Tag: Heroes

HEROES Episode Review: Acceptance and Hysterical Blindness

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Well you can definitely say things are heating up on Heroes, even with the slow simmer that was this week, and the week priors, episode.   Even though every episode ends with their usual “To Be Continued…” moniker, these past two episodes really seemed like they fit a little bit more into the two-parter mold.   Mostly because the characters from last weeks and this weeks episodes were prominent in both and it didn’t really veer off into what the overall arc of what this season is about.   And what is this season really about?   So far they have been taking their time with what could possibly be the life ending, earth shattering point of it all.   Not that I really have a problem with a nice, good build up but I’m really dying to know what’s up with that compass and what the final motives of Samuel and his circus are.

And why did these episodes fit so well into two parts?   Well from where last weeks episode left off, it made it such the perfect cliff hanger for this weeks episode.   But let me start off by jumping back to last week and throwing in some explanation.   Mostly the episode centered around Nathan as he continues to figure out he might not all be right in the head and slowly Sylar is creeping out.   He also starts to get visions of an accidental death that he was involved with that may have been erased from his memory.   But once he goes digging for answers and talking to all the wrong people, Swoosie Kurtz among them, his fate at the end of the episode doesn’t bode well for return.   We also see Hiro as he continues the only slightly interesting “Dial a Hero” story line he’s been given as well as facing the fact that his power is now slowly killing him.  And speaking of powers not going to right, we also get Tracy trying to work some angle with H.R.G. and her powers start to back fire on her.

Then we have this weeks episode which was pretty good and that was mostly do to the fact that Madeline Zima’s character professed her interest in Claire and they had that girl on girl kiss that we got a glimpse of from last week.   Of course Claire also suspects her of being a nut job stalker trying to take people out to be close to her but later its revealed other hands are involved with those more dastardly deeds.   There’s also the continuation of Peter and the new girl on the block with powers as they have a slow build up to hooking up, come on its soooo going to happen.   Now Sylar is also back in the game and they work the amnesia angle for a little bit but hopefully that will be cast aside rather quickly because if there’s anything that’s more overused then amnesia in TV I’d like to hear about it.   Well sadly I looked at the numbers and not even a pretty hot girl on girl kiss was enough to bring in too many big numbers for the show this week, a pretty sad 5.6 million, so I don’t know how long Heroes may be fated to last.   It’s sad because it’s up against stiff yet ridiculously dumb competition.   I can’t profess how much I hate Dancing with the Stars and all the IQ lowering stupidity that show offers, and yet there’s really no other place to move Heroes.   Yet again, crappy reality programming reigns supreme over shows that can actually offer a stimulating story line.

HEROES Episode Review: ‘Ink’

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I hope some of the naysayers out there are watching this new season of Heroes because all I can say is that, so far, it’s delivering on pretty much every level.   It really seems like they have learned from their mistakes from seasons past and actually discovered how to kick off an engrossing season.   There are definitely some good things they did right off the bat this time that saved their asses from falling into yet another disappointing season.   For one it seems like they might have completely written out Dr. Suresh.   He was never a terrible character but they did just keep give him bad story line after bad story line.   That whole him turning into a monster was just a sad and pathetic rip off of The Fly.   Also they seem to be keeping these episodes so far pretty tight and not letting them meander over too much useless story filler.   What helps is that they don’t seem to be trying to cram every character into every episode anymore like they used to.

Take Monday night’s episode ‘Ink’ for instance.   They really only focused on three of the characters and had a few others intermingle among those three story lines.   No sign of Hiro or Ando in this one nor Tracy Strauss doing her water tricks and looking sexy as hell for all them heroes.   It really helps the show to just stay focused on each episode and keeps it from getting too bogged down in what every character is doing towards their eventual goal and plot line of the season.   I especially liked Parkman’s story line this week as he now has Sylar pretty much permanently stuck in his brain and destroying Matt’s mind mentally in the hopes of being able to get back into his body.   Matt assumes he’s just an irritating figment he can just ignore but Matt soon finds out he can do much more and make his life so much worse.

