There are few characters from the 1980′s more iconic and beloved than Ferris Bueller. The movie is one of those rare gems of cinema that can delight audiences born well before and long after it was introduced. For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard people rumor, hope and ask for a sequel to the film. I’ve never thought a sequel was a particularly good idea–some kinds of lightning, you can’t bottle twice.

But Honda’s new CRV commercial is a real treat, for the most part, recreating classic moments from the original film in a nostalgic, yet still “in” on the joke sort of way. I have only one complaint: that Ferris is driving a CR-V sport utility vehicle. Really, Honda, you have a great new car that Ferris might actually be seen in: the CR-Z. That one little change would have made this commercial just about perfect.

First, the impression: The Cape has all the makings of a great superhero show, but like a new package of Legos, those pieces have been poured onto the floor in a big, incomprehensible mess. Let me explain.

Let’s start with a discussion of what was wrong (I prefer to end on a positive note, so bear with me,) which can be summed up in a word: Pacing. The show’s pace was all wrong, racing along at breakneck speeds as it tried to get Vince Faraday into his outfit quickly–too quickly. In the space of about twenty minutes we went from a basic character introduction to a man in an outfit, with only snippits in the way of explanation. Sure, we get the gist–Vince is a good cop, most of the rest are scumbags, and then bam-his partner, who’s barely introduced at all, becomes his betrayer.

Faraday’s introduction to the carnival was interesting but raced by too quickly, his “training” barely existing at all. The characters who make up the circus and its various abilities had too little screen time, with virtually no motivation to actually help Vince, much less teach him the secrets of their trade. The security card was nice, sure, but in reality it would have been deactivated before the frame job even happened, useless for a bank robbery, much less several, but we can chalk that up to “suspension of disbelief” and move along.

Next is Vince’s meeting with Orwell. What the hell happened here? First time we see her she’s snapping pictures of Vince, next moment he knocks her down and gets her in a headlock, and before we know what’s happened she’s driven him to her house. What.The.Hell? What should have been something that examined both characters was simply plowed through, like a teenager so desperate to get to the goodies in his prom date’s dress that he doesn’t bother to ask if she even wants to show him. And why, apparently out on a spying and picture taking “mission,” did she have a bunch of flyers clearly identifying herself as Orwell, yet she spends the rest of the episode telling Vince that she can’t let anyone know who she is? If you want to remain anonymous, it’s probably best not to carry clearly identifying paraphernalia while spying on those from whom you wish to remain a secret.

I felt that the editing was a little baffling at times in both halves of the episode, a fact which I think is a little strange given that it seems all this footage was filmed at least 6 months ago (which is about when the trailer debuted, if I recall, though it may have been longer than that.) Beyond just the speed of the thing, many scenes and shots were just incredibly abrupt, immediately cutting away from what could have been more interesting moments. It wasn’t terrible, to be sure, but all the way through I felt like we were being rushed and hurried to some big destination–that we never did end up reaching.

There were some other very glaring oddities as well. For example, why, in the restaurant where the poisoning guy was trying to kill the secretary of prisons (is that even a real position?) was the killer the only one working in the kitchen? Here you had this giant kitchen in a fully loaded restaurant, yet nobody was cooking anything? There were no additional chefs? No waiters coming in and out? No food all over the place, no sign that anybody’d done anything at all? Seriously–somebody needs to talk to the set dresser. Another strange thing was with Vince finding that old “not the cape” cape and starting to dick around with it arbitrarily. OK…why? Sure, we saw him read the comic with his son, but that doesn’t explain why he’d have given that thing a second look, much less played with it so much. Last but not least, so Vince kick’s the poisoner’s ass and ties him up–in the kitchen of a restaurant apparently owned by Chess. OK, and? What’s to stop Chess from simply untying the thug and putting him back to work? Nothing, that’s what. Chess owns the police (and apparently a restaurant, but no security detail to check out the skirmish in the kitchen, that he does on his own, mysteriously.)

The big problem I see is simply this: the focus appears to be on plot over character, which is simply backwards. If the audience doesn’t know the characters well enough to care about their well being and their situation, the plot doesn’t really matter. Don’t get me wrong, I love plot, and rue the show that eschews it entirely in favor of character development (see Lost, which had 95% character development and 5% plot; it irritated me to no end, but I kept watching because they managed to make me care about some of the characters,) but you do need to have some. There are questions to be asked and relationships to be examined, and it’s precisely these that make any plot worth watching at all.

