Dark Views

*gasp* (Sound after emerging from a two day Heroes Season 1 marathon). If you haven’t seen this, yet, you should.

As an author and SciFi fan, I’m always looking for good movies and TV shows. Here is my summary of season 1 (with a few spoilers further down below).

Overall, I’m very impressed. The show delivers depth and atmosphere like few I’ve seen before. It’s as smart and logical as CSI or Dr. House but the cast is much more complex and the story is a beautiful example of an interwoven stream of events which happen independently but influence each other in a very special way. Nothing in that series is set into stone; events happen, the viewer feels he knows what is going on just to stumble over another small piece of information which turns everything around. The same happens to the characters which often find themselves having to make hard decisions they feel they aren’t prepared for. Babylon 5 showed a glimpse of what can be done in this regard, Heroes goes the whole nine yards: Storytelling at it’s best, rich, believable characters, super-human action without losing a grip on the special effects.

Spoiler Warning: The following text is only safe to read after seeing all of season 1.

There are a few dark spots, though, and they show a few of the problems an author/storyteller faces. Let’s start with the “perfect prison”. The prison itself contains almost nothing except for a few pipes which one of the heroes uses later to make an escape. I didn’t notice them when Sylar was in that cell, so I’m giving the author the benefit of doubt and assume that Sylar was in a similar cell but one without the pipes. Alas, if you have ever seen a real prison, you’ll know that surveillance is ubiquitous. Furthermore, with dangerous criminals (especially ones with special abilities), guards never visit the inmate alone. Not so in Sylars case; no one seems to care who visits him and when and what they take along. When Jessica Sanders is imprisoned, the authors don’t make this “mistake”: Guards never handle her alone; they are even afraid to come close to her in rather large groups!

I’m calling this a “mistake” because actually, it is quite easy to create a prison that no one can escape without help. Unfortunately for the show, Sylar has to escape which renders the whole “perfect prison” idea into a death trap for the writer. Authors: If you ever feel you have written yourself into a corner, take a step back and check where you came from. If you can, try to find a real instead of a cheap solution, because when Sylar escaped, I thought: “Oh, that’s so silly.” I didn’t believe the show anymore for some time. When you write a story, the reader trusts that you produce a logical, believable world. Whenever you betray that trust, the reader will feel that your work is not worth the money she paid for it and this not what you want.

In the Sylar case, a possible solution would have been to rewrite story to make the attack on Claire happen far away from any “Company” location. Sylar could then have escaped much more believable from a make-shift prison. Or how about having more people around? It’s unlike Sylar to just slaughter anyone in his path but he could have just rendered the “normal” guards unconscious and then go after the persuading girl (so she can have her grand moment).

The ending of season 1 is something else entirely. At first, I thought is was impossible for Sylar to be alive. Mr. Bennet knows how dangerous he is and would surely have put a few more bullets through his head if he had had any doubt that Sylar was dead. Some of that is solved in season 2 where the writers come up why the heroes didn’t notice Sylar … “escaped”.

Just to round this up, here are a few more blunders which probably only happened because the writers had written themselves into a corner or vital information had to be cut away to fit the time slots of the show:

• In the scene in the future when the guards smash in the door and shoot “Future Hiro”: Why doesn’t he stop time when he hears the door give in? Why doesn’t he stop time as soon as the Haitian is taken out to tell Hiro everything he knows just to be safe? There is no apparent reason to wait until the last moment (except to allow for a dramatic and tragic (a.k.a stupid) death). Or why doesn’t he stop time as soon as the Haitian is down to take out the guards trying to smash down the door?
• When abducted in Las Vegas, Nathan Petrelly can fly away despite the Haitian being close by. Oh, and if that was a sonic book we’re hearing, Nathan ought to be dead but maybe his ability turns his skin into something more durable than steel while he flies. That only leaves the question how his clothes make it …
• Again in the future: In all these years, Matt Parkman never noticed that Nathan Petrelli was in fact someone else? Never? In five years? Okay, again the benefit of doubt: Maybe the ability to create illusions can fool a telepath, too. Still, it seems uncomfortably odd.
• After Claire ran the car into a wall, her father Noah has the brain of the quarterback erased so he “can’t make her life even more complicated that it already is”. Later, the whole school knows that Claire is somehow involved in the event. Having his brain erased just makes everything worse for her. Seems like an unlikely mistake for someone like Mr. Bennet.

All this might give you the impression that the crew around Tim Kring did a sloppy job. Well, think again. If you have seen Star Wars, you probably noticed the 264 mistakes in the first movie. For a TV show with a budget that is probably close to what Goerge Lucas spent for rubber stamps during the shooting, they did an incredible job.

Conclusion: Well done.

Lesson for authors out there: Strive for perfection and try to eliminate all logical mistakes and “easy ways out”. Otherwise, your readers will spend their money on the authors that try harder than you do, the next time they buy a book.