAR!" This may have totally ruined my ability to see the actor as anyone else.
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Give it time on ZQ - when I first heard the casting I was like, "Sylar...?" but by the time the ST movie actually came out I had forgotten well enough to enjoy his Spock. The new Trek movies have their flaws but they're far superior to Heroes, just let that one fade from memory~!
The Fall of "Heroes"...
I also stopped watching at some point in Season 3, when I couldn't stand any of the characters anymore. I'd loved Claire for her level-headed good sense, her strength, kindness and courage, but now, she was suddenly merely a dumb bitchy teenager; Mr Bennett (who'd been my favorite character, along with Nathan and Hiro+Ando) was going off in weird directions; there were dozens of new characters I didn't care one whit about who took up lots of screentime, and the characters I'd never cared about were getting more and more important. Ando had been all but written out of the series for some unfathomable reason (I honestly thought he was Hiro's canonical boyfriend at the beginning - maybe I wasn't the only one, and that's why they wrote him out??? or did they not want *any* non-powered character to be important and interesting, when that was one of the things the series desperately needed??), Hiro himself was pointlessly in a different time for ages and ages (???) and increasingly losing his dorky appeal...
And YES. I am so with you on Sylar. From the very beginning, he wasn't an interesting character in the least - what I hated wasn't so much the (bland, boring) character himself as the enormous importance the series gave him, as well as the nature of his power, which was too strong in contrast of any of the others (except Peter's). Basically, introducing Sylar and *not killing him off* turned the rest of the characters - except Peter - into cannon fodder and denied them any real impact on events.
I wasn't over-fond of Peter either, which didn't help... also mostly due to the too-strong power and the way it was handled, which relegated the rest of the characters to the sidelines.
I think I stopped watching when there was an explosion that supposedly killed Nathan (?), and I just couldn't care about any of that crap anymore. I heard of the "Sylar impersonating Nathan" bit somewhere, and it infuriated me and made me glad I didn't watch any more. That boring Mary Sue Psycho Creep replacing a character I'd actually cared about, pushing himself into all of those relationships, taking over his role in the series in addition to already being one of the only two people who ever really mattered plot-wise...? Hell no.
Now I'm curious as to how things continued after that, though... it's like watching a train wreck. What ways can they have found to fuck things up even worse? I don't doubt that they found those ways...
/rant
Sorry about that. ;-)
Re: The Fall of "Heroes"...
In fact, just about every character I liked in the beginning has been reduced to a caricature at this point, doing things because the plot tells them to, and in no way behaving like actual human beings.
And yeah, I never liked Sylar for all the reasons you gave. As a character, he's bland and dull. As an opponent, he was interesting in season one because he was so powerful that he posed a very real, credible threat -- but then they had to either kill him off or keep finding ways of depowering him (or just have him behave inconsistently in order to stop him from killing off the whole cast, which was increasingly the direction they went). I loathed Sylar's "redemption" arc in season three with the power of a thousand suns. I am as much a sucker for a good redemption story as any girl ever was (see: Nathan, at least until the show gave up on character development in favor of having him randomly flip from good to evil and back again), but you do NOT win my sympathies by taking a character who's been a sadistic, torturing, mindfucking psychotic killer for two seasons and trying to turn him into a woobie. You just don't. The redemption, will-they-go-bad-or-won't-they thing worked with characters like Nathan and Bennet (at least back when the show cared about things like consistent characterization) because they were set up from the beginning as basically decent people who loved their families but had various character flaws that ended up drawing them towards the dark side. Sylar ... there is NOTHING about Sylar's various storylines in season three that haven't made me want to throw things at the screen and wish that someone would just kill him already, and it's increasingly obvious that the writers view him not only as one of the major characters but one of the major protagonists even when he's killing people, and, just, aaaaaaaaaaaa. *primal scream of rage*
Re: The Fall of "Heroes"...
I love gray characters - I love fucked-up characters, too. I am willing to love characters who do a lot of horrible things. But Sylar just didn't have enough substance or interest to be turned into anything at all; one-dimensional characters like Sylar can't grow or develop, they can only be twisted into new positions in the plot. And if those positions are too far away from their previous ones, then that is merely bizarrely inconsistent and ridiculous.
They did something pretty similar with Mohinder, IIRC, except in the opposite direction - although he and his entire plotline were so boring, ridiculous and implausible that I have forgotten most of it.
Basically, these writers are simply way out of their depths (which was actually obvious pretty early on).
This is an excellent sumjmary of the problem:
In fact, just about every character I liked in the beginning has been reduced to a caricature at this point, doing things because the plot tells them to, and in no way behaving like actual human beings.
Re: The Fall of "Heroes"...
This.