Even Peter who’s story line didn’t amount to too much more than himself running into this seasons latest villain was enough to hold my attention.   Partly because this ink man villain is actually pretty bad ass I gotta say.   It may just be the actor being able to do a kick ass performance with the part, but there’s just something about him that makes you feel the foreboding around him.   Also I liked Peter’s other run in with the entrance of yet another person with abilities at his work, a deaf woman that has the ability to see sound in light or something and can play one of hell of a cello without any lessons.   I’m not exactly sure what her powers are exactly but I am excited to see more.   We also get to see a little bit more of Claire interacting with her new friend played by Madeline Zima, who I absolutely love in almost anything, and basically we get to see them become chummier after she saw Claire fall out a window and put herself back together.   Keep on keeping on Heroes and try to make it so this season rivals the first in being just plain bad ass.

TV Review: ‘Heroes’ Episode: ‘An Invisible Thread’

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So here we are. The end of volume four has been reached and what an interesting end they’ve chosen to go with. I’m not exactly sure how to take the episode I just watched for I didn’t think they bungled it like they’ve done so often in the past with one of my favorite shows, but it felt like something was lacking. It had all the neat twists and turns I was hoping that it might take and there was no lack of intriguing story arcs to make it a disappointing mess. I must say it might be the fact that there was no big showdown like I feel a season ender should have. There were some good fights here and there but when you watch the end of a season, and in this case the end of a volume, shouldn’t there be some big explosions and people flying all willy nilly through the air to their deaths? Even the end to the last volume had the explosion of the Petrelli’s father’s evil lair. But maybe I’ve just seen one too many action movies. But in the end I will say that this was a good end to the volume and a very introspective one at that.

Now I won’t go into every detail of the show but leaving off from last week we now see Sylar is all back to being a bad ass villain mode and is planning on going to meet the president at some hotel and is all jazzed about shaking his hand. I’m not exactly sure what this will get him but it’s apparently a big enough deal to get every available hero moving his ass double time to stop him. Hiro and Ando are still on their quest to bring down Building 26 and now it seems as though Hiro’s body is rejecting his power for some odd reason and every time he uses it he gets a nose bleed or his ear bleeds, pretty much blood will shoot out of some part of him if he keeps using his power, that and he’s now more prone to dizzy spells and collapsing into people’s arms.

Nothing of too much excitement goes on during the scenes at Building 26 and it’s no great siege as you might be hoping for. It basically becomes a plot point to help out a few characters so they can join the rest as they head to the hotel to make sure Sylar doesn’t touch the president, and not in a creepy pervy kind of way but in a power hungry demented Sylar kind of way. Now there is a pretty good show down between Nathan, Peter, and Sylar, or at least it sounds really cool as we get to see none of it because the door gets closed and all we get is fighting noises and blue lightening flashing around the cracks of the doors. That’s okay though because it ends up being kind of a nifty trick to not waste money on the CGI that would be required to show us a good old smack down. And let’s just say one person doesn’t get out of the fire fight all in one piece.

And of course we build up to the inevitable meeting of Sylar and the president because we can’t not have a scene where the villain looks like he is about to succeed in his nefarious scheme and then all hell breaks loose. Now what they do with several of the characters at the end is pretty inventive and I’m not entirely sure how they are going to pull it off in the season, or seasons, to come. It was a pretty nifty trick but it seems to negate where the whole show had been heading in the whole future of it all. Of course as we’ve seen through time paradoxes, the future of the show has changed many times over from the choices characters have made so it won’t be more needed than a simple altering of what the future now has to offer to explain away all the events that have transpired from this volume ender.

So I must say good for you Heroes in making a volume that pretty much corrected all the wrongs that have been going on with this show ever since the start of volume two. I will say I think they’ve pretty much regained their strength and have restored my faith in this show and of course now there’s always the problem of sustaining it and keeping it on track but that can’t be that hard. From the little preview of volume five that we’re given, titled Redemption, it seems like they are heading into some interesting and mind bending territory.

