Lower Decks

The following contains spoilers through “Strange Attractors,” originally broadcast 10/26/09.

The fourth season of ‘Heroes’ is called Redemption, and although you wouldn’t know it by the ratings, the title is supposed to reflect both the arc for the characters and a new path to reconciliation with the fans. You might remember that a similar tack was followed at the beginning of last season, which is story enough to explain the lack of tangible viewership, which in all likelihood means, despite every effort, this will probably be the final season of the series. As one of the remaining and actually enthusiastic fans, I find myself pretty well at peace with this notion. Four seasons is pretty good, especially for a niche show (who knows what even ‘Lost’ would have ended up with had its own creators not announced at the end of an unpopular third season that it had the rest of the story plotted out; the days of this particular brand of fan getting much more, like what used to be routine seven seasons of a Star Trek, much less nine for ‘X-Files,’ are probably long in the past). Regardless of the reaction, however, ‘Heroes’ is still going strong, if playing that get-the-fans-back card pretty strongly.

‘Heroes’ is the rare show for me, and thanks to DVD it was possible at all, where I didn’t start out as one of its biggest fans, but ended up one anyway. Believe it or not, but the way most people feel now is exactly why I stopped watching after only a few episodes into the first season. I had too much else to concentrate on to bother trying to maintain interest in something that didn’t seem like it was going to be worth it. But the buzz kept building, I had numerous family members who assumed that I was watching, and so I gave it another chance, and found the first season, after all, to be exactly the extraordinary experience that it had been made out to be. The second season had an almost immediate backlash from the same fans who had built it up so unexpectedly a year earlier, and a writer’s strike cut it short, not so much mercifully but perhaps in time to allow viewers a chance to catch their breath and another chance to wonder if the creators knew what they were doing. It was another season I skipped (because I hadn’t yet rediscovered the show), but became more and more suspicious about, because the more people reject something, the more likely, in my experience, it’s probably worth checking out. Buzz is a terrible thing in some ways, because it only exists either to thrive on itself or to dissipate after a time. It takes on a life of its own, an excitement that lives only to feed itself, like being a fan of a local sports team simply because that team is, well, local. We can call it an infection, but that might be out of taste these days.

Anyway, by the time the third season bowed, I was a newly-minted fan, and I found myself continually rewarded. Lower Decks had a plan to list our favorite episodes from the 2008-2009 genre season, and I would have had three ‘Heroes’ episodes ready (“The Second Coming,” the season opener; “Villains,” where viewers got a fresh batch of trademark flashbacks; and “Cold Snap,” the classic Bryan Fuller return where, among other developments, Rebel is finally revealed), with another, “An Invisible Thread,” ready but not quite appropriate to admit, because I knew fans were once more disgruntled, even if it set up things that quickly became quite important to the new season.

Which brings us to now, because the fourth season has been all about theoretically giving the fans everything they’ve been asking for. They were getting sick of a number of the characters. They wanted new stories. They wanted new characters. Well, in quick succession, “Orientation” took care of all three issues, building on the key developments of “An Invisible Thread” and opening the door to new ones. Nathan was secretly Sylar, having finally gotten his comeuppance for all his questionable decisions; Parkman discovered he had Sylar’s mind stuck in his own head, payback for his decision to meddle one too many times with powers he’s never truly accepted; Tracy started taking revenge on those who “killed” her; Hiro found that his powers were apparently proving fatal. In “Orientation” and later episodes, Nathan started to realize the truth behind his new lease on life; his brother Peter tried to return to his life as a medic and blend in as normal; Samuel, played by Robert Knepper, and his carnival were introduced; HRG (I don’t care how routine it’s been to know him as Noah Bennet, it’s just plain better to refer to him as we originally did) and Claire distanced themselves from the Company and took on the brave new world of college.

