#401: 'Orientation'
Wr: Tim Kring
Dr: David Straiton
Synopsis: Our heroes are trying to find ways to cope with recent events. Some (Claire, Matt) trying to find normality and others (Hiro, Ando, Peter) trying to use their abilities to do good. Angela worries about Sylar, and a new threat arrives in the form of a mysterious carnival.
Review: Four months after the curtain fell on a thoroughly lacklustre third season of Heroes, in which characters abandoned their well-established histories to service gimmicky, flash-in-the-pan plots and the narrative shunted from relentless over-indulgence to repetitive mundanity over the course of two volumes, Tim Kring is unleashing his ‘Redemption’ on us and he’s absolutely, undeniably determined to get it right this time. This is ‘back to basics’, ‘new beginnings’, the return of what supposedly made the deliciously creative, potential-fuelled monolith such a phenomenon in its freshman year… only, therein lies the fundamental problem. Going backwards to move forwards is a flawed endeavour at best, and one that it’s notoriously difficult to pull off. Heroes is such a different show now, such a well-established show, that it seems fruitless to deny it; what we need, Tim, is originality, fresh blood, an injection of something that we haven’t seen a hundred or so times before. A pity, then, that from the evidence of ‘Orientation’, our season four opener, Kring seems hell bent on recreating season two… only without that troublesome Mohinder Suresh to have to slot into the story somewhere.
So we start, ladies and gentlemen, with the question, ‘what do heroes do when forced to return to normality?’, the answer to which can be found in the first few hours of ‘Generations’: bore the audience to death. This penchant for pressing the reset button on the protagonists’ complicated, evil-fighting, end-of-the-world-preventing lives may seem appealing at first glance, given that it tends to avoid the sort of out-of-character repositioning that littered, and somewhat spoiled, last year’s ‘Villains’, but it quickly becomes dry and uninteresting, especially when you consider that, having spent so many years getting to the point where everyone was seemingly quite comfortable with their special abilities, we really just want them to get on with it already and become the extraordinary people that they really are, not retreat into themselves and deny their inherent heroism. Yet again, we find the ‘collective’ disbanded, going their separate ways, living their own lives, but you just know that in the space of five or six episodes, they’re all going to be reunited, working together to prevent some as yet undisclosed catastrophe or getting at each other’s throats in an endless cycle of pointless deceit and double cross. It’s just such a repetitive formula, and it’s bloody difficult to swallow.
We really have seen it all before. How many times is Kring going to have Matt Parkman renounce his ability before he realises it’s getting old? How many new educational institutions does Claire have to frequent before she gets an interesting story? When will Noah actually right his wrongs and stop lapsing into the same mistakes two seconds later? These are simply the same frustratingly banal character beats that we seem to spend a good chunk of every successive volume of the show deliberating over and you would think that by now, by year bleeding four, the production staff would realise that they are as predictable as day turning to night. But no, sadly; Kring clearly thinks that having Peter be a paramedic again, complete with uber-friendly everyman best mate, obligatory loner complex and a nifty penchant for rescuing the helpless just in the nick of time, is tantamount to innovation. In reality, it’s just tiresome. He also seems to be obsessed with showing us every baby step in Claire’s educational career; this year, she’s in college, making a vow (somewhat refreshingly) to tell the truth. Woo hoo! How thoroughly engaging! And look, there’s a caricature, straight out of Stereotype 101, of an annoyingly over-confident and over-enthusiastic roommate, designed to provide cheap laughs and guide young Claire towards her real college destiny… realising that popularity and academic super-stardom are nothing compared to the integrity and true friendship you’ll find by befriending the awkward outsider. Euck, this story is so moralistically archetypal, it’s almost sickening. Claire’s roomie is completely unbelievable, a one-dimensional cipher whose ludicrousness increases and increases with each passing scene. You just know she’s going to get her comeuppance; in fact, she’s there for precisely that purpose. If I were being generous, I’d say that Kring had been watching too much Joss Whedon, since the story is taken straight out of the first few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s fourth season, only without the added bonus of the irritating one actually being a demon (well, we presume at any rate.) However, unlike Whedon, Kring does nothing with the archetype, preferring instead to let it run its course in the laziest, most monotonous fashion possible (she’s got a trajectory? Really?); in fact, it’s essentially the West storyline all over again… I’m just waiting for Gretchen to start breathing fire or something.
