Every previous episode was dragged down by molasseses pacing, unsympathetic characters, wooden acting, and virtually none of the titular subject; heroes. Hell, it took like two episodes to see anything out of the ordinary happen, and then the next episode the characters all deny that anything took place. The audience is left betrayed as the character who can fly denies his ability to his brother, the girl who can heal very quickly denies saving a man from a burning train, and the man who can travel through time has his power treated as an idle daydream. PHOOEY.

This episode laid it all out though. Hiro, the Japanese time traveler, appears from the future to let the dopey young doctor character, Peter, know where to go to get the plot rolling. Peter?s brother, Nathan, actually uses his power of flight to escape from men from an unknown organization trying to steal his brain. The psychic druggie paints the future, and finally shows someone who knows what his pictures mean. Without revealing too much, it was much more exciting, and actually had people doing things in it! Plots progressed! People talked to each other about meaningful things instead of hiding them! It?s a goddamn miracle.

CONCEPT: 4/5 - I enjoy the concept.

INNOVATION: 3/5 - Superheroes are nothing new, but a prime time TV show with Heroes treated with respect? Well, it?s not that creative, but it?s been a long time coming.

SATISFACTION: 4/5 - This episode was particularly satisfying, lots of action and some actual foreshadowing that didn?t make me go AW, COME ON.

EXECUTION: 3/5 -Even the cinematography seemed a bit better this go around, and the special effects aren?t bad. But I expect better from a high profile show. Maybe it?s not high profile yet. All I can hope for is better effects than Buffy I suppose.

FUN FACTOR: 4/5 - Fwoosh! Zooo! I?m a Superhero!

OVERALL: 8/10 - Not disappointing like I was made to believe I would always be with this show.

How does "Heroes" compare to comics? Let's take a look at the main characters:

_ Claire Bennet (played by Hayden Panettiere): A high-school cheerleader from Odessa, Texas, Claire can heal from any injury. Not that she likes it; being a 16-year-old girl, the last thing she wants is to be different.

In the comics: Claire is usually described as "indestructible" or "invincible," but she isn't invulnerable like Superman. Actually, her power is closer to Wolverine's healing factor.

_ Isaac Mendez (Santiago Cabrera): New York artist Isaac can paint the future _ but only when he's high on heroin. How sucky is that for a power? And his paintings (actually created by comic-book artist Tim Sale) predict a deadly future that it's hoped our "Heroes" can prevent ... if anyone will take the ravings of a junkie seriously.

In the comics: Larry Trask (X-Men) and Madame Web (Spider-Man), among others, can see the future in bits and pieces.

_ Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka): An office drone from Osaka, Japan, Hiro (yes, pronounced "hero") is a comic-book-reading and Star Trek-quoting geek who instantly embraces his powers _ and intuitively understands the comic-book science behind them. (At last: Being a nerd pays off!) Hiro can manipulate the time/space continuum, which means that he can, among other things, freeze time and teleport through both time and space. Added bonus for comic-book fans: Hiro discovers a comic book (by "Isaac Mendez," but probably also by Sale) that shows his future adventures _ and which keeps changing as Hiro changes his present.

In the comics: Time travel has long been a staple in the superhero set, from Superman to the Legion of Super-Heroes at DC Comics, and teleporters are fairly common, too, like X-Men's Nightcrawler and Vanisher.

_ Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg): A Los Angeles policeman who can read minds, Parkman gets in trouble for knowing a little too much about various crimes.

In the comics: Telepaths are thick on the ground, including Professor Xavier (X-Men), Martian Manhunter (Justice League) and Saturn Girl (Legion of Super-Heroes).

_ Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar): A selfish politician, Petrelli can apparently fly but wants to keep it buried to win his election.

In the comics: A list of flyers would fill the column, but we'll mention Superman, Hawkman and Green Lantern of the Justice League and Angel and Storm of the X-Men, since they've appeared in movies or cartoons.

_ Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia): Nathan's brother, who appears to have the power to ape other people's powers when in proximity to them.