This episode doesn’t cover every arc that’s been going on during the season, so it’s not specifically necessary to reference them all, but it’s relevant to say that the feel has certainly been different in almost every regard because of it. There’s been a conscious effort to all but ignore most of what has gone on for the last two seasons and instead live in the touchstones from the first one, when everyone still loved the show. Even the idea of letting some arcs wait episodes to play out a little more is more akin to the first year. It had become common, and not unpleasant (at least for me, and maybe that’s what became the problem for some fans, because they watched weekly whereas much of my experience came far more rapidly, where I didn’t have to wait to see how things worked out, which is different than how they actually developed), for a lot more to happen, for a lot more characters, each episode. Different characters, a chance to take things more casually, because in essence, the fourth season isn’t just harking back to the first season, but acting almost like a literally new start.

Not that new fans, or disgruntled old ones, are going to care at this point. An old one like me, who’s been following the series arc from the start, will certainly appreciate the idea of Redemption, where you have the chance to clear away some of the clutter along with the characters, because what it really amounts to is a move forward, rather than the mire they’ve been in, just trying to figure out for themselves what having powers means. Samuel and his carnival represent an alternative that the Company, or Nathan’s political maneuvering, never quite did, a chance to be perfectly comfortable with abilities the rest of the public can’t be expected to accept easily. It’s no mistake, though, that Samuel has been portrayed as a sinister figure (or, for that matter, the casting of Knepper to play him; he made an excellent bad guy for four years in ‘Prison Break’), because his offer, whether our characters realize it or not, however and whenever they encounter him, is really not all that different from the possibilities they’ve encountered in the past. The difference is that at least this time, they won’t have to deny what they are. The series arc, from the start, has been to find the happy transition for ‘Heroes’ to better reflect the superhero archetype that Tim Kring has consciously avoided, like ‘Smallville’ and the embargo on flights & tights (in other words, Clark Kent as Superman).

“Strange Attractors” builds on the developments from within the fourth season itself. Sylar quit being Nathan two episodes ago in “Hysterical Blindness,” and stumbled into the carnival life in “Tabula Rasa,” where Samuel tried to help him figure out his memory problems. In that episode, we didn’t revisit Parkman at all, which was strategically significant because it gives “Attractors” the chance to build on what we’ve known, and what Parkman has been dealing with, since last season. I only realized during this episode how ironic the situation really is. Back during the first season, the last time Parkman was only in the role of a cop, it was his investigations that first revealed the existence of Sylar. Aside from Parkman’s frank assertion that “I’m a cop, you’re a killer,” there’s a certain amount of karma involved that these two characters are once again intertwined. That alone should be indication enough that the creators, at least at this point, can still be trusted. But they’ve been doing this sort of thing all along. There’s Molly’s boogeyman, again first referenced during the first season, who was revealed during the second to be Parkman’s father. The Shanti virus and Takezo Kensei, more links between the first two seasons. Arthur Petrelli, which the episode “Villains” pointed out so well as a vital figure worth revisiting. That’s just scratching the surface (and my favorite examples of what’s made this show so continually engaging).

Parkman, of course, has been fighting Sylar’s mind, the hallucinations, throughout the season, and he thinks he finds a way to win during “Strange Attractors,” but as it turns out, he’s very wrong. Claire experiences a similar revelation with the college friend who knows too much, whom she’s continually learning new (and quite frankly, terrifying) things about, and just as her dad HRG with the boy Jeremy, with whom he’s been trying to make amends after basically ruining Jeremy’s life from the way he used to do things. The last of these adventures ends tragically, and through a number of complications, sends Tracy straight into the hands of the carnival, the second character after Sylar (the one who thinks he’s Nathan, or thought so, not the one who’s now currently Parkman).

You can guess where this half of the season is headed, but the interesting part will be how the second half will push our characters closer to their ultimate destiny. Me, I’m just waiting until Mohinder resurfaces. Hey, Parkman (when he was still Parkman), already placed the call. I was worried for a while, actually, that the creators were making too many concessions to unsatisfied fans. But usual, they know what they’re doing. It may be a complicated strange ride, but it’s worth it.