TV Review: ‘Heroes’ Episode: ‘I Am Sylar’

I'm actually Sylar from an earlier episode. I was good in this one.
I'm actually Sylar from an earlier episode. I was good in this one.

After a somewhat lacking origin story the previous week, it’s good to see Heroes back on kick ass form this week. How could it not be when the title of this chapter we get to see scratched into Sylar’s arm. That’s what a lot of this episode deals with, a good old heaping of Sylar and luckily this time we don’t get a mopey Sylar in search of his father with a none too interesting kid in tow. This time we get a rather messed up Sylar who is having a few glitches you could say with his shape shifting abilities.

In an early scene we get to see a little cameo by Clint Howard, Ron Howard’s brother who you’ll recognize from any of Ron’s films as well as a myriad of other movies. My suggestion to for you to check out would be Silent Night Deadly Night 4 where he plays a psychotic hobo, truly knows how to keep up with his brother. Anyway he plays an ability owning man with the power to shake things into pieces, and he gets two bad options when he runs into Sylar. The basic problem is Sylar wants power and Dangko wants him to stay as an agent he has killed and taken the identity of. This is Sylar’s essential struggle through the whole episode and there’s actually a couple glints of hope for his character tossed in as well, but we all know Sylar must be Sylar.

We also see Matt Parkman ditching Hiro and Ando and taking his kid back to his ex-wife and leaving the two to their own devices. Their plan is to attack Building 26, “Evil Agent Headquarters†, head on and they have a nice little bit between them where they fight over how they both now have powers as well as what famous super heroes they would be more like. Ando also comes up with his own super hero name that’s kind of bad ass I think. I don’t know. Does anybody think The Crimson Arc sounds like a cool name at all? Matt Parkman again struggles over two ways to head on his adventure and again shows us how much pain it is to make a decision and that’s about as interesting as he gets.

Now I forgot to mention that this is all happening eighteen hours before the ending of the last episode where we saw Sylar impersonating Nathan on TV. So about twenty minutes before the episode ends we take off from the end of the last one and see Nathan pissed as he watches himself on TV and he’s quick to rush off and set things right. Before all this though there is a pretty creepy Norman Batesesque conversation that Sylar has when he shape shifts to look like his mother and he talks to her about all the problems he has and what he should do.

I won’t reveal what happens in the last few minutes because it is a pretty big slew of to be continued action. Let’s just say things aren’t looking good for most of the heroes and I’d say for one villain in particular as well. Now I’m pretty positive next week is supposed to be the finale and with what they’ve built themselves up with I can’t wait to see how they end it all up. I’ve got to say that this Fugitives chapter is living up to what they gave us in the first season and I hope they can sustain it into a few more seasons.

TV Review: ‘Heroes’ Episode: ‘1961’

Peter and Claire being bad by avoiding digging work.
Peter and Claire being bad by avoiding digging work.

After watching this episode of Heroes I had a very bittersweet feeling from the whole affair. I mean after the past couple of episodes I was expecting a really bad ass explanation for the whole Coyote Sands and origin story. The past few episodes have been pretty action packed and given us some sweet as twists and turns, what with Sylar now able to shape shift into whoever he wants, and the final revelation last week that we would finally get to the hear how this all came to be, I felt this one fell a bit flat. First off much of it revolves around flashbacks to when the facility was first up and running and when Angela was young and ended up there with her family. Now this could’ve been chock full of all kinds of cool back story and weird ass craziness, but too much of it revolved around how she apparently had a sister that was with her and how she died there along with everyone else.

