TV Shows I Watched In 2015

It's that time again, folks. Here is a list of the shows that I watched this year, some of which I watched live as they came this year, and some of which I just happened to binge and thought I'd mention here. Spoilers everywhere.

This image is, in itself, a spoiler. Unless you don't
watch the show. Image from sidekickreviews

Game of Thrones - Season 5, HBO/Sky1
Written 15th August.

Another season of Game of Thrones went by, and along with it another series of controversies, odd character decisions and an unhealthy obsession with victimising women. The show managed to cover pretty much all of the most recent two novels in G.R.R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire book series while also going more heavily off-book than ever before. This led to, as in last season, a lot being left out, as well as characters being moved around, killed off and generally manipulated in such a way as to confound anyone who knew the plot of the books.
    The best and most amazing storyline was also the one that went most off-book - fresh off the heels of killing his father, Tyrion Lannister is smuggled to the continent of Essos and is encouraged by his saviour Varys to seek out Dragon Queen Daenerys Targaryen. Along the way he is kidnapped by exiled servant of the Queen, Jorah Mormont, who happens to be heading in the same direction. Unlike in the books, however, Tyrion actually makes it, leading to several scenes of Daenerys and Tyrion together. A lot of the frustration with Dany's storylines in the first four seasons was their loose connection to the plots going on in Westeros, and getting to see Tyrion in that part of the world made the mythology tie together more physically - as well as putting my two favourite characters onscreen at once.

"Bring it." From Wikimedia

     Over in controversy corner, and the show continued its trend from last season of exploiting violence towards women and girls. Sansa, who at this point in the books has stopped doing anything, is shipped over to her home in Winterfell, where she becomes the wife and plaything of the disgusting Ramsay Snow. After spending four seasons building her up and delivering her the agency she always wanted, her character was derailed in a plotline designed to act as a redemptive arc for the tortured Theon Greyjoy. This culminated in a horrific rape scene, thankfully not showing the act but regardless framing the scene by making us watch Theon's face as we hear Sansa's terrified screams. This carries forwards to the storyline in the North, where, again off-book, Stannis Baratheon decided to use his daughter for a blood magic ritual, and again we get to watch his face as we hear his daughter's genuinely blood-curdling and upsetting screaming. The list of reasons why this doesn't make sense is long, but notably: killing his daughter makes half of his mercenary army rout the field; his wife kills herself because of her guilt; and now the guy who believes himself the "rightful king" has no heirs whatsoever. Which is why it didn't happen in the books.
     Now with the death of Jon Snow (or not, it's an uncertainty carried over from the book), and a great deal of material not covered by the series (leaving a few notable holes), the future of Game of Thrones is uncertain. HBO has guaranteed that the show will get another two seasons in order to conclude its story, and they've apparently been given notes from Martin himself. Despite all of the horrible ways that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss like to hurt female characters and mess up the story, I still enjoy Game of Thrones, and I want to see it get better.

Rick's group approaches the Alexandria Safe Zone.
From Wikia

The Walking Dead - Seasons 5B and 6A, AMC/Fox
Written between 15th August and 27th December.

