Heroes Season 2, Episodes 1-4
Tim Kring’s serial superhero drama made a triumphant return to television a little over a month ago, and it’s so far been a rough four weeks for our intrepid band of evolutionaries.
Peter is, of course, alive and well, and not surprisingly, so is Sylar. Claire and her family are in hiding, as are the 3M’s (Matt, Mohinder and Molly). Hiro is off adventuring in medieval Japan, and we spend a lot of screen time tracking the progress of Maya and Alejandro – the life & death twins – as they attempt to cross the border to the States, and leaving a rather blatant trail of hemorrhaged corpses in their wake. (God forbid these two twins ever learn how to use a phone to at least figure out if Dr. Suresh even wants to see them first.)
What surprises me most about Season 2 is how similar the general plot is to Season 1. Peter is once again exhibiting powers that he doesn’t fully understand (owing to some convenient memory loss), Claire is once again smirking her way through high school, Matt is back on the force, and in episode 4, we are introduced to yet another pancake waitress with an exceptional learning ability. I swear to God, it’s 2006 all over again, with a bigger budget.
A couple of things are of course significantly different as well: Claire no longer being a cheerleader is the biggest surprise, although in exchange we are made to suffer through the most stomach-churning high school romance subplot I’ve ever seen on mainstream TV. More than Hayden Panettiere’s celebutante-esque acting style, is the fact that the dude they chose to play flyboy West looks and acts like a third-rate Zac Efron. As before, Claire’s high-school scenes are enough to drive viewers to mass suicides—one would think that Kring and company had learned to avoid that by now.
On a more positive note, the embittered Nathan is a pleasure to watch, and the unfolding mystery behind Molly-the-human-Google’s nightmares is certainly interesting. I guess what I find most surprising is how much time it’s taken Season 2 to really get rolling—only Episode 4 has so far shown any real life post-explosion, and even then we have to sit through almost 15 minutes of a thoroughly sickening romance between flyboy and indestructigirl. (Almost makes me wish we had more scenes of Niki and Micah, however inconsequential those usually end up being.)
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All-Star Superman, Issues 1-8This Eisner-Award-winning new series has restored my interest in Superman, although I’ll admit that it had a lot to do with the creative team of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, who I believe are two of the very best currently working in the industry. “All-Star” is both an homage and an innovation of classic Superman, a truly creative cross between the groundbreaking revisionism of Alan Moore’s legendary run on Supreme, and the sci-fi-driven insanity of Ellis and Millar’s work on The Authority. Because it’s a bi-monthly series, it’s still only at issue #8, although it debuted back in November of 2005. Sadly, both Morrison and Quitely have stated that they’ll be leaving after issue #12, but that just means I’ve got 4 issues of wonderfully entertaining Superman comics to go.
Dexter Season 2, Episodes 1-3
Unlike Heroes, HBO’s fantastically clever serial-killer drama starts off with multiple bangs. Dexter’s positively Biblical murder of his brother in Season 1 has left our hero in a bit of a funk; he hasn’t had a successful kill in over a month. As if that weren’t enough, his underwater dumping grounds for his past victims has just been uncovered by the Miami police. Now there’s a superstar FBI agent in town and a task force looking for the “Bay Harbor Butcher,” and just to add a little extra salt on the wound, Rita has finally figured out the “truth” behind Paul’s missing shoe. Michael C. Hall’s stoic delivery is great fun as always, and the fact that everybody around him is kooky with a passion makes this show wonderfully entertaining to watch.