Besides the flashbacks there’s not much going on with anyone else other than when a sand storm starts to brew up and Suresh shows up to join the crew and find out what was up with this place and his dad. I will say though that we do find out some cool information about the Company and how it was formed to keep such a massacre from ever happening to their kind again. Also that Bennet was only working for the new Agency so that he could bring it down from the inside but Dangko ended up proving to be a bit too strong. Now Angela apparently wants to start a new company with her sons, Bennet, Claire, and I guess whoever can be relied on to not turn into a douche and go all evil on everyone. But other than that we mostly get conversations between the characters more notably some pretty dull ones between Nathan and Peter, that fall flat and has an air of not meaning much of anything.

But back in flashback land we start to see things heading south between Angela and her sister Alice, who can control the weather like it ain’t no thing, as Angela starts to plan an escape from the facility with some other ability abled youngsters liker herself. Included in this group is a young Linderman that is not put to much use then using his power on Angela and talking all British like. Then we find Alice is the real cause for why everyone was shot up and killed as she accidentally killed a guard during an experiment and then all hell broke loose. But we soon find that her sister is still alive and hanging around the facility and is the one behind the big sand storm. After a bit of a show down with her that’s nothing too spectacular, she just kind of walks off and looks all deranged or something. She more than well should be after surviving a massacre, in which her parents died, and hanging out in an abandoned, creepy facility for close to fifty years.

Then we see all of them in a diner and they are talking about how they aren’t going to form a new company but a family. Luckily the sappiness gets slashed to ribbons as they see Sylar on TV pretending to be Nathan and is holding a press conference. So hopefully after this somewhat mopey attempt at a version of their origin we can now get cracking back to the action. We only have a few episodes left and I’ll be damned if they don’t do their best to blow me out of the water. At least give Dangko what he has coming to him. If they do that I can fully forgive them for past trespasses.

TV Review: ‘Heroes’ Episode: ‘Turn and Face the Strange’

Hey! Bennet! Just wanted your attention, can you believe I killed Sylar?
Hey! Bennet! Just wanted your attention, can you believe I killed Sylar?

With only a few episodes left in the season, Heroes is really cranking up the intense action as we lead up to whatever cliff hanger we will invariably be tossed upon. Starting pretty much off from last week we see that Bennet thinks Sylar is dead and Sylar and Dangko are still working as a team of extreme evilness and Sylar can’t stop himself from using his brand spanking new shape shifting power to annoy Dangko and mingle with people who want to rip his head off. As in one scene where Bennet’s wife shows up because agents have raided the house and Claire is gone and she’s quite pissed that her husband never spends anytime with her. Bennet is not helped in this situation by Dangko coming up and introducing himself and walking around the place like he’s the cock of the walk, but of course it turns out to be Sylar just playing around as he walks into the bathroom and we see the real Dangko taking a number one. Here we are informed that Sylar doesn’t plan on killing Bennet, he plans on destroying him, bum bum BUM!

From there we get some more baby time with Hiro and Ando as they are traveling along trying to find Matt Parkman and unload his baby on him. They remind me of an old married couple as they bicker around a bit but that’s probably more than intentional. Eventually the car dies and then they find that the baby can restart it, only when he’s happy of course, and that Ando must make a face that is pure Pikachu looking all the way. Then the mystery gets ratcheted up as we hear the name Coyote Sands and that Nathan and Claire are planning on meeting Peter and Angela Petrelli there and that she will be telling them everything they want to know. So sounds like some pretty intense information will be hung above our heads like a carrot by the end of the episode and then the whole to be continued thing will pop up and we’ll have to wait until next week or maybe even the week after to find out what Coyote sands is all about.