The fifth season of The Walking Dead, now finished, can only be described as... sedate. Which is an achievement, for a show which is pretty sedate anyway. 5A had a few interesting moments, but its story progression was fairly slapdash and lacked focus. That lack of focus continued into the second half of the season, with Beth's death glossed over with the death of brilliant supporting character Tyreese. Thankfully, the season picked up again, following our characters into the Alexandria Safe Zone. Seeing our characters back into a suburban environment was really interesting, and would have been even better if they hadn't bogged it down with an off-book romantic subplot. I did however love Rick's descent back into savagery - it felt like a logical progression that after he killed two entire groups (the Claimers at the end of 4B and the Hunters in the middle of 5A) he would flip out upon being asked to trust a group of people who had stayed out of the whole thing. The final scene of the half-season, with Morgan finally meeting Rick again after two seasons, was the icing on the cake.
     I think one of my problems with The Walking Dead, starting this year, was the fact that there appears to be no end in sight. That's not a specific problem with TWD - this occurs in all fiction in this genre, with a number of different possible endings, none of which are going to be very satisfying. It doesn't really help that the show, like Game of Thrones, is adapting its source material somewhat faster than it can be produced. Five years into the show, we're seven years into the comics, and that's not even taking into account the extra plots grafted onto the show's canon. The thing that saved Lost's last few seasons was a definite ending point, and that gave the series a sense of purpose going forward, and a guarantee of sorts that everything would come to a head. Season Five proved that this is exactly what The Walking Dead needs, and what it currently sorely lacks.
     That was, of course, until the beginning of the Sixth Season in the Autumn, at which point the show suddenly shot up a gear. Having spent 5B establishing the people of Alexandria, their politics and the threat of a chaotic group known as The Wolves, 6A set about providing key character development, juicy plots and a refreshing pace. By far the saving grace of this season was the arrival of Morgan, whose philosophical differences with the rest of the cast allowed for some realistic conflict that didn't just descend into painful, "it's inevitable that we're all going to die" nonsense. It also provided quite possibly my favourite episode of the entire show, the phenomenal parable that is, "Here's Not Here" which has Morgan in the spotlight. With these things in mind, I'm a lot more confident about the show's future, and I hope that this movement out of mediocrity lasts for a long time.

Insert joke about the West Coast here.
From Forbes

Fear The Walking Dead - Season 1, AMC
Written 3rd September.

For some critics, this six-part miniseries preceding Season 6A of the parent show travelled far too slowly. I am not one of those critics. There is a certain lackadaisical pace to Fear which it has inherited from The Walking Dead, but there are several things it holds in its favour - characters we haven't been slugging it with for five years, the new concept of watching the apocalypse happening from the start, and the sense of tension as society slowly collapses. So much of The Walking Dead consists of wandering around empty countryside, with tension only mounting when the characters decide to explore an abandoned structure or something like that - here, the tension is constantly building as the world basically crumbles around our knowing protagonists. And that, for me at least, is more worth tuning in for than seeing what weird thing Rick is gonna do this week.

Hey Nicky, you so fine, you so fine you blow my mind
Hey Nicky! From zimbio

Orange Is The New Black - Season 3, Netflix
Written 15th August.

Where do I begin? I tried my best to avoid the hype train on this Netflix series set in a women's prison, mainly because I expected I'd have a great deal of Hype Backlash. Now that I have seen it... what was I thinking? This show is just as awesome as everyone said it was! Originally focusing around rich white girl Piper Chapman and her year in prison on drug-possession charges, the series opens up into a lots-and-lots-of-characters ensemble drama which takes the format of Lost (main plot in the present with an character-specific flashback each episode) and puts it into a format which is deliberately designed around binge-watching. It also manages to portray important issues like LGBT rights, trans discrimination, police and government corruption, sexual abuse and many more in a responsible and innovative manner. (With the exception of the show's solid refusal to say the word "bisexual".)
    I love this show for so many different reasons. The characters are all well developed, with everyone (except Dee, fuck Dee) getting several shades of grey to their characterisations. My favourite character is probably Red, played by the amazing Kate Mulgrew (better known as Captain Janeway). While I actually did enjoy Piper's story in the first season, I agree with the common idea that her storyline is less interesting as time goes on, and I think it's a sign of great writers that the show evolved to focus on a wider set of characters. I'm really looking forward to Season Four and I'm glad that I finally joined the bandwagon.

Sarah and her clones face off against Project Castor.
From screenrant

Orphan Black - Season 3, BBC America
Written between 16th August and 3rd September.