As if these stale narratives weren’t enough, we also have Tracey Strauss’s killing spree to contend with, which gets all of about five minutes of screen time, despite seeming like a rather significant plot point when it featured in the small preview of volume five that we were treated to at the end of last year. It’s questionable whether Ali Larter should still be hanging around, given that she struggles to convincingly portray her myriad characters at the best of times, but at least it does give us the chance to witness the rather nifty attempted murder of Noah Bennet. Of course, it’s stopped by Zelkjo Ivanek’s Danko, who is still loitering like a bad smell, trying in vein to kill off, lock up or just generally get on the heroes’ nerves for no good reason. Really, what is his investment in all of this these days? Personal vendetta? Megalomania? Fetishism? No matter, we need him around to die a dramatic death at hour’s end that, rather depressingly, was spoiled by TV.com days before the episode aired. Sigh. Oh, and then we have poor Hiro and Ando, who Kring continues to bastardise by lumbering them with a bunch of lacklustre comedic beats. ‘Dial A Hero’ might raise a smirk or two but it’s complete fluff, and only actually shows signs of beginning to go somewhere about ¾ of the way into the episode. The strand is saddled with some hopelessly clunky dialogue too, as the need to re-establish Hiro’s sister as Ando’s unrequited love interest results in a chunk of unvarnished exposition being lumped into their diction. Ando essentially reminds Hiro that he’s in love with the woman, despite this being a well-known, well-established fact between the two of them. It would be rather like you having a conversation with your mother about the wallpaper in your bedroom, and stopping to tell her that the bedroom is the one at the top of the stairs, next to the toilet. It’s just completely unnecessary and, as such, it comes across as forced; as a function of the narrative rather than an organic part of the story. Regrettably, it happens at several other points in the episode too, and most memorably during Angela’s conversations with both Noah and Matt. They essentially recount the events that occurred at the close of season three, obviously for the benefit of the casual, forgetful or brand spanking new viewer, but it’s entirely pointless from a realist perspective since they were all there in the first place.
Tellingly, it’s when Kring bothers to do something new or out of the ordinary that ‘Orientation’ begins to gain momentum. The Carnival is probably the best thing about the show right now, beautifully depicted with its luscious cinematography, Batman-esque camera work and unusual, unnerving underscore. The new characters all seem interesting and fairly well rounded, with powers that are engagingly different: the use of ink for foresight, depiction and manifestation is a particularly fascinating trope. The strand has a feeling of complexity to it; the individuals we see here aren’t simply ciphers or determinable heroes/villains, they are people, with all their foibles and difficulties. Robert Knepper is just excellent as Samuel, bringing a real sense of uncertainty to the role, painting the character as simultaneously compassionate (the scene at the graveyard) and disturbing (his interactions with ‘knife-man’.) Speaking of acting chops, kudos to Cristine Rose, Adrian Pasdar and Zachary Quinto for some top notch work in the scenes between Nathan, Angela and ‘Sylar’ in the restaurant. This is really engaging stuff, with Quinto as deliciously eerie as he’s ever been and Pasdar showing a real talent for subtlety, taking care not to give too much away in Nathan’s minor lapses into Gabriel Gray. Rose finally gets a fresh set of character beats to play too; rather than depicting a maniacal power monger, here she gets to be a fragile, concerned mother, desperately trying to hold things together. Her subsequent phone call to Matt Parkman positively reeks of desperation and it’s all the more moving because of it. These elements bring a fresh emotional quotient into the mix, reliant on the events of volumes past, and it makes you wish that Kring would spend a bit more time trying something new instead of resorting to half-baked rehashes of former glories.
As an introduction to the fifth volume of Heroes, ‘Orientation’ disappoints more than it engages. Kring’s script is so keen to press the refresh button, so desperate to erase what the Zeitgeist perceives as past mistakes, that it ends up tripping over its own good intentions. The preoccupation with going ‘back to basics’ proves to be the episode’s undoing, as it results in a narrative littered with predictable story developments, lazy, one-dimensional characters and uninteresting motifs. A good chunk of the hour is spent rehashing the fundamental tenants of the show’s second season, which is far from a good thing, getting bogged down in the question of ‘how extraordinary people return to ordinary lives’, which is exactly what we don’t want to see in the show. There is some promise here, the most encouraging of which is the successful introduction of The Carnival, the show’s new blood, but, then, that’s rather telling in itself: when the production staff take the time to create something, to delve into that pesky pool of originality, to look forwards, they tend to come up trumps. It’s when they lock eyes on the past that things start to go astray and unfortunately, there’s just far too much reflection and navel-gazing in ‘Orientation’ for it to be considered anything other than decidedly average. 5.8
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