Moving on to what was good: I like the Cape’s costume design, and his (admittedly tenuous) grounding in somewhat real world “stuff.” I like that he has no super powers, and that his connection to “regular” human stuff is his son and his wife. Right there we have the basic ingredients for some very poignant moments, but there are layers that need to be built up first in order to make that happen. Simply knowing they’re his wife and son isn’t enough to get us caring–everyone has people they care about, the question is, “why should the audience care?”

The other elements I see as having promise are some of the outlandish villains, with the exception of Chess. A billionaire CEO on a power trip can be a great villain (witness Lex Luthor as portrayed by John Shea–a much better actor, I’ll add, than the one hired for Chess) without the need for an outlandish outfit or silly contact lenses. It’s fine for him to find those folks and hire them directly, there are plenty of character quirks you could exploit to make his desire to use them seem plausible, but there’s virtually no reason why he’d dress himself up, and certainly no reason why he’d wear those cheesy contact lenses while alone, in his home, without the rest of the outfit.

How I wish it would have unfolded is pretty simple: first, spend the first hour on character. Show us Vince Faraday being a good cop, doing the right thing. Show him taking down bad cops. Hell, maybe even show him working with Orwell via her cryptic computer messages and taking down some actual corrupt cops. Show Vince and his family at play, sharing good times. The comic book reading with Tripp was the best part of the episode–yet unfortunately one of the shortest. Don’t dress him up yet–before we can care about the Cape, we have to care about Vince Faraday. It can’t work any other way. Let hour one resolve in Vince being betrayed and presumed dead. End it in a scene of grief and despair.

For hour two let’s talk new connections and training. Meet the circus freaks, establish something meaningful. Vince and Max should have a father/son sort of relationship, with Max seeing in Vince some potential that stirs something in himself, ideas about heroism and doing great things. There’s a little of that hinted at in the second half now, but it’s too slim. Realistically the entire second half should have been devoted to his training in various ways and forging relationships with some of the circus characters, only to finally debut as the cape in the last 10 minutes, but still not coming face to face with Chess. The direct encounters between Chess and Vince were easily the worst parts of both episodes. These characters simply should not have met face to face, much less in battle, by this point.

So, my advice in summary is simply this: slow down, slow down, slow down. The show is trying to cram far too much into far too little time, and the whole endeavor suffers as a result. Put character first, put plot a close second, and if you can get any of them, hire some of the writers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Pushing Daisies or the first season of Heroes (but not the later seasons, please.) Some names to consider include Jane Espenson, Brian Fuller, David Fury, Tim Minear, Stephen DeKnight, among a few others I can think of off the top of my head.

All in all The Cape has a worthy premise and all the ingredients to make for powerful superhero drama, but it’s not quite there yet. I’m holding out hope for things to improve, but only time will tell. Now back to work!

It’s a shame, really. I do love the cast and characters (except Kate–I hate Kate for being a stereotypically weakfemale lead, always making stupid decisions that seem to illustrate that “if she’d just listened to the man” things would have been better), who’ve managed to grow on me, each in their own, wonky ways, over the course of the six seasons leading up to the Lost Series Finale. The drag is that the resolution was disappointing enough that I really will never recommend anybody start from the beginning of the series and watch it. Great acting is always wonderful, but without a well executed overall story, what’s the point?

But enough about the cast and characters; everyone already knows those are wonderful. The problem with Lost was always in its plot, or more accurately, lack thereof. In the end it sort of works out, in some sense, because Cuse and Lindelof successfully managed to explore a number of interesting themes both in the main body of the series and in the finale, not the least of which are those about personal choice and sense of self in the formation of identity. 

Like life itself, Lost ends with no real revelations, no magical key to sudden knowledge or wisdom, and with countless plot threads utterly ignored. Lost can be summed up as a “beautiful cacaphony,” leaving you starved for a melody, yet mesmerized by its absence. As a series, Lost is chaos incarnate, with very little meaning in most of its machinations. It’s like Cracker Jacks: tasty by the handful, but ultimately you really do need to eat a real meal.

Is it worth the time investment? If you got into the series at the very beginning and already had a sizable time investment, say maybe, the first 3-4 seasons, I’d say yes. If you’ve never seen Lost and are wondering if you should start, I’d say no. Why? Simply put, you can get all the major philosophical themes of Lost via countless other stories or films and understand its meaning in a few short hours, whereas the series will leave you, most of the time, confused and spinning your wheels. I submit that life does that enough already.

