Week 3. Running out of ways to express disappointment. Fear the spoilers…

HEROES: S2 E03 – ‘Kindred’

So, we have two possibilities. Either Season 2 of Heroes is a truly daring experiment, a pop culture game of chicken to see exactly how lumpen and uninteresting they can turn the show at every direction, whether they can still be producing a ridiculous moment every three minutes and still somehow be crowned as geekdom’s latest cause celebre… or it really is as bad as it looks and the writers don’t even know it. Season 1 had some major problems, but it rarely got as bad as the clunky storytelling that’s being thrown limply in our direction, and while the episode did show a couple of twitches of life, they arrived about a minute and a half before the damn thing came to a halt. Heroes really is exploring new realms of badness, and wasn’t helped by the decision to indulge in a series of very unwise big-scale CGI shots that failed to look like anything other than shonky and badly used CGI (especially in the frankly abysmal ‘Superman’ pastiche- the first season was wise to stay away from this kind of stuff, as it can very easily look exceptionally bad). We also have the important life lesson that apparently it’s okay to be an unforgivably selfish prick like West as long as you turn out to have a special ability (with Claire somehow managing to gloss over the fact that he was peering through windows in her house– which is creepy stalker behaviour, not potential boyfriend material), and Sylar turning up again (yawn) and immediately turning on his saviour (yawn) and finding out that something’s wrong with his powers (slightly smaller yawn). The most ruinous wheel-spinning of all was the ridiculous Oirish gangster plot, where Peter spends the whole episode getting the box back and then conveniently doesn’t open it so that he can shag the Oirish gangster’s sister instead, in a plotline that’s seemingly been constructed for no other reason than to fill space. We’ve got about six or seven plot threads, all apparently going in different directions, very little resembling momentum, and some truly terrible dialogue. Unless someone on the writing staff has got something pretty major up their sleeves, I think it’s official– the emperor has no clothes.

I’ll report back when something interesting happens (which may be the iminent arrival of Kristen Bell). Let’s see how long it takes…