Heroes Reborn Finale: I'm Ready Already for Another Immersion

Heroes Reborn ended is first season this week on NBC.  It's likely to be its final season - at least on NBC, which has not renewed for a second second.  But I'd bet it's not the last we'll see of Tim Kring's unique and still appealing creation.

As I've said throughout this season, it's been uneven, but that includes times and ways in which I liked this season even better than a lot of the original, hallowed Heroes.   The pace was often fast to the point of being frenetic - which is a plus in my book - and the integration of virtual and real with the Katana Girl story was excellent.

So was the integration of surviving characters from the original series.  That includes, most prominently, HRG Mr. Bennett, Claire's father and grandfather of her twin children.  He left in a noble way, in a sequence that plumbed the possibilities of time travel in a satisfying way.

Time travel, as many of you may know, is one of my passions - as a viewer, reader, and author of science fiction.   I find it irritating and unacceptable when it's not done right - meaning, usually, that lip service is paid to the paradoxes that time travel engenders, rather than seriously working the sometimes almost unimaginable complexities into the story.

The original Heroes did a pretty good job at this.  Heroes Reborn did it even better.   At the end, Nathan is about as adept as you can be in pulling the strings of timelines in motion, and navigating them to achieve the desired result.   This includes the daring move of working with a slightly earlier or later version of yourself - depending upon whose point of view you take - rather than worrying or claiming that running into yourself will blow-up all reality.

The special effects were great, which gets us back again to the virtual reality part of this story.  When Katana tells Ren, intra-virtual-world, that she has a feeling they'll meet again, I was glad to hear this. The ending in our world, with pointer to Nathan and Malina's father, calls out for a continuing story.

Heroes Unbound may not be everyone's cup of tea.  But's it's certainly mine, and I'll be ready in any time for another another sip and another immersion.

See also Heroes Reborn: Good to Be Back ... Heroes Reborn 1.3: Carly Fiorina meets Steve Jobs ... Heroes Reborn 1.4: GPS RIP ... Heroes Reborn 1.6: Space, Time, Videogame ... Heroes Reborn 1.7: Time Travel and Twins ... Heroes Reborn 1.8: Answers and Questions ... Heroes Reborn 1.9: The Memory Man ... Heroes Reborn 1.12: Penultimate

And 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 ... 4.18: Penultimate  ... Heroes Forever

And 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

#SFWApro



                     time travel on a train

Touch: Fractals, Heroes, and 24

Touch joins Awake as one of the most intelligent shows on television - with heart and soul as well as intellect - refreshing, very complex, provocative, and altogether welcome.

Two great forces of popular culture come to bear in Touch - Kiefer Sutherland, who looks and sounds almost exactly the same as 24's Jack Bauer on Touch, and creator Tim Kring, who brought us Heroes.

Kiefer plays Martin Bohm, father of 10-year old Jake, who's mute and diagnosed as autistic, but is much much more.   Jake does have an incredible memory - like the classic idiot savant - but he also can see, intuit, understand the fractal nature of the universe, or the interconnected patterns of everything around us.  This part of the story - fractals - is science not science fiction.  Why, for example, do leafs and bird wings have the same patterns, when they have no evolutionary connection?   The universe, it seems, offers up a given series of templates - which harken, in a sense, to Plato's ideal forms.

But Jake sees much more than this, and here is where the wonder and amazement of science fiction come in.  Not only is Jake sympatico with fractals, but with quantum mechanics, and the part of it that compresses past, present, and future into an omnipresent now.   In plain English, Jake not only sees the interconnections, but where they can lead.   His chosen job is to get silent word out about bad futures to his father, so Martin can do something to avert them.

The pilot has two distinct stories, both connected via Martin, otherwise distinct from each other.  One concerns a smart phone that someone loses at the airport, which Martin gets his hands on, but before he can return to the owner,  gets called away to help get Jake down from a steep construction site on which he has climbed.  Good thing, too, because that phone set loose in the world eventually leads to stopping a suicide bomber, and making a singer famous.   The other plot concerns a firefighter who almost saved Jake's mother's (Martin's wife's) life on 9/11, and has felt guilty about that ever since.  Jake's interventions lead to a school bus of kids saved and the firefighter reclaiming his sense of self-worth.  Both of these happy endings follow a long series of apparently unrelated events, and the fun  is in seeing how these events all tie into one another - see, that is, what Jake already knows.

Meanwhile, Martin learns more of what's happening in Jake's head from Arthur Teller (Danny Glover), a sage old guy in the Bronx.   With Martin now realizing at least part of what Jake is up to do, the stage is set for some wild, complicated stories in which Martin tries to pick up on Jake's leads to shape the future.

Heroes meets 24?   That's just the past, Touch is the future, and I'm looking forward to more (including that 24 movie which is somewhere still to be made).

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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

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Heroes Forever

A beautiful Heroes finale tonight - definitely of this, the fourth season, maybe of the entire series, though I hope not.   This was written by series creator Tim Kring.  It tied up some powerful lose ends, and brought into being some revolutionizing new ones.

Among the highlights -

1. Hiro finds Charlie.  The actress, Jayma Mays, is on Glee now, but Hiro finds her in his hospital - very old, and at the end of her life.  Samuel sent her back to 1944.   She never stopped thinking about Hiro.  He can fix this - he can go back to 1944 (the operation restored his powers), and take her back with him to the present, where they can live together, happily ever after.  But Charlie's grand daughter comes into her room.   Charlie has led a full and happy life.  If Hiro were to go back to 1944 and "save" her, what would happen to her family, to her granddaughter?  They would cease to exist.  In a good ending to this little time travel nugget, Hiro understands that he has to let the story of Charlie and him end right there, in this hospital.

2.  Hiro and Ando in any case are urgently needed in New York City, where Doyle, doing Samuel's bidding, is getting Emma the cellist to play her music.  This is attracting droves of people to Central Park.  Samuel's plan is to kill them, to demonstrate his power.   But all kinds of heroes are converging on the park, to do what they can to stop him.

3.  This includes Peter and Sylar, freed last week by Peter from Matt's mental prison, and swearing that he's changed, he's a hero now.   And he indeed does his part, and frees Emma from Doyle's puppetry.

4.  Noah and Claire were buried in a carnival van deep in the ground by Samuel last week.  But Lauren figures out how to save them - she enlists Tracy, who turns to water, seeps under the ground, and provides a liquid route to escape.

5.  Samuel's power comes from the power of heroes around him.   As they're told the truth about him, they all leave.   Meanwhile, Hiro teleports all the non-heroes to safety.   Deprived of his powers, Samuel is finished.

And now the kicker.   Claire, who has been struggling with whether to live a lie, denying her powers, for the entire series, decides a change is due.   Contrary to what Noah so desperately wants for her, Claire decides to go public.  With most of the heroes on hand and watching in amazement, she invites the cameras of the assembled media to watch her, as she climbs up high, jumps to what should be her death on the ground, then stands and cleans herself off.

It's a wonderful ending.   If the series is renewed, we'll have a whole new story next year, of at least one and maybe more heroes publicly known.  If the series is not renewed, there will now always be a good basis for a comeback series, five, ten, even fifteen years from now.

Whatever happens, I predict we will in one way or another be seeing more Heroes.


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 ... 4.18: Penultimate

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