Despite some shaky moments, the third season of Orphan Black continued to demonstrate Tatiana Maslany's immense talent. The appearance of male clones played by Ari Millen threw several new factions into the mix, and proved to take the series in directions that were both positive and negative; positive in that the male clones allowed our sisters to finally discover their genetic origin and advance the mytharc, and negative because these new male characters just weren't as interesting as the pre-developed relationships. This made the beginning of the season feel a little messy, and the varying subplots didn't really mesh together until the very end.
     This season's main theme, tied into all of its storylines, was the importance of family - both actual family relationships and those forged in friendship. Alison ran for head of the local Schools board, funding it by running drugs through her mother's soap shop. Pregnant Helena was captured by the male clones (Project Castor to contrast the female Project Leda) and eventually rescued by Sarah. Sarah and her adopted mother Siobhan then followed several clues in order to find both Castor and Leda's genetic origin - Kendall Malone (Alison Steadman), Siobhan's birth mother, a genetic chimera with strands of male and female DNA.

     Season 3 was messy in places, and it didn't really find its footing until a few episodes in. But it's still not a series that can really be faulted. Tatiana Maslany is still the best actress working on television today, no question, and that didn't change. I can't really complain about the uselessness of the Castor storyline from the beginning of the season, or the random new love interest given to Cosima, when everything with T-Mas was so brilliant. From the discovery of the genetic original, to the introduction of new clone Krystal, the treatment of Rachel as she recovered from a pencil to the eye, and the amazing silliness of Alison's drug business, I kept finding something to love. I can't wait for Season Four.

Gemma Chan as Mia. From Channel Four

Humans - Series 1, AMC/Channel 4
Written 6th September.

By far this year's biggest surprise was the C4/AMC coproduction Humans, adapted from a Swedish series about an alternate Present Day in which human-like robots known as Synths have taken a valuable place in human society. Originally a focused character drama looking as the Hawkins family, the show spiralled out into a rich mythology and backstory while never losing that skill with its characters. In rifling through all of the ways in which robots have been treated in science fiction, the show managed to develop its cast of humans and sentient synths as a large set of distinct, well-developed and sympathetic by Episode Two. Add in phenomenal acting turns by Katherine Parkinson, Colin Morgan, Gemma Chan and newcomer Lucy Carless, and you've got one of the best newcomer shows of the year. (See here for my longer article on the show.)

These are two attractive people. From ibtimes

Outlander - Season 1, Amazon Prime/Starz
Written 6th September.

Carrying on the recent rise in online-only shows, this year I also watched the first season of Outlander, a show only available in the UK via Amazon Prime's exclusive premium on-demand service. Adapted from the series of books by Diana Gabaldon, the show follows 1940s army nurse Clare Randall as she is thrown back in time to 18th Century Scotland. There she is taken in by the Clan Mackenzie, a local lordship in opposition to the British throne, and she falls in love with the strapping Jamie Fraser. Forced to fight the evil ancestor of her 1940s husband, she must find a way to get home.
     Outlander often struggles with its balance of historical drama and sci-fi leanings. Like its obvious protegé Life On Mars (which actually succeeds the publishing of the books which inspired the show), it's often difficult to remember the fact that Clare is displaced out of time, at least once the "Fish-out-of-water" humour runs dry. Luckily, the plot is well-placed enough that a lot of the time you don't much care, and those sci-fi elements do raise their heads again. I did find a lot of the show's nudity and sex scenes a tad excessive (this show has more nudity than Game of Thrones, although it's usually a lot less bloody and violent) and I found it questionable that the two main villains of the this first season were both implied to be gay (and the same was not true of any other character.) But despite concerns, there's something strangely compelling and relaxing about the escapades of Clare Randall, especially in the second half of the season, when the series' mytharc begins to bear fruit.

Even on the poster it looks like she doesn't wanna be here.
From the BBC

Doctor Who - Series 9, BBC1
Written 27th December.