In the comics: Mimic and Rogue of the X-Men, Amazo (Justice League villain), Super-Adaptoid (Avengers villain).

_ Niki Sanders (Ali Larter): A single mom who puts her kid through private school by stripping on the Internet and borrowing from the wrong people, Niki seems to have a murderous doppelganger in the mirror who replaces her in times of danger, with fatal results for the bad guys. How this works exactly _ and whether Niki and her secret sharer are one person or two _ is unclear.

In the comics: In DC's "Rose & Thorn," gentle Rose Forrest had a split personality, becoming the violent Thorn in times of stress. DC's Enchantress had an almost identical schizophrenia. And speaking of people you don't want to see angry, how about the incredible Hulk?

"We're definitely talking about it," Kring told the comic book Web site Pulse (www.comicon.com/pulse). "We're surrounded by lots of comic-book guys, between Tim Sale, Michael Turner, Jeph and Jim Lee. I can't imagine we won't be able to generate some 'real' comic book out of this. It seems not only inevitable, but obligatory that we do it."

Watched the latest episode of Heroes on Monday. Wow? This show just keeps getting better and better!

I?ll try to get you up to date without too much spoilers (still, refrain from reading if you?d preferred to be surprised).

This week the heroes begins to cross paths. Flyboy Peter Petrelli suspects that he isn?t really flyboy at all, but what comic book fans affectionately call ?the leech? - I?ll leave it up to you to think about what that means.

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Source: Lite Reviews

After several episodes of mostly singular character development, NBC's "Heroes" is taking the next step in further the super drama - by mixing and matching the characters in suprising ways. Mohinder Suresh meets Peter Petrelli again (they shared a cab in the first episode, but that first meeting seemed easily forgotten), with Peter suggesting to genecist Mohinder he might be able to mimic the powers of others. Mohinder had a rather forgetful meeting earlier with Peter's politician brother Nathan, who has his security detail brashly escort Mohinder out of his sight. Peter tries to introduce the doubting Mohinder to the heroin-strung precog artist Issac Mendez, but Issac is too busy painting-by-trance to notice the knock on the door. On the train ride back, time freezes and Peter is confronted by Hiro - but not the bumbling guy winning off of card tables in Vegas - but a dreary post-apocalyptic survivor who has a message for Peter.

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The first two episodes of NBC's new series, Heroes, left me with mixed feelings. It's one of those new, ultra-hip dramas that tries soooooo hard to ape Lost with the slow, drawn-out mystery that I wanted to reach through my television and slap the showrunner around a little. Okay, a lot. Two full episodes, and all we'd had were character intros. Sheesh.

The end of episode 2, "Don't Look Back," gave me a bit of hope with a cool tease of a nuclear explosion going off in future New York. Okay, now we know at least part of the plot. And episode 3, "One Giant Leap," ended with the killer (literally) cliffhanger of cheeleader Claire waking up on an autopsy table with her chest cut open. Ouch! Last night's episode, "Collision," featured a number of the proto-heroes crossing paths (what is it about Las Vegas, anyway?) and the series finally starting to generate some forward momentum. I have one suggestion for the show runners--quit trying to follow the Lost playbook. "Collision" is thus far the episode that stands out the most simply because it deviates more from that draw-things-out mentality (or, in comics terms, the much-derided Marvel strategy of "decompressed storytelling). With more episodes like "Collision," I'll definitely stick around to see what happens next.

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One good sign for Heroes' future - with each episode, the number of people in my living room watching it grows by one. If this is happening elsewhere, the ratings should be really nice for the climax during the November Sweeps.

TV Guide will be featuring the cast of Heroes in their October 19th issue. The mark of a good show is when it can improve on its lead-in, and Heroes has done it big-time.

Claire's predicament is proof that in the Heroes-verse, superpowers are based on cerebral activity. Claire was fortunate that her power of regeneration has a standby mode if her brain is temporarily disabled through severe injury. Hmm, looking at where she was stabbed, I'm wondering if her medulla oblongata had been severed. With her brain unable to connect to the rest of the body, she entered a state of apparent death. When the spike was removed, the brain was able to re-fuse the medulla and initiate revival.