In the interest of helping you, dear reader, avoid spoilers in the event you haven’t seen the finale but plan to, this is your last chance. Beyond the break you’ll find a list of top Likes and Dislikes about the finale, and I hope you’ll share your thoughts on this non-event Event in the history of television.

Top things that disappointed me:
1. No mention of Walt. He went from being so UBER important to being an “also ran”
2. No “special revelation” of knowledge for characters who accepted being the Island’s guardians, they’re as clueless as everyone else.
3. Very little explanation of the alternative universe. Was it really JUST for them? Were they the only “dead” people in it or was EVERYONE in it “dead”?
4. When the Man in Black went into the hole with the Magic Lightbulb, he became a Smoke Monster. When two additional people went into the same hole, nothing happened to them. Why did the Man in Black become a smoke monster, exactly? Because he wore black?
5. No explanation for virtually anything that happened on the island over the years. Christian’s empty coffin, the Time Travelling, the Polar Bear, Walt appearing to people in visions, women unable to have babies, the Dharma Initiative–everything appears to have been a dead end.

Top things I ENJOYED:
1. Thematically, the idea that YOU have to decide the person you are, and not fall into the trap of what other people TELL you you are.
2. Thematically, the idea that the people in your lives, whether friend or foe, are there because you need them and they need you, to help shape the course of your life.
3. The “connection” of the living characters to the dead and the reunions of people who loved but had lost each other; those scenes were SO effing sad, I love it!
4. That all the characters died in the end. No possibility of “Lost: Return to the Island!” in five years.
5. The urge to wonder and criticize: Lost did a lot of things well: connecting the dots of a coherent story is not one of them. What’s an interesting emergent from the chaos, though, is the desire to think about what happened, how and if any of it connected or didn’t connect, and to think about abstract ideas such as identity of self, relationships, etc. It’s unsatisfying, but at the same time cool, and in a sense it mirrors life–there are no easy and guaranteed answers; from childhood until death we must always question, always wonder. That’s a decent moral.

All in all I feel both cheated by and glad that I watched it. I wouldn’t recommend the series to anyone else because thematically the whole series could easily be summed up in a 2-3 hour movie (See: Pleasantville, among others), but, having gotten on board not knowing what to expect, it was an interesting–if frequently frustrating–ride.

So now the question is, why was Heroes cancelled? This is a topic that could go on forever, and I’ve already reviewed a few other blogs and media outlets dishing ever so briefly on the topic, so now I think it’s time I had a bit of say, myself.

1. Let’s start with the obvious: following the first season, the show failed to ever execute a cohesive, well-planned plot or villain again. Sylar, in season one, was a masterpiece of a television villain, played to near perfection by Zachary Quinto. Season 2 didn’t really have a villain at all, Season 3′s “Villains” arc suffered a similar fate (Arthur Petrelli was OK, but really just a crusty, much less intimidating retread of Sylar), and while Season 4′s Samuel character was an interesting character, he was a useless villain with an ability so lame that all anyone had to do was run away from him in order to take it away. And while it was clear early on that the writing team on the show really tried to make the final season much better, and to a large part they succeeded, there were simply too many other problems, which we’ll get to.

2. Character development. Perhaps only a little less annoying than its plot issues was the show’s character development, specifically because, there pretty much wasn’t any. By the end of the final season, Claire was still the same whiny, self-flagellating brat she’d been since season one, only by then it had gone from being the endearing mark of a character going through something new and scary, to that place where you’re just sick and tired of hearing her whine about being different. Come on, Claire, get over it and move on, already! The same was true of One-Note-Nathan, who like any living politician stereotype, wobbled endlessly between the side of good and the side of evil. By the time he died, I was glad to see him go, and a lot of other people were too. There are only so many times you can watch the same character flip-flop back and forth. Pick a damn side and let’s get on with it.

3. Meaningless deaths. In the first season, we got some real deaths, and they were pretty damn sad. Charlie, Isaac, Simone, all were reasonably well developed (less so in Charlie’s case, but she was developed very well in a short space) and that worked out. Unfortunately, nobody ever died and stayed dead again after that. Charlie ended up being brought back during the fourth season, which really served no greater purpose than to ruin the original story’s sadness; Nathan, even after being killed in season 3′s finale, kept right on coming back to life via Sylar in season 4; Nikki, the show’s most annoying character from the very first episode, came back as a clone. Time after time, characters were shot, beaten, maimed and blown to smithereens, only to somehow return again. If there are no real death stakes, what’s the point of killing the character at all?