After being pleasantly surprised by Series 8, I had a lot of hope for my favourite show. Moffat was still here, of course, but there was something of a development in his writing style that seemed to me to be less about making offensive jokes and more about actual character development. Series 9 was very much one step forwards, two steps back. A lot of Moffat's old tropes returned, including an arc which didn't really go together very well, and the habit of retconning important parts of Doctor Who's history. However, the show did go the extra mile in taking some steps in new directions, especially when it came to the Time Lords.
     The most notable differences in this season came with the show's new format and aesthetic. Most all but two of the episodes in the season were organised as two-parters, which brought to mind the format of the Sarah Jane Adventures. I had hoped that it would allow a lot of the stories to become more developed, as they were approaching the length of Classic serials, but that didn't really come to pass as a lot of the time each individual part had a very different tone, pace and occasionally writers than the other half, meaning there was something of a lack of tonal consistency. This tied into another aesthetic shift for the show, with Moffat falling back into his misguided desire to make the show "cool" and "modern", exchanging the Sonic Screwdriver for a gaudy set of sunglasses and Peter Capaldi's Pertwee-esque costume for a hoodie and trainers. And the less we talk about that electric guitar, the better.
     Clara finally got to leave this series, although they had to ruin it again by giving us a passable if noble departure, followed up by a less believable resurrection and an open-ended departure off into space. Series 8 had her developing from a normal-ish human being into a character somewhat obsessed with taking on the responsibilities and identity of The Doctor, and that development did continue here, albeit a great deal more slowly. Unlike the previous season, which presented this as a noticeable flaw which Clara really shouldn't be working towards, this year it was just an accepted fact about who she was, including during both of her exits. I like that she carried on that development, but I still think that it would have been so much better to just let her leave in Last Christmas like she was supposed to.

I am going to break that guitar. From BBC America

      And, finally, this year was struck with a number of arcs and recurring characters. From the second episode we got not-so-subtle mentions of "The Hybrid", a retconning Time-Lord prophecy which spluttered to an unsatisfactory ending in the finale. Part of that developing arc was the reoccurring face of Maisie Williams as Ashildr/"Me", who didn't really impress in the role, with the exception of a more subtle turn in The Woman Who Lived. These recurring aspects did tie the season together into a cohesive whole, but the result didn't really gel very well because of the vast changes in tone and the fact that most of it is brushed aside for an arc with the Time Lords in the finale.
     For a series that tried very hard to be different, it's a shame so much of it failed in the execution. For the first time we got two female writers and both of their episodes were slated by fandom, even though they were two of the best episodes of the season. The Zygon two-parter, while dangerously stupid in its politics, was at least trying to be relevant and interesting science fiction. There's a sense of stuttering, of a car failing to start repeatedly. The question is, can Doctor Who recover before it burns out the clutch? And, if rumours are to be believed, is next year the last outing for both Capaldi and Moffat?

At least Miko's story turned out not to be as terrible as I thought.

Heroes Reborn - Season 1, NBC
Written between 30th October and 27th November.

I had a lot on the table for Heroes Reborn. Despite a lot of my misgivings about its parent series, I was still of the opinion that it could have really done with one final season to conclude the story and the journeys of these characters, as well as to explore that last cliffhanger in which the existence of Evolved Humans (now "Evos") is now a public matter of fact. When Reborn began I wasn't very impressed with the the way it reused a lot of the same character archetypes and themes to say a lot of the same things, but as the series went on I began to see how tightly the story has been written, avoiding a lot of the pitfalls that Heroes itself often fell into.
       Instead of acting as yet another cycle of Heroes' repeating storyline, the focus of the series around the aftermath of an orchestrated terrorist attack means that this Universe feels a lot more adult, with characters having to face the consequences of their actions as and when they happen. There are enough old faces to make the show still feel like you're watching Heroes, but for the most part the injection of new blood has very much updated the show, developing it past its mid-noughties chic and neatly avoiding a lot of the stink that the show had picked up by its fourth season. Its biggest improvement is in its time-travel story, which manages to be very tight-knit and cohesive, dotting all the is and crossing the ts to make an exciting and yet perfectly logical sequence of events.
     I wish I could have reviewed this week-on-week, but I really didn't have the energy to do so. I'd also have liked to see how it ended - but for some stupid reason NBC have decided to leave the final three episodes of the season in January, ending this year's run with an awkward filler episode and completely demolishing any and all momentum that the show has. People are not going to tune in in January to finish this thing off, and if they do, all of the tension will just be gone. It feels a little like NBC want to sabotage this show and make sure that Heroes doesn't end up coming back full time, and that's a real shame, because once this little mini-series got going, it really deserved a fair chance.

