I Need A Hero...

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I had other ideas today for a blog post, but having read noisms earlier post about the series Heroes (which debuted on British TV last night with an impressive 4.3m viewers) I felt like I had to respond.

I have to say, that based on the hype and things I had read about Heroes I had a feeling that I would like it, and I think that noisms could like it too if he had given it more than five minutes - in that time I think only a fraction of the characters had been introduced, how can you get a feel for an ensemble show in five minutes? Granted, the opening of Lost hooked you with the aftermath of the plane crash on the beach, but from the outset we're shown hints that Heroes has a much greater ambition, a cast split all across the world. To say "I don't like this" based on the first character one meets is a little extreme (perhaps noisms just really wanted to watch How To Look Good Naked, and this gives him a reason if pressed for one later).

Despite the first person we meet going on about the magnificence of cockroaches (noisms can pick it apart like a pedant if he wants, but I think the sense was supposed to be "cockroaches are hard bastards"), I'd heard about some other things in the show that kept me watching. Anyway, maybe a university professor of genetics wouldn't say this, but if we're watching this show are we expecting a documentary? Are we expecting to watch a sci-fi/fantasy show and see total realism? Forget that, do we expect to watch any television fiction and expect everything to be in accord with our conception of reality?

I'm watching Heroes because I've been told that there is a good story developing over the series, and I thought that the characters introduced last night were really varied; they were all at different stages in their lives with different dreams and reactions to their manifesting powers - the geek who can't get enough, the cheerleader who doesn't want anyone to know, the desperate mother who doesn't understand what is happening to her - this is not just teenagers coping at some fictional high school with the fact that they are mutants.

I put it to you, noisms, that you didn't give Heroes a real chance, and I put it to you ladies and gentlemen of the jury that while his writing about slugs and evolution has merit, his introduction to the topic was based on a prejudice against genre television in general.

Saying that, if Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit.

You've Got to Search for the Hero....

Ok, I admit it. I watched the first five minutes of Heroes last night. But there's still hope. Before it was too late, I realised it was a load of old cobblers and I'd be wasting two hours of my life, and I turned over to watch How to Look Good Naked instead.

What is it about visual sci-fi/fantasy that makes me want to claw out my own eyes? Is it the bad acting? The clunking scripts? The ridiculous stereotypes? The moralising? The idiotic pseudoscience? Yes, it is all of those things, but mostly it's just because I love the genre and what it can do, and I hate to see it brought down by naff things like Heroes.

Anyway. In last night's Heroes, one of the main characters, a professor, made a little speech about cockroaches, in which he outlined the idea that cockroaches are the 'pinnacle of evolution', not humans - because, as we all know, they can live off the back of a postage stamp for ten years and can survive without a head, and other cool stuff like that.

The idea that a university professor - of, apparently, biology, indeed - should spout such drivel is laughable (one of the reasons I switched channels) but it ties neatly in with a Ricky Gervais podcast I was recently re-listening to, in which Ricky made the interesting statement to Karl that "slugs are as evolved as you".

One of the things that people find hardest to understand when it comes to evolution is that everything alive today is as highly evolved as everything else. When it comes to life on earth there is no pinnacle; all species are exactly as 'developed' as they need to be, whether cockroaches, slugs or humans. We've all done what we had to do - we haven't died out yet.

The operative word is 'yet', of course.

Anyway, just think about this next time you step on one of these on a rainy day: