It has been a while since I saw something in this show that really engaged me but yet somehow I am still watching it. That said, I did watch the first half of season 3 in the same way as I came to the second – record it off BBC2 each week then watch all the episodes as quickly as possible of the course of a week or so. The reason for this is because I suspect if I had to remember to watch it each week (and also wait a week for the next one) then I would probably have bailed out of it. Despite my amazement at the car crash of the first half of season 3 I came back for the rest (which, in keeping with the "up itself" tone of the show is entitled "Volume 4").
Volume 4 came to the UK and US with the same apologetic tone from the makers and the usual talk of "reboot" that seems to come with each new season or part season of Heroes. Not sure how many more times it can do but because at the moment creator Tim Kring is starting to look like a terrible magician, continually picking the wrong card from the deck and asking "is this your card?", "is this your card?" and never getting it right. I thought that perhaps this was the card that is correct but the very early episodes of V4 suggested that it was actually going to be more of the same. The story painfully moves in another direction by using coincidence, convenience and simple lazy writing to get things going. In theory the overall narrative here about persecution and capturing of those with powers could have been laced with intensity and intelligence but quickly we are told that it will not be this way. It is hurt by how obvious and simple it is whether it be the obvious orange jumpsuits (which may have been clever once but years after Guantanamo has become a lazy metaphor) or just how cluttered and messy the flow of each episode is. I understand what they are trying for, because the show knows that if it can just make enough "stuff" happen then maybe it will engage by virtue of the sheer volume of stimuli it is handing viewers.
I suppose this approach works in 24, which relies wholly on hooking in the moment but even that show knows it is not as easy to do this as it sometimes appears. In Heroes we have the problem of multiple characters all of equal standing and generally there are so many balls in the air at once that having them all constantly moving just causes a mess of blurring in front of one's eyes. It doesn't help either that at least some of the threads/characters cannot really cope with the requests put on them. It gets a bit better towards the end because one thread (Sylar of course) comes to the fore and gives the other characters something to rally around, but this is too little too late and even then it still has the same problems inherent in it. None of it is helped by it being infused by this terrible "worthy" air brought by the music and the awful narration because this only highlights how weak the material really is. It sort of goes without saying that the cast are not that great – with most of them struggling with the unreasonable demands of the material. Coleman, Oka, Quinto and a few others do well but Ventimiglia, Panettiere, Ramamurthy, Pasdar, Rose and many others cannot do much at all. Zeljko Ivanek is a nice addition but he is essentially just repeating the same sort of plot that Coleman's Noah once effective led.
Volume 4 is better than volume 2 and volume 3 but that is not much in the way of praise. The plots are messy and rely on convenience and, to be frank, lazy writing, to move things along – most of the time not entirely sure what it is doing. It is not quite a car crash but certainly nobody has been able to clear the previous car crash off the road and, while improved, volume 4 is very much a wreck. I'm not sure if I shall bother with volume 5 on the basis of the last 2 seasons – particularly since season 1 was the show at its best and that wasn't amazing or anything. I was hoping that volume 4 would do something to make me eager to return, but sadly it only confirmed the doubt in my head.
