Heroes 4.18: Penultimate

Heroes put on an excellent next-to-last of the season episode 4.18 last night.  Will it be the next-to-last ever?   I hope not, because as I've saying here from time to time, I think this quieter, deeper season of Heroes has been the best since that mythical first season.

Last night featured a good back story on Noah.   We see how and why he first came to hate the "specials," and how he came to work for Primatech.   Claire sees this, too - Samuel wants her to see it, so she'll turn against Noah, but that doesn't happen.  Instead, Claire and Noah end up buried but alive in a carnival trailer that Samuel has put under the ground.   Lauren's somewhere on the premises, so there's hope they'll be discovered.

In some ways the even more profound story last night concerned the reckoning and ultimate partnership - at least for now - of Sylar and Peter.   Both are in the mental prison Matt constructed for Sylar, and Peter entered to rescue Sylar - not out of any love for Sylar, but because Peter in a dream saw Sylar as essential for stopping the cello woman from killing hundreds of people, under Samuel's influence.  The mental prison scenes work well, and have echoes of the original Prisoner series.    The two eventually break free of the prison when Peter believes that Sylar really regrets his murder of Nathan, and is to some extent at least a different person.   Peter perhaps recognizes some true Nathanic qualities in Peter.

So on to the Season 4 finale next week.  Heroes has run a strange course indeed for a television  series.  Bolt-from-the-blue hugely successful first season, followed by meanderings the next two seasons, and now a fine, satisfying, more contemplative year, in which the characters are, well, more human, and therefore more comprehensible, because they're closer to our scale of life.   I definitely want to see more.

See also Heroes Season 4 Premiere: Metaphysics, University, Carnival ... Heroes Meets The L Word in 4.5 ... Heroes 4 Mid-Season Finale  ... Heroes Season 4 Resumes ... Heroes 4.15: The Chess Game Continues ... 4.16: The Trial of Hiro

See also reviews of Season 3 Heroes Gets Lost ... Heroes 3 Begins: Best Yet, Riddled with Time Travel and Paradox ... Sylar's Redemption and other Heroes and Villains Mergers ... Costa Nuclear ... Hearts of Gold and the Debased ... Seeing the Future Trumps Time Travel ... Superpowered Chess with Shifting Pieces ... Villains and Backstories ... The Redemption of Sylar ... Thoughts on the Eclipse, Part I ... The Lore of the Comic Book Store ... Hiro's Time Traveling Closure ... Augmented ... Shades of Recalibration ... Baby, Rebel, and Last Fantasy ... All that Shape Changes Remains the Same? ... Season 3 Finale: Hopeful Deceptions

Reviews of Season 2 Heroes: Episode 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4 ... 7. Heroes Meets 12 Monkeys ... 9. How Immutable Are Fate and Isaac's Futures? ... 10. Penultimate for the Fall ... Heroes 2 Finale: Heroes Who Didn't Survive

And from Season 1: Heroes in Focus ... Heroes Five Years Gone: Triumph of Time Travel and Comics ... Heroes the Hard Part: Only the Pictures Not the Words ... Heroes Landslide: Winnowing and Convergence ... Heroes Volume One Finale

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The Plot to Save Socrates



"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

Preview ... Intriguingly Miasmic Meadowlands on Showtime

From Ancient Greece until late in the 19th century, it was thought that the swamps gave rise to poisonous vapors - miasmas - which tainted the air and caused all manner of illness and disorientation. The main alternate theory blamed human maladies on demons and devils. When you were sad, you were said to have the blue devils ... the origin of what we today call the blues.

Showtime's new 8-episode series Meadowlands premieres Sunday, June 17. I just saw the first four episodes. And while a doctor and music play important roles, this highly original darkling series is much more than that. In fact, it is so original - in pacing and story - that it almost defies categories.

For starters, think The Prisoner meets Twin Peaks meets Dexter meets any story about witness protection programs. The Brogans come to Meadowlands. We don't know why. But we do know that they better not leave. And we do know that not only the Brogans but everyone else in Meadowlands has some kind of story that maybe any well adjusted person is better off not knowing. Although it's not quite "The Monsters Are Due On Maplestreet," that Twilight Zone classic, there is a flavor of something ghostly, possibly supernatural or maybe just dreamlike, that is also just below the surface of Meadowlands.

The series has fine, attractive acting. David Morrissey - seen most memorably in Derailed with Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen - plays Danny Brogan with just the right combination of power and vulnerability. Indeed, that combination of emotions is at play in every member of this family, and simmers in surprising ways in Danny's wife Evelyn (Lucy Cohu) and their two teenage kids - fraternal twins - Zoe (Felicity Jones) and Mark (Harry Treadaway). Felicity Jones, in particular, brings a real freshness to her role. And the background characters, the neighbors, are just what you would expect in a British series of this sort - each an exquisite nutter, some dangerous, some funny, some just strange, and each played to the hilt.

I put Dexter in the list of comparisons, not just because Meadowlands and Dexter are both Showtime series, but because both share a little gore. And maybe a touch of Arrested Development, too. But you'll know that these Meadowlands when zany are never light and breezy ... if you keep watching, you'll see blood and hear screams and get caught up in a compelling puzzle of a story....

Special sneak preview of the first episodes of Meadowlands ... password: secret

Look here for reviews of specific episodes of Meadowlands in June... ... Meadowlands Opens ... with Tongues and Groves ... Episode 2 ... Episode 3 ... Episode 4 ... Episode 5 ... Episode 6 ... Episode 7 ... Episode 8