Then we have Suresh and Parkman and Parkman is all up in arms after the death of Daphne, one of my more favorite characters and I hope it turns out she comes back somehow but probably won’t, and now he is on a full blooded revenge to take Dangko out. Suresh asks if that’s what he really wants and I for one say hell yes, the guy strapped a bomb to his chest and made him look like a terrorist for God’s sake. Parkman eventually, through the use of his powers, finds the woman that Dangko most cares about and finds out she don’t know much about what Dangko is all about, and apparently thinks his name is Jacob. So Parkman shows up at Dangko’s apartment and forces him to her the truth and that he kills people and is not so good a guy. Then, trying to be a big bad tough, Parkman tries to shoot Dangko’s confused lady but drops his gun and Dangko pulls his and very much shoots to kill but is very much stopped by Hiro, in a very cool gun, bullet, Matrix kind of scene, and drags Matt out of there before his blood comes pouring out of him. He then gets to meet his son for the first time and overjoyedness abounds.

I do give it to this episode on behalf of Mr. Bennet because he gets jerked around like crazy throughout the whole thing. We get a scene where his wife shows up and gives him divorce papers and really lays down some crushing words but then it turns out that it had been Sylar in disguise the whole time. Bennet does find this out, the signature on the papers don’t match up, and he then puts a gun to his wife’s head thinking its Sylar but luckily a trusty call from their son Lyle, I feel bad for this actor because he isn’t used worth a dung heap, proves who she is and she tosses him out pissed as ever. Then he confronts Dangko no knowing that he’s working with Sylar and he shoots an agent believing it to be Sylar in disguise and the guy does and now Bennet himself is on the run. It actually was Sylar but apparently he can squeeze out his blood for extra dramatic effect.

So now, close to the end, everyone is meeting up at Coyote Sands and Angela tosses them a bunch of shovels and tell them to dig up the past. From the side story with Suresh, who has moved back into his old apartment and found some old files of his dad’s, all we find out about the place is where they may have performed a bunch of government experiments and something about a project called Iccharus. And what do they find from only a few feet of displaced earth? Well a human skull of course and the more than likely chance of more to be found. So there we our left and thus we must wait another week until more is unfurled before us and the yarn continues to unravel.

Heroes Time! Episode Review: “Into Asylum”

Peter and his mom decide to disrupt the church service by having a clandestine meeting.
Peter and his mom decide to disrupt the church service by having a clandestine meeting.

I have to give it up somehow to this week’s episode of Heroes because this was possibly the weirdest episode I’ve seen all season. This week the focus stays on three sets of characters and for the most part it just feels like nothing interesting is going on in at least two of them. I mean the one with Sylar and Dangko is pretty cool but when it comes to the story arcs with Peter and his mom and Nathan and Claire I was left with a feeling of so what and where were you going with this. It may have been my attention was somewhat diverted during the episode but besides the overall general idea of what they were going for I felt I didn’t get too much more out of them than that.

Let’s start off with Nathan and Claire. As was seen previously between them, Nathan rescued Claire from agents that were raiding her house and they flew away together. Now we see that their best plan is to fly away to Mexico and hang out in a cheapo motel for a few days. They have their usual talks of how he hasn’t been the greatest father and how hunting people with abilities maybe wasn’t the greatest plan to put into action but other than that there’s not anything really new brought to the table. Strangely enough we do get to see a scene where Nathan starts a tequila drinking contest with some southbound frat boys so they can earn a little extra money but even that never gets overly interesting. Eventually Nathan is drunk other the table and it becomes Claire’s responsibility to take over where dad left off and finish off these frat fools.

After she does win she carts the drunk Nathan back to the hotel room and they have a discussion about this and that as Nathan stumbles around the room drunk and eventually passes out. By the end of the episode they are leaving the hotel and Nathan has sweetly bought back the necklace she had sold to get them some start up money because her other dad, guy in horn rimmed glasses, had bought it for her and meant something to her I’m sure. Then they walk off hand in hand and seem like they are now becoming chummy with each other. And thus ends one wild weekend in Mexico as they head of to wherever it is they are headed now.