4. Stakes and consequences. The stakes rarely got any bigger on Heroes, either in the sense of devastating plots or in the sense of transformational character events. No, Arthur draining off Peter’s powers does not count. What characters needed were life-altering events like you’d find on better shows such as Angel or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was unilaterally a superior Superhero show to Heroes. There, we watched the writers do horrific things to established, recurring characters, killing off some, utterly reshaping the character of others. No character on Heroes ever faced stakes where they would have no choice but to cut down the person they love the most in order to save the world. No character on Heroes ever fell in love only to have that loved one brutally murdered before their eyes. And when Heroes characters died and returned, there was no price to pay, no shift in the balance of the world’s power, no consequences. When Buffy died while saving the world and was (months later) resurrected, there were consequences first for her character, which was fundamentally transformed by the trauma of death and bliss of Heaven, and later for an entire season as her return had triggered a shift in the balance of the world’s power that ultimately lead to the deaths of several of her allies and goodness knows how many additional innocents. Heroes never played with stakes like that.

5. Lack of advance planning. Heroes creator Tim Kring has said publicly that they do not plan the series very far in advance, preferring to write by the seat of their pants so as to always introduce new story possibilities. I suppose as theories go, that’s all well and good, but it’s still no excuse for not establishing an overall framework for where your story will go. How can you possibly write a series that says something if you don’t have anything in mind you want to say? And therein lay perhaps the root of Heroes’ problems: it doesn’t really have a message. Buffy was about female empowerment; Angel was about the neverending battle between good and evil; Star Trek was about an optimistic view of the future and humankind’s ability to succeed in it; Veronica Mars was about both female empowerment and the ability to understand and deal with the world logically even when it wasn’t very logical; Battlestar Galactica (new version) was about how humankind is a screwed-up mess with no true direction, just a fantasy.

What is Heroes about? I have no idea, and really, neither do its creators. And that was ultimately its biggest failure, and the most prominent reason why not only did it fail, but it earned its failure.

This month has been really exciting on Dollhouse, as the plot races along at full bore toward what will undoubtedly be an epic conclusion. In the leadup to the series finale-which I have to say, we really should be grateful to Fox for letting the season run its course in spite of the awful ratings-things have gotten really exciting. The entire season has been really good, but in the most recent six episodes especially, the development of characters and plot has reached the proverbial “fever pitch”. The evolution of Echo into-dare I say it-a REAL character-has been both gripping and surprising in many ways. Similarly, the development of Victor and Sierra-about whom I couldn’t have given less of a damn for most of season one-have rapidly become my favorites.

Wha I’ve been especially impressed by is the quality of performances we’ve seen from Enver Gjokaj (sic?)-Victor-in particular. That guy is frickin’ AMAZING, easily slipping between various personalities with complete believability. His spot-on portrayal of the Topher Brink character was beyond brilliance-it was as if the actual actor (I forget his name, and since I’m writing from my iPhone I won’t bother with the research) had somehow slipped into Victor’s skin. I truly hope to see him in another series soon.

So, lots of questions remain: how will the return of Caroline to her own body affect Echo? Will they-and how will they-bring Rossum down? And perhaps just as importantly, if they do manage to stop Rossum’s nefarious plans, how will they explain that in the context of Epitaph One, set another decade in the future?

On most of these points I have no clue, but on the last one I was struck with an idea while watching the second of last night’s two episodes. The faux future we saw while Echo, Sierra and Victor were trapped in the attic, stuck inside the Dollhouse technology’s creator’s mind, bore an awfully strong resemblance to the future in Epitaph One. Now, this could be simple: after all, one post-apocalyptic future looks pretty much the same as the next-or it could be that Epitaph One’s characters were, in fact, simply current era dolls who’d been sent to the attic. I can’t decide if that would be a cop-out of a development or not. What do you think?

By now, you may have read that Joss Whedon’s most recent show, Doll House, has been cancelled, though with a bit more ceremony and respect than most cancelled shows ever get. Unlike said other shows, Doll House will be allowed to complete its second season as planned, with every single episode airing, in order, as promised. I’ve got to give Fox props for trying-they’ve given the show almost every opportunity to succeed, with the one exception being that it’s been stuck in television’s worst time slot since the day it launched. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps a Sunday night slot might have yielded better results.

