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

John from Cincinnati is ... Neo in the Matrix!

All right, as a final post (I think) about John from Cincinnati, I thought I'd offer a little more than how beautifully incomprehensible the series is/was...

Here's my best guess about what is going (I just thought of this about 10 minutes ago, and for all I know, it's been realized by other viewers, already) ... but -

I think all of John from Cincinnati - everything that we're seeing in Imperial Beach - is taking place in a virtual, Matrix-like world.

That's why John (and in the last episode, John and Shaun) have nothing to say about where they were when they were gone from IB.

That's how John was able to bring Shaun back from the dead or near-dead - the player outside the virtual world made that happen. Same with the levitation, etc - all the things that seem unreal to us are games the game-player is playing in his/her control of the virtual world.

Possibly the Howard Hesseman character - the chemist - is the creator, designer, or just player of this game - and that's why Mitch went to him. Or maybe it's Linc. Or - hey - could be Dwayne with his computers.

In any case, it would explain why so much of John's powers are on screens, why Linc gave the rant about the Internet, etc... (It might also explain the dead-guy in the motel.)

I give this theory about a two-percent chance of being right (I read yesterday in the New York Times that some philosophy dudes think there's a 20-percent chance that all of us are in a virtual reality sim - I have no idea how one could come up with any percentage of probability for this.)

So, there you have it - have at it...

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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