Then we have the story of Peter and his mom which really seems to give us even less than the story with Nathan and Claire. First off theirs takes place in a church through the whole episode. At least and Nathan and Claire could give us a little debauchery with the tequila drink off they started. But here all we get is Peter meeting his mom at a church, apparently the same one she married his father and he received his first communion if it even matters, and they talk about this and they talk about that and it seems they spend hours there and it looks like a lot of praying gets done. Eventually some agents track them down to there and they hide out in the confessional. Someone soon decides to check there and finds they are hiding but it turns out to be Mr. Bennet and he tells his colleagues that it’s all clear and besides that nothing else really goes on with these two.

Now getting to the real story we have a bit of a team up between Sylar and Dango. Apparently a person with the ability to shape shift into other people is being hunted down but, for obvious reasons, he’s a bit of a hard catch. So, for no other reason than I’m sure to get a brand spanking new ability, Sylar contacts Dangko and decides to help him out with hunting down the shape shifter. There is a pretty cool chase scene where it turns out one of Dangkos men is dead and has been replaced by the shape shifter and they chase the guy through the building and parking garage and he escapes from their grasp and is back on the loose.

So Sylar takes Dangko to the guys apartment and they soon establish how this guy operates and soon track him down to a club. This is where it gets really cool as it turns out the guy has stolen Danko’s face and is macking pretty heavy on a lady with it. Dangko should be kind of happy I’d think seeing how his face is doing so well with the ladies but his overall facial expression upon seeing this doesn’t really convey to me that he’s happy in anyway. Eventually they lose track of him again and we cut back to Dangko meeting up with Sylar and saying they should head out and Dangko turns and shoots Sylar, the shape shifter cleverly disguised yet again, and then the real Sylar shows up and takes his ability. We leave off with Dangko and Syler leaving the body looking like Sylar and getting Bennet believing they’ve actually killed Sylar. Not a bad plan but I mean once Sylar starts doing his thing again won’t people just realize he isn’t really dead. This plan only seems to really buy him a few days of people not looking for him and that’s it. Oh well, I guess we’ll see how they deal with it next week.

‘Heroes’ and ‘Twilight’ together?

Don’t worry, this post is not to tell you anymore about the movie ‘Twilight’. It is to inform you that on  Moday, November 10th, before you can get your ‘Heroes’ fix, Robert Pattison the star of ‘Twilight’ will introduce the show in an effort to draw viewers to the November 21st opening.

‘Heroes’ Season 3 is going to be awesome!

OK, so it’s not movie-related, but come on… how can I NOT talk about this TV show? We’ve spent so much time and attention on ‘The Dark Knight’ I think it’s only fair to briefly indulge my geeked out anticipation for this new season of one of the coolest shows on TV… EVER!!! Here’s the two minute long primetime preview commercial for the third season of ‘Heroes’ called ‘Villains’ … I mean, right there says it all. Now, watch the preview and tell me you’re not totally stoked!

Hayden Panettiere worth at LEAST $1 per pound!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the ‘Heroes’ TV show. I love it! It’s a great show, but I think some people are getting a little carried away. I mean, fans are fans, but seriously … I was playing around on eBay and found this autographed card of Hayden Panettiere (plays Claire Bennett) which was pulled from a box of Topps ‘Heroes’ trading cards. I couldn’t believe what it was going for! As a point of reference, I checked the current maximum going prices for three other REALLY popular female celebrity icons on both eBay and the Internet marketplace in general, and this is what I found:

Angelina Jolie … Autographed 8×10 photo, up to  $550.00
Scarlett Johansson … Autographed 8×10 photo, up to  $125.00
Myley Cyrus … Autographed 8×10 photo, up to $80.00

Whoa! Jolie, understandably, still blows the pack away. [Then again, this was just one item listed at that price. Jolie’s autographs actually being bid on/sold have a much more “reasonable” price.]

Panettiere is a rather petite young lady, so its safe to say that her autograph is going for at LEAST $1 dollar per pound (body weight) and with over one day left on the auction, will possibly get pretty close to $2 per pound. [Sorry if this sounds like I’m equating women to deli meat. That’s ABSOLUTELY not my intention.] What do you think? Is her autograph worth this? If not, is anyone’s autograph worth this?