Heroes: Season 4

Since I already lashed into Heroes as an entire four-season series in another blog, I'm going to do something I never thought I would do. I'm going to write a positive post about this final season of Heroes. In fact, I will break convention entirely and make a bullet list of every positive feature I can come up with. I'm sure there'll be a fair share of sarcasm, but bear with me. This is no easy task! Anyway...

• It wasn't the worst season of Heroes. That distinction still belongs to Season 3. The series had "enjoyed" an entirely downward quality trajectory before reaching this season, which managed to rebound from "absolutely horrible" to simply "mostly terrible." Picture a "quality versus time" graph that looks like a ski jump.
• I watched all 812 minutes of this DVD set in under twelve hours. I could have done so in nine. About halfway through the season I realized that if I pressed "fast forward" on my PS3, the first option was a 1.5-fold speed up in which all audio and video remained intact. Yes, characters moved and spoke rather quickly, but I honestly didn't miss a thing of any substance (as if there was any to miss at all - sorry, I know, positive thoughts, positive thoughts) and after a few episodes it felt weird not to be watching the show in 1.5-speed. Talk about a time saver!
• For a few episodes I was genuinely interested in what was happening. I don't feel like verifying it, but I think the three or four episodes I'm talking about were spread out neatly across the season. This is a win. I came in expecting the season to go 0 for 18 and instead it went like 3.5 for 18. That's still just a .194 batting average, but then, the Mendoza line is more or less the limit for Heroes.
• Robert Knepper (T-Bag from Prison Break) was used to the best of his abilities and was one of the season's highlights. The creepy but charismatic charmer didn't simply play a Heroes version of T-Bag all over again. Instead, his character spoke with some sort of Irish accent and was hellbent on bringing his "family" (a traveling carnival full of people with superpowers) to a promised land of sorts. Same charming but sleazy T-Bag vibe, but with a totally different delivery. Acting has never been an issue with Heroes, but I still need to give props to Knepper for a job well done.
• A refined and slightly trimmed down cast allowed us to focus on the characters that mattered. After three ever-increasingly bloated seasons were spent introducing new people with special abilities without really killing or writing off that many characters, it really felt like this one cut back, and hard. Nathan, Mohinder, whatever character Ali Larter was playing this time, Parkman, Claire's mom, and Hiro's dad were all minimally present, leaving the focus primarily on Peter, Claire, Hiro, Sylar, and Knepper's "Samuel" character. It didn't make any of those characters better or more interesting, but it did make for a less convoluted and annoying story arc.
• They briefly teased a Hayden Panettiere lesbian angle. It never panned out and the other girl wasn't attractive. (Think Rebecca Black, aged poorly.) But still.
• The finale, which was never intended to be the series finale, actually works pretty well as a series finale. So there aren't a ton of loose ends left, at least in Heroes terms. After foiling a villainous plot to destroy the world at the end of the "volume" (as per usual), the next volume begins with Claire sick of hiding her powers from the world and jumping off a Ferris wheel on national television. "She just changed the world," remarked Peter, or Sylar, or someone. And it ends. So we can all rest easy now that the "specials" (people with abilities) were welcomed and embraced by society and that was that. Hurrah!

And so it ends. The idea of continuing the franchise in some form or another is still floating around out there, but I've paid my dues and after watching four whole seasons on DVD (and two of them also on NBC), I can't imagine that I'll be in on any straight-to-DVD movies or a novelization series or whatever, if anything, comes next.