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• Why did the ''previously on Heroes'' voiceover paint the show as a tale of ''five strangers across the globe'' and then go on to describe seven folks and their superpowers?


• How come Niki's shovel was so glisteningly silver, even after she'd buried the baddies' bodies in the desert?


• Anyone else wondering about the similarities in the names of Heroes' murderous morpher Sylar and Battlestar Galactica's villainous Cylons?


• Does drug-addicted artist Isaac also have the power to regenerate? When I watched an advanced screener of the pilot episode, it appeared he'd cut off his own hand with a saw, but since then, he's been a two-fisted predictor of the future. Did NBC change that part of the pilot when it aired, or is there some other explanation for his miraculous recovery that I didn't pick up on?


• After seeing Hiro's pal, Ando (James Kyson Lee), checking out the pervy action at LasVegasNiki.com, did anyone else go to the site? (Hint: It's not what you'd expect!)


• And finally, when Claire woke up to find that someone was midway through an autopsy on her own freakin' body (GAH!), do you think it was the local medical examiner's table, or perhaps the laboratory of her eeeeevil daddy (Horned Rim Glasses)?


Source: popwatch

So over the summer, I saw the screener of the Heroes pilot and didn't think much of it. The original script for the pilot had been a compact version of what got turned into the first and second episodes, but as we all now know, the second episode had references to New York City being hit with a nuclear bomb, and NBC chickened out and chopped it up into two episodes, hearing ('m told) a backlash for coming out swinging with a terrorist subplot right in the premiere. Lame, right?

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The new show Hero?s on NBC? is terrible. I am not happy about it, I don?t think alot of people who were excited about the idea of a comic super hero television show wanted it to be this.

I keep trying to like it, but don?t believe the ads they pump out every week during prime time about being a great number one hit TV show, it really is terrible. Now the idea for the show, great, but of course the execution is poor. In specific, the acting is just? bleh which is probably 50% the actors fault and the other half the writing. A great concept still needs some decent dialogue to keep people strung along between the special effects. I heard on some pod cast that it?s all about shock value, and really that?s all it is, just stringing the audience out for as long as possible, despite the many moments in-between that make you want to cringe.

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Conclusion:
The end of the episode at least starts to tie the semblance of a television-worthy plot together. I hope they do a better job with the character development next week, and I think the psychic cop?s character has the potential of bringing them all together once Hiro can bust him out of prison. Assuming that this snag remedies itself in the first few scenes of next week?s episode, it appears the Fly and his brother may be sharing the ?central character to the plot? role with the psychic cop (nickname forthcoming).

Addendum (Gripe one):
Somehow the writers forgot that cheerleaders don?t practice on the football field, and most coaches frown upon non-athletes walking through practice. If you?re going to have a high school storyline, Dawson?s Creek is not the model to use and neither is Saved by the Bell. I can only assume that whoever scripted this must have dreamed of being an athlete because they certainly didn?t get it right. And fyi, the cheerleaders in high school generally wear their uniforms on days of football, basketball games, key wrestling matches, or pep rallies, not for practice.

If Heroes is going to keep going with this high school storyline, and I?m not saying they should or should not, I suggest the writers hire the varsity club president of some local high school to help consult with them during his or her offseason or get him or her to make a recommendation of someone who can make the show's portrayal of high school a little more believable. The last thing we need on tv is another Laguna Beach, since that's real life. I saw that Heroes is produced by ?Tailwind productions," which uses a pole vaulter for their icon, which is great. On the assumption that this company must have some roots in track & field, then I'm going to assume further that someone connected to the show participated in *varsity* athletics at the high school or college level, and they must be insulted by this misleading portrayal of high school life/sports.

Other observations: I must have seen three or four x-men commercials. Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one? Aren?t they trying to distinguish Heroes from X-Men?