The immediate trend I’ve noticed on the topic has been one of blame, and specifically, blame for Fox. I have yet to see many people blame the show’s writers, who I think carry a significant burden of blame, nor the show’s audience, who certainly deserves blame a-plenty. A lot of things happened to conspire against Doll House, not the least of which was DH itself. The concept is, without a doubt, effing brilliant. The problem is that during the first season, the show’s primary characters-the Actives-were completely and utterly unrelatable. From the first episode to the sixth, it was very difficult to care about any of the characters. Yes, there was some good action, and yes, we got to look at some nice boobies in tight or revealing outfits, but those things alone do not make a show interesting. Well, at least not interesting enough to watch religiously.

It wasn’t really until episode six, “Man on the street,” that any characters really became interesting. From that point onward, several of them suddenly became a lot more interesting, not the least of which were Ballard and his beautiful neighbor/Doll, Millie. We got a lot more flavor of the season’s plot and the story’s characters from then on, but the problem was that in order to get to that point you really had to go through the first five hours of the series, which were boring and mediocre. Unfortunately, very few people will actually wait that long for a series to become good; if it can’t grab them from the first or maybe second episode, they’ll tune out and move on, and that’s exactly what they did.

Season 2 has been phenomenal so far. Every single aired episode has been great, and I’ve enjoyed watching it immensely. The characters have finally become rich and full of promise, and the stories told have made me actually give a rat’s ass about the Actives. Unfortunately, this has come too late; before the season began, the viewers were already gone. It’s a shame, of course, but you can’t really blame Fox for that-they were generous to give DH a second chance at all. If I have one wish, it’s that they should have tried the show in another time slot, where I really do think it could have done better. Niche shows in niche timeslots are a recipe for-get this-niche audiences.

Doll House has not been Joss Whedon’s best work, but it really could have been. I can’t blame him, of course-the concept of DH is very difficult, and few writers would be willing to tackle something so sophisticated at all, much less in episodic television. The show, for all its problems, flaws and weaknesses early on, really has been shaping up to be something rather extraordinary, and if the episode descriptions online are even remotely accurate for what’s to come, we should be in for one hell of a ride come December. I wish the show had been as good from episode one as it is in the current season; maybe we’d be looking forward to season 3 if that had been the case.

I love Joss Whedon’s work with a fairly epic passion; I’m always evangelizing his great work in Angel, Buffy and Firefly, and I regret that, like Firefly, we’ll never really see what DH could have become. But with any luck it’ll be a lesson learned, and Mr. Whedon will take it and do something even better for his next project. I’d love it if he got naked and sweaty with a network like Showtime or HBO, where he could really go wild and deliver something completely unhooked, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Whatever happens, he’s got a lifelong fan in me and many others.

Goodbye, Doll House. We barely knew ye!

Heroes, as I recently discussed here, has made it a habit this season of making me eat my hat. I’ve been shocked to observe that, following a very mediocre intro episode that got the season off to a battered limp, every single episode subsequent has been very good. This week’s was no different. The show caught me off guard on three separate occasions, so if you haven’t seen the episode yet and don’t want to know, you’re hereby advised to avert your eyes.

The first surprise I found involved Blank-Sylar, who quite unexpectedly reverted to the form of Nathan-complete with Nathan abilities and memories intact-who promptly realized he was standing in Freakshow, USA and flew away. Subsequent to Nathan getting his ass shot to death a few episodes back, and the recent news that Adrian Pasdar had been canned from the show without even being told by the producers until he read it in the script, I really didn’t expect to see him back. Of course, I should have accepted by now that Heroes only rarely kills off characters for really-reals, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. In any case, I was.

The next surprise was really a two-fer, and came when the ever-annoying Matt Parkman, whom I believe should have been killed off a long time ago, finally manned up, stopped whining, and acted like a Hero instead of a crybaby. If you’ve seen the episode, you know by now that Parkman manipulated Sylar-now in control of Parkman’s body-to write a murder note on a napkin at a diner, which resulted in his being surrounded by cops. Shockingly, Parkman then forced Sylar to act like he was pulling a gun, which of course lead to his being shot repeatedly, apparently falling to both their deaths. Sylar hit the ground with a soggy thud, and Parkman disappeared. In a perfect world, this is the way these two characters-both long past their usefulness-meet their ignominious ends.

In any case, the episode went off extremely well, and the final few minutes were practically dripping with a sense of foreboding about the future. A major conflict appears to be brewing, and as I realize we’re 8 episodes into the season, I’m actually a little shocked that there’s no sign of it involving some character travelling to the future only to uncover some horrific event that they have to stop. Bravo to Heroes for breaking out of a very weak plot trend!

Unfortunately there’s also some worry that comes from having now watched the trailer for next week’s episode. There are SPOILERS after the jump, so if you don’t want to know and you haven’t seen the trailer, stop here and enjoy life!

So, the sad truth is that the writers-utterly unable to keep a secret or kill off a major cast member with any permanence, apparently, have already revealed the return of both Parkman and Sylar. The trailer for next week’s episode features the two quite prominently, alive and healthy thanks to Peter Petrelli. Evidently the cops in Texas have decided it might be a great idea to rush their would-be-murderer to a hospital in New York City, where Peter works. Evidently, NYC is just a hop, skip and a jump away. From Texas.

While I can’t be too surprised about this move, I am very, very disappointed in the writers. Not only have they ruined, in the space of less than one episode, what was a poetic and shocking death for two of the series’ major mainstays who really have needed to be put down for awhile now, but they’ve put us right back where we were two episodes ago: with Parkman being haunted by Sylar, a plot thread that was stale the moment they introduced it.

Perhaps they have something better planned, but I don’t know and I sure don’t bet on it. Although Heroes is in the middle of enjoying its second best season to date, some of the inherent problems of the series remains. Why it is that the writers are unwilling to permanently end the lives of major characters is beyond me, and utterly disappointing. They really should look to shows like Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer for inspiration, both of which were not only better written shows about superheroes, but they both used the deaths of major characters to superb effect.

1. Dexter. Why? Because it’s effing brilliant, that’s why. It is in fact so brilliant that I’m not sure any show in the history of shows has ever been so consistently well written, acted, directed and executed (pun utterly intended). Dexter follows the life of a serial killer who works for the police as a blood spatter analyst, where he carefully watches to see which monstrous criminals manage to evade justice, performs his own investigation to ensure that they’re definitely guilty…and then delivers justice in his own gruesome fashion. What’s amazing about the show, though, is that it’s really an exploration of the importance of Ethics, of having a moral code to guide your actions. Dexter follows “the Code of Harry,” a set of guidelines taught to him by his foster father, a police officer, to ensure that he never harms an innocent person and never gets caught. As each season’s story unfolds, the Code of Harry is tested and at times Dexter either adheres closely to the code or rebels-the latter of which occasionally leads to near disaster-but occasionally reveals a new dimension to the Code and to Dexter’s interpretation of it. Intriguingly, it appears that Dexter is actually becoming more Ethical over time. In any case, a superb show which has, from what I’ve seen, absolutely no equal in today’s television.

2. Heroes. Why? Because I’m a glutton for punishment, or maybe because I’m such an optimist that I’ll endure almost anything for the day when something great happens again. Heroes began, as many folks will remember, brilliantly. In fact, Heroes had what may have been the best freshman season of any science fiction series ever produced; it wove a pretty well thought-out time travel story in with a number of stories about self-discovery. There were too many characters, many of them extraneous, and this periodically distracted from the narrative, but overall it went off with few hitches–until the finale came and underwhelmed audiences everywhere. It was pretty much all downhill from there, at least until original writer Bryan Fuller returned toward the end of season 3, when things got decent again for a time. Unfortunately he left again, and season 4 debuted with a dull, boring, thud. I’d almost written the show off until a few weeks ago, when they managed to do something they haven’t done since the first season: they caught me off guard. What I thought was extremely obvious and obnoxious, turned out to be entirely wrong. I was pleasantly surprised and developed a modicum of hope for the show again, which to my shock has paid off for about four weeks running. Only time will really tell if they can make this one truly great, but it’s looking more and more like the pieces are being moved into position. Here’s hoping it stays better and they clean up some of their dropped plot threads from seasons past.

Speaking of dropped plot threads, that brings me to…

3. Lost. I think I was in love with this series during the first season. It came with an astonishingly good cast, an interesting and unique premise, and an amazing ability to hook the audience into the lives of its characters so intensely that waiting for the following week’s episode could be nearly painful. The second season was also very good, but it began to unravel toward the end as it became apparent the writers had no idea what they were going to do with their phenomenal cast and setup. When third season began…they just went ahead and admitted they had no idea, then promptly took a four month break to fix the show. Unfortunately season 3 ended up being largely a lost cause, though it did steadily improve as they moved from wasting far too much time to introducing plot elements. Season four was “meh”, but five was superb, and at long last we started to get some answers about the-let’s just say it-completely wacky bullshit going on with this time-traveling island. Given the way season five became arguably the best since season one, I have high hopes for the impending final season of Lost. Here’s hoping they don’t disappoint me.

4. Dollhouse. This is a show I desperately wanted to fall in love with from the word “go.” It has an interesting concept, an excellent cast (except for Eliza Dushku; I loved her as Faith in Buffy and Angel, but I just don’t think she has the range to pull off a character like Echo. I hope I’m ultimately proven wrong, but I guess we’ll see) and the pedigree of being a Joss Whedon project, so all things considered, it should be one of the best shows on television. Dollhouse follows a fascinating premise: that an organization exists to cater to the super rich by providing people who have been programmed to perform specific kinds of tasks extremely well, only to have their memories wiped clean after the task is complete. This is pretty brilliant-it provides a fantastic platform to build drama and approach a lot of issues with moral weight. The problem with the premise, at least in the beginning, is that the main cast-the Dolls who inhabit the Dollhouse-are utterly unrelatable. Wiped clean every week, they’re essentially fresh and clean every week, with little to nothing carrying over; at least, that’s how it started.

So far, season 2 has been fantastic. I don’t think we’ve had a single stinker of an episode, and unlike season 1 we’re starting to see each of the main characters begin to retain parts of themselves in some fashion. We’re learning their backstories, and we’re examining the motives and the positions of the people who actually operate the dollhouse itself. All in all, there are massive plot seeds being planted, and for those who’ve seen Whedon’s previous work you know that when this guy plants seeds of this kind, the payoff is huge. So, I do think that beginning with season 2 (well, really with Epitaph One, the unaired season finale of Dollhouse from season 1), DH is one of the best shows going right now. Unfortunately, the first season was botched so badly that most of its viewers have tuned out. Couple last season’s mistakes with a terrible time slot (really, Fox, Fridays at 9? Is ANYBODY even home to watch TV on Friday nights?) and DH’s prospects for a third season aren’t great. It’s a shame, of course-it really could be something fantastic. If you’re not watching, I recommend that you catch up and start following. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

For the most part, that’s what I’ve got. I’ve watched a little bit of Flash Forward, but so far it hasn’t hooked me. I hear Mad Men is great, and I intend to watch it, if for no other reason than that it has Christina Hendricks, who played in a couple of episodes of Firefly back in the day. That alone should make the show stack up nicely…

OK, so I admit it: I don’t wear hats because they make me look goofy. And like hats, Heroes is now making me look goofy, and it’s doing it in a very unexpected way: it’s good again. I know, I know-I’ve spent a fair amount of time giving the show shit-which it’s deserved-only to suddenly find myself nibbling at the tasty feathers of crow while the show carefully and meticulously crawls out of the hole it spent the last two seasons digging itself into.

So here’s the recap: in the three episodes since the lackluster season premiere, Heroes has demonstrated once again that it knows how to build a careful narrative in which its characters can demonstrate a little growth, a nugget of exploration, and, as is desperately needed by a show about people with super powers, a surprising glow of humanity. In the time since the now infamously ill-received premiere, every episode has been carefully plotted to bring the show’s core characters back into the foreground while some of its more useless or annoying characters and their shtick remain conspicuously absent.

The ever-annoying Nathan Petrelli appears to finally be permanently dead, Ando has been left behind in Japan while Hiro rejoins the New York division of Heroes, Inc (OK, I made that part up) as he tries to make right some wrongs from his past before his tumor kills him. We’ve only had to tolerate Matt-I’m-such-a-whiny-bitch Parkman for (I think) one episode, and although his “Sylar is in my brain” storyline so far has been a little cliche (and more than a little reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica’s vision of Cylon #6 in Gaius Baltar’s head), it’s been done to surprisingly good effect as the “evil Sylar” has Parkman hard at work systematically destroying his own life. Now if they just kill Parkman, things will get even better in the Heroes-verse.

In any case, it appears that things are finally approaching a turning point as we creep toward the midway of this volume’s 12 episode story arc, “Redemption,” with all of this season’s major cast members showing what can only be described as “impressive growth” (it’s like the stock market, but with super powers!). Luckily our core cast has shrunk significantly, with the ousting of such fan-non-faves as Mohinder and several of the throwaways of the last two seasons.

