What I’m Watching: Heroes

Heroes: Season 4, Episode 8 “Once Upon A Time in Texas” (F)

This episode is simply unbelievable, and not in a good way. Since this show has run out of ideas, they’re literally recycling old plotlines by actually playing them out again. Instead of highlighting anything related to the actual present, the show takes two characters that are generally not crucial to the ongoing storyline and transplants them into the past to take a look at what this show used to look like. There’s nothing added by taking another look at the heroes and where they were three months ago, and the attempts to try to fabricate something new out o fall the old material feels horribly forced. It’s welcome to see Charlie again, but seriously, what’s the point? Setting the whole show in the past is pretty damn random, and that even truer when characters like Isaac and Eden resurface momentarily. I, for one, forgot all about them, and while at least the sight of Eden reminded me that this show used to not be that bad, Isaac’s presence contradicted that, and on top of everything, their appearances didn’t add anything. Revisiting the show as it was three years ago paints a really bad picture of it and doesn’t do justice to the somewhat valid status of the show’s first season. The biggest change is Noah, who at that point in the series was still the mysterious HRG. No one cares that he was a drama geek, and his bonding with Claire doesn’t fit in with their relationship in the past. Just because they’re growing closer in the present doesn’t mean that they had this meaningful chat way back when. Remarkably, Noah’s dumbest line doesn’t come when he’s sharing a scene with Claire, but with the remark, “I’m Haitianing you.” At that point, I thought that this episode couldn’t get any stupider, but then there was another shot of the idiotic hero running around with a wheelbarrow and a Western showdown to boot. The fact that Sylar is more villainous in the past doesn’t matter because it’s not the same Sylar who’s not quite evil in the present. Don’t worry, Hiro, the time-space continuum is more messed up and unfixable than you could ever imagine.