Heroes - Season 3

Heroes' third season was two stories in one, the first of which was completely awful and the second of which was decent at times but still pretty bad. It's really sad how far the show has fallen. The first season was pretty darn good. The characters were interesting and sympathetic for the most part, and it felt like what might happen if a bunch of people suddenly had crazy powers. By now though, almost every single character is irritating. The two Asian dudes are still kinda funny, and the best moment of the season occurred when they encountered Seth Green and Breckin Meyer as a couple of comic geeks who recognized them from the Isaac's books. Even they are suffering under the weight of the show's increasingly terrible writing, though. No character can be rooted for when their motivations and ambitions are constantly changing for no reason to suit whatever lame purpose the plot currently requires, as the series slowly descends into the worst kind of crap that plagues the comic industry they were supposed to be avoiding.

I don't care if I spoil anything that happened months ago, so I'll just give an example of how stupid these characters are. Peter comes from a future where Nathan had revealed the existence of humans with powers to the world, and things weren't going so well. Instead of warning Nathan of the consequences at some point before he does so, he decided his best course of action is to SHOOT HIM IN THE CHEST DURING THE PRESS CONFERENCE. I don't even remember how Nathan managed to survive, but it's no surprise he did when nobody ever dies. This is a pretty egregious example, but pretty much every significant decision anyone makes during the third volume has some gigantic problem with it that anyone with a brain could have avoided. The fourth volume is a little better, with some of the more all-powerful characters' powers being limited a bit to reel it in and some decent revelatory episodes here and there. It's still brought down by almost everyone having a severe case of either mental retardation or schizophrenia, and the complete refusal by the writers to really kill or remove any characters unless they were introduced fairly recently. The only reason I still watch is some idiotic notion against not finishing something I've started, so I can only hope the next season is either magically good again or terrible enough to finally get this thing canceled, though with the way they set it up, only the latter seems plausible.