Luther is captivating but running out of ideas. From the BBC

Luther - Series 4, BBC1
Written 27th December.

Erm... Hi? I've loved Luther since it started, I think it's an amazing, unique take on the detective genre which combines gruesome villains with a charismatic lead, playing off of a number of detective show cliches while never actually feeling held down by them. It fell into a nice format of four hour-long episodes in two rhyming couplets, which worked, keeping the character's intensity in short bursts. The third season ended on an open-ended but satisfying moment, keeping it open for star Idris Elba's desire to take the series to cinemas. That's what makes this incredibly short two-parter seem a little... well, weird is the word. It's nice to see you, Luther, but why is this such a flying visit?
     Given the brevity of the series, I was expecting something huge from the two-parter, something which would fundamentally change the format of the series. While we shifted some of the cast around, replacing Warren Brown with Rose Leslie and starring a brand new messed-up killer who eats his victims and then leads the police to each of them with a trail of identity papers. It was a balance of moments both introspective and painfully tense, but it didn't really have the barnstorming, triumphant surge which made Luther work - there needs to be the catharsis that comes with watching Luther beat the shit out of someone. The second half also wandered off into very strange territory, and even with Luther's extraordinary stories it stretched my sense of disbelief. I would have much preferred that this be the first two episodes of a brand new series instead of this strange "event" show which didn't really feel like it made that much of a lasting impression.

This show would be at the top if this was a "Top 11 Shows" list.
From denofgeek

Jessica Jones - Season 1, Netflix
Written 27th December.

A late addition to this list, but I couldn't talk about 2015 without mentioning Jessica Jones, the latest of the Marvel spin-off TV shows appearing on Netflix. Running alongside the series of blockbuster films and two TV shows on Disney's ABC channel, Marvel moved its vast Cinematic Universe over to Netflix earlier this year, with the 13-episode series Daredevil starring Charlie Cox. I wasn't really interested in that series, but I was interested in Jessica Jones, a series about a superhero-turned-private-eye starring Kristin Ritter and David Tennant. And let's get this out of the way, because it's going to be the most controversial thing I say on this list - Jessica Jones is the best thing that the MCU has produced.
     The main themes behind Jessica Jones , are incredibly important, as they discuss a topic very rarely addressed in mainstream media - female agency. Jones' main villain, Kilgrave, is a super villain whose ability lets him make anyone do whatever he wants them to, and he used this to both physically and psychologically abuse Jessica for a number of years. The series doesn't shy away from the language surrounding the topic - Kilgrave is a rapist, he's a murderer, and he's also the most charming person in the room. The show is a testament to both Ritter and Tennant - Ritter for portraying the anger and strength of a survivor of abuse, Tennant for managing to deliver the most realistic portrayal of an abuser I've ever seen on television.
     But the brilliant thing is that those issues aren't the be-all and end-all - there are a lot of amazing action scenes, some great mysteries and intrigues, a heart-breaking romance subplot that doesn't feel insultingly shoehorned in. There's a charming noir feel that the series maintains with very little effort, but it also feels modern and engaging and almost beyond cliché. Of all the shows on this list, this is the one that I have to recommend the most highly - it's clever, consistent, breathtaking in its topics and just one of the best TV shows to come out in 2015.

Thanks.

Review: Heroes Reborn 1.1 and 1.2: "Brave New World" and "Odessa"

Mohinder voice: Heroes is back, after all these years. You could that that it's Heroes... Reborn? Actually, no, why would you name it something different? The storyline follows on from Heroes, the first "volume" of this show has the same name as the last, aborted "volume" of Heroes and it revolves around many of the same characters and all of the same themes. The only thing majorly different is the direction and the soundtrack, and that's because hey, it's not 2006 any more. They even have the pretentious opening narrations...