We’ve watched Peter both embrace his nature as a hero and yet return to a more “mundane” life as an EMT. We’ve watched Hiro continue on his hero path even as he faces the fact of his own impending death. We’ve watched Noah flounder as the older man looking back on his life to see how the choices he’s made have caused more harm than good, particularly to himself and those closest to him. And of course we’ve watched as Nathan’s past came back to bite him in the ass for the last time, causing the face and abilities of Gabriel Gray to re-emerge with a mind and personality so completely blank that even when confronted visually with the physical memories of his past as a monstrous villain, he’s refused to believe or return to that form. At least…so far. I have a feeling that the new villains, now attempting to re-awaken the old Sylar, are going to end up having that bad choice’s consequences demonstrated on their own hides.

Next week will mark the halfway point for this volume’s story arc, and if it holds up this will be the fourth consecutive good episode-something Heroes hasn’t had since the first season. They’re on a roll right now; let’s hope they can keep up the good work and, going into this season’s second act, show us something that will make us keep wanting to come back for more. If we’re very lucky, the end of this volume may just have fans asking once again, “more, please!”

1. Sylar. He was an awesome villain in season 1 and a complete waste of time in season 2. He was tepidly interesting in season 3, and in season 4 he’s a Cylon #6 ripoff embedded in the brain of one of the show’s least interesting characters, Matt Parkman, while his real body is waltzing around under the control of Nathan Petrelli–who should have died 2 seasons ago and stayed that way. When they first put Nathan in control of Sylar’s body they could have done something interesting–let the audience forget he was really Sylar.

Explore Nathan as Nathan for half the season while the new villains do their worst and just when things seem to be at a low point, worsen them–by letting Sylar re-emerge as dominant, with no warning whatsoever and no sign of an underlying Nathan. Instead, though, we get to endure Sylar as a hallucination to a boring character while Nathan starts to feel powerful enough to, no doubt, do something stupid yet again.

2. Claire. OK, look. In season 1, it was cool: Save the Cheerleader, Save the World. Catchy line, smartly written concept, made sense when you finally got all the puzzle pieces. Our heroes saved the fucking cheerleader. They saved the world. Now send her the fuck away. She’s BORING. She’s WHINY. She treads on two sidewalks: I love my daddy, I hate my daddy. Boo-fucking-hoo. Clair-bear? Go away. I don’t care where you go, but stay there.

3. Nathan. OK, I get it: We’ve written ourselves into a corner where it’s impossible to kill Sylar, but everybody WANTS Nathan dead. So we kill Nathan…and copy him into Sylar? Why do that, especially if you’re not going to bother using it well? Nathan is annoying and stupid and utterly predictable. How many episodes until he once again flips like any other politician and does something stupid again?

4. Hiro. In the beginning, Hiro was my favorite character. I enjoyed his child-like excitement and devotion to being the good guy. He was a great counterpoint to some of the other characters on the show, but now it’s old. He’s no different today than he was at the start of Season 1, even after experiencing the defeat of being unable to save the waitress he spent 6 months falling in love with, after losing his father, after finding out his childhood hero was just a bunch of bullshit. How can he be unaffected by these kinds of events? We’ve had this fantastic glimpse of a future bad-ass Hiro who’s been tainted by pain-and by now, he or something damn close to it should be the Hiro we see every episode, now the goofy 10 year old. In the finale of Season 1, we really should have had Ando be killed-brutally-by Sylar, only to die in Hiro’s arms and change him forever.

5. Powers-Why the hell does every character have to get powers eventually? Giving abilities to Ando and Mohinder was just stupid. Let’s spell this out clearly: For a super powered hero to be somebody the audience can relate to, we need normal people to counter-balance and ground these characters in reality. This is a lesson Tim Kring and friends should take from what is arguably the best superhero show of all time: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was super powered, and aside from a couple of side characters like Spike and eventually Willow, nobody else was. These characters helped keep the show on an emotional level that was real and something we could connect with. Heroes had that in season 1 with several non-powered characters, but now who do we have? Just Noah. And he’s not exactly a fount of emotional depth, is he?

When I first watched the premiere season of Heroes, I was blown away by how well it was executed (for the most part, anyway; it did have a few misfires like most shows do) and how each episode made me eager for the next. Then the ending came and…well, it was pretty much underwhelming. Not a catastrophe, but more of an “Oh. Is that all?” And it’s been downhill ever since. Now all I feel is apathy at a brilliant concept that’s been so poorly executed I just don’t know what to make of it. If only Joss Whedon had been in charge instead.