We Could Be Heroes

Last night NBC threw two hours of season finale action at us. While this post is going to be mostly about the Heroes Volume Four finale, I need to mention how great Chuck was last night. It was a fantastic ending to an awesome season. If this is, in fact, the last we see of the CIA/Buy More crew, I will be sad but pleased with what they gave us.

Unlike Chuck, which has been getting better and better over the past two years, Heroes has been all over the place. Season One was one of, if not the best first season in my memory. After that the show started on a downslide, which might have been caused by the writers’ strike during the second season. Volume Three started this fall and it was more of the same mediocrity. Now for me, volume four was looking like a step in the right direction, but last night’s finale threw me through another loop.

I have always been the guy who says that, in a serialized action show like this, you need to kill people off at times to keep the viewer’s attention. This is something Heroes wasn’t willing to do. Sure they got rid more minor characters like D.L., Isaac and Linderman, but when they kill off Nikki only to bring her back as Tracy, or they kill Nathan at the end of season two only to have him be healed by Claire’s blood it just makes me angry.

So when spoilers for this volume’s finale said that a major character would die, I didn’t think they were going to cop out like they did. -SPOILER ALERT- So Peter and Nathan go in to attack Sylar (which they don’t let Claire or the audience see, bootleg) and surprise surprise, the killer with multiple lethal powers kills the dude that can fly around. After Nathan’s throat is slit by Sylar, and Peter has mimicked Sylar’s shape shifting power, Peter shifts into the form of the President and stabs Sylar with a tranquilizer. Now Peter, Claire, Noah, Angela and Parkman are left with a dead Nathan and a knocked out Sylar. As a political move, and so that Angela doesn’t lose her son, Parkman gives Sylar’s body all of Nathan’s memories and removes anything to do with Gabriel Gray/Sylar.

So there wasn’t really a death of a main character. Sure the real Nathan is dead, but he’s still around in Sylar. And I guess the essence of Sylar won’t be around, but the preview of volume five shows that the new Nathan starts to show Gabriel’s original power of knowing how things work. So we will probably end up with having a half Nathan, half Sylar dude wondering around in the near future. That's not really killing anyone off.

And to top things off, at the very end of the volume five preview we see Tracy again. After shattering herself into a million pieces a while ago she is now back and has some sort of water manipulation power like Alex Mack. Unless this is not Tracy, and is in fact the third triplet, it is more proof that they can’t kill anyone off.