There have been some pretty contrived powers on this show.
But "enters video game when withdrawing the sword of
Takeo Kensei" is the most contrived of all.

You may remember back in 2013/14 when I reviewed each "Volume" of Heroes, the superhero show from NBC with a famously good first season and an infamously mixed-to-bad everything else. Me, I loved the show - despite the myriad plot holes and stupid character decisions, I ended up falling in love with the characters and the Universe the show is set in, especially characters like Clare Bennett and Sylar. They number among a number of characters not returning for this show, ostensibly a revival "event" series which uses a few of the same characters from Heroes but puts most of its focus on new characters in a slightly "evolved" world. Pun not intended. This opening, two-part pilot did a lot of things I enjoyed, but it also fell into a lot of traps that Heroes did back in its day and doesn't really seemed to have learnt anything about the way storytelling is told in modern TV.
     Inching closer to Heroes roots in the X-Men franchise, the word is now out about Evolved Humans, now referred to as Evos. Whereas in Heroes these were a loose diaspora held back by fear and superstition, now they're a fully-persecuted minority held back by fear and superstition, the world still reeling from a terrorist attack at a Human-Evo peace conference in 2014. However, there is a great something coming in the near future, and a conspiracy in which even "unregistered" Evos are being killed en masse. Amongst the cast of characters are: Heroes' Noah Bennett, who along with a "fun" comedy sidekick is attempting to discover what happened to his daughter Clare, and why he appears to have erased his own memory of the day of the Incident; Luke Collins (Zachary Levi, Chuck) who is an Evo hunter with his more determined wife; Carlos Gutierrez, who is forced to take on the mantle of a Mexican-wrestler inspired superhero upon his brother's death; teenage Tommy, who has the power to make people disappear, and Miko Otomo, who has the power to... enter a video game.
     The thing you immediately notice about the main cast is how wonderbread it is - the three main storylines are about Noah, Luke and Tommy, all white guys with complicated motivations. Noah is Noah so I'll leave him alone, but Luke's storyline in particular is a sign of the overall issue here - he is portrayed as being brooding and unsure about his merciless slaughter of an entire race of people, while his black wife is portrayed as a violent sociopath. He is given the development, she is given anger. This is particular egregious given the current events in the States, in which the stereotype of black people as more innately violent than white people is leading to the wholesale murder of African Americans by the police. And the rest of the show isn't better in its complete lack of complexity and understanding of non-white cultures. The only Latino characters live in a crap, run-down neighbourhood and their hero wears a Mexican Luchador mask. The only two Japanese characters exist in a world entirely composed of nerd-culture and video-games. At least Heroes gave a slightly wider insight into the overall Japanese culture outside of Hiro's obsession with comic books - Miko has so much potential to be an interesting and well-developed character, but her entire agency is expressed either through the admiration of her male companion or by her badly-animated exploits as a "badass samurai girl".

We're meant to be rooting for the white guy to have a
redemption arc and get away from his emotional, violent
black wife. In 20-fucking-15.

     But of course, this is still Heroes, and there's a lot to love. The whole plotline of a series of disconnected people banding together with extraordinary abilities they don't entirely understand worked back in Season One of the main show, and it's probably going to work here. The main problem, ignoring the stuff with race, is that I really doubt that a newcomer to this show would have any reason to be invested. I'm sticking with the show because I watched 64 episodes of this universe, I like the background mythology, I'm a big fan of Noah Bennett. But it's not doing anything new or interesting, the show is too built upon its older sister for any of the little hints and callbacks to mean anything to newer viewers. Heroes Reborn can't take in new viewers and make them stay, and the old viewers coming back expecting to find a rejuvinated show will only find more of the same.

Thanks.

Overview: Heroes: Volume Five - Redemption

I'll take you to task and ask you to remember to read this in an Irish accent, as I tell you a tale of a show desperately looking to better itself for the third time in a row. Something clicked with the writing staff and the show began to embrace mature values - too little too late, I'm sad to say. For every well-handled and exceedingly inclusive LGBTQ relationship, there's a painful ending cliffhanger. This would be the end of Heroes whether it was ready or not, although that may have been something of a blessing... Written between 17th and 21st August 2013. 

Samuel Sullivan and his Creepy Carnival.
From moviesinsights

Season Four (Volume Five, but I write "season" by default so...) popped up in the Autumn of 2009 and, unlike the previous Volumes, carried on into the new year with a fair 19 episodes' worth to go on. The show entered something of an era of emotional maturity, with a lot of the drama throwing away the superhero ethics and focusing on characterisation in a way that would have been alien to the earlier seasons. There's an overall injection of life and colour into the show which sounds great, but on a week-by-week basis the pace of the plot means that the season only really works as a DVD marathon.
     The season's big schtick is the Carnival, a group of specials who travel around together picking up Specials in need and using their powers to con foolish carnival-goers of their cash, led by the mysterious Samuel, who as it turns out only has his "family" around him because his earth-based powers grow stronger in proportion to the number of specials in his immediate vicinity. Throughout other subplots where Claire is at uni and Noah tries and fails to carry on spying and Hiro gets a tumour and Peter hitches up with a deaf lady, the main cast are guided by Samuel's manipulations towards the Carnival, where they must use their respective powers and character developments to foil Samuel's plot to become uberpowerful and split the world in half.
     I think the biggest focus is on Claire's storyline, at least in my memory. Every single volume has seen Claire in a new social situation, to the point where following her into College is something of a weird parody, especially as we're expected to follow the hijinks of her sorority, a super-powered assassin who wants to hire Claire for the Carnival and the unexpected delight of Gretchen, whose initially creepy character goes on to form a romantic relationship with Claire in what is a remarkably well-done LGBTQ representation, especially for a series where non-heteronormative characters like Zach had their histories conveniently written out in previous volumes. She decides to join the carnival... just cos, I suppose, and then ends the season on a cliffhanger. More on that later.
     More awkward in the extreme is the treatment of the last season's cliffhanger, with Sylar now stuck in the form of Nathan Petrelli and his mind cluttering up Matt Parkman's. This gives the rather odd double role in which Sylar's physical body is walking around (sometimes looking like Nathan, sometimes like Sylar) with no memories of who the hell he is, while Matt is continually haunted by ghostly images of a Sylar who is having the time of his life being a snarky bastard and taking over Matt's body to do a variety of sick and hilarious things. It's a mighty kerfuffle which ends up with Sylar getting a crush on Claire for a few episodes and then deciding to become good in a way which makes every line read from then on pretty ridiculous and I think pretty much ended any possible character development he could have had.

Farewell, sweet cast. From Movieweb

      Which doesn't really matter, of course, as this was the last season. As happened in the previous volumes, it ended in A Brave New World with a teaser of the next volume, in which Claire reveals herself to the world by jumping off of a ferris wheel while the world's press is for some reason ready and waiting. On the one hand, there's a lot to be said for storylines covering the public reception to real-life superheroes and all of the social commentary that goes with it. On the other hand, what a stupid fucking idea. Literally every time that the public has been given a glimpse into the special's world on a mass scale, in Bad Futures or otherwise, it's always led to camps and holocausts and all hell breaking loose upon the world.
     And that's that. Yes, this is a shorter article than the big ones, but like the series itself I'm imbued with an apathy that I didn't possess at the beginning of this mini-project. It's a fair bit of symbolism for the show itself. It hadn't ran out of ideas, but it had certainly run out of the fresh-faced enthusiasm that it used to deliver them with, and a lot of the character beats in this final volume were either confusing, contradictory or simple repeats of things from previous volumes that really weren't needed. I think that a show like Heroes really does have a definite lifespan, and the only thing that I can really fault this final volume on is the fact that it uses that frustrating cliffhanger technique when really I think they should have bitten the bullet and let the show come to a natural and somewhat satisfying end. It didn't. And that's really what Heroes has left us with.

Thanks.

Overview: Heroes: Volume Four - Fugitives

The tide turns and the wind changes and this season didn't. Despite still