Heroes Reborn 1.6: Time, Space, Video Game

I missed Heroes last week - the memory guy got to me and made me forget to watch it.  No, I just got caught up in too many other things, but that's ok, because Heroes is best watched between the cracks, in time stolen from other things, which makes you a kid reading comic books when you're supposed to be doing homework.

Or playing video games.  Both of which - comic books and video games - are the heart and soul and brain of the Heroes saga.  They figure especially vividly in Heroes Reborn, and especially so in episode 1.6, on old-fashioned 2015 television this past Thursday in what was one superb episode, easily the best of the season so far, and setting us up for much more.

The hour was chocked full of great little narratives and scenes - Tommy and Emily teleporting to Paris, and doing so much better than the Eiffel Tower (including a gem of a scene at the Bouquinistes by the Seine, where Emily shows Tommy an Isaac Mendez comic book), Malina saving Luke from drowning by telekinetically pulling him out of the water, and lots of good action with Noah and company in enemy Renautus headquarters - but the best was Katana Girl, and her successful mission to rescue her father, who, as we had to know all along, is Hiro Nakamura.

The quest had its humorous moments, with Ren's laptop running out of battery power at a crucial time, but at its core was deadly serious, with Miko needing to sacrifice her life to free Hiro.  It turns out that she was maybe not really alive, a computer virus living in both virtual and real reality, but that doesn't matter, because she's such an appealing character.  So I'm betting that notwithstanding what Miko/Katana was told, we'll see her again, alive and well and even better than before, in some seamless interface of the real and digital realms, as befits an ultimate video game.

Because, after all, with Hiro and his ability to change the past now unbound, anything is suddenly possible once again in this story.  Hiro is of course wary of changing anything in the past - and with good reason - because that can undo the very basis of the present - but there's a lot in the present that can risk undoing, including not only what apparently happened to Claire but now Miko.

The deft mix of comic book, video game - far better than a LARP - and this reborn series continues.

Note: apropos video game magic, here's a debate I once had with an anti-videogame crusader ...


See also Heroes Reborn: Good to Be Back ... Heroes Reborn 1.3: Carly Fiorina meets Steve Jobs ... Heroes Reborn 1.4: GPS RIP

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

 
no heroes, but pretty strange

Heroes 3: The Lore of the Comic Book Store

Second part of the eclipse on Heroes tonight, but more time was spent inside a comic story - with Seth Green, Prop. - and that's fine with me.

I think the first time a comic book store figured so meta-centrally in a science fiction-fantasy story was in M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable. In fact, I was in that comic book store, giving Night a Nebula award for his first movie, The Sixth Sense, back in 2000 - see the photo to the right. (A comic book store also figured in "The Superhero in the Alley," a superb episode in February 2006 from the first season of Bones, which I just saw other night - and which, given the timing and for all I know, might well have inspired some of Heroes.)

I already had a good feeling about comic book stores. In the Bronx, where I grew up, they were usually combined with candy stores and soda fountains - food for palate and well as thought.

Hiro is able to see what's going on, even with his little boy mentality, in Seth Green's comic book store, because it has copies of 9th Wonder, which have all of Isaac's drawings and stories.
I'm not sure if he saw the most important part - I think - of what happened tonight. Which is Sylar, who was really beginning to become likable, is shaken up by almost being killed by HRG, and may be bad again. In fact, he may have killed Elle at the end ... but I still come from the school that, if a person isn't blown to smithereens, right in front of your eyes on a show like Heroes, he or she may well still be alive. Come to think of it, didn't Nathan and Peter survive the atomic explosion? Well, I guess that wasn't right in front of our eyes.

Heroes continue as the most thoughtful, interesting season so far. And now that the sun is back out, we'll see more next week.

See also 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 ... Hiro's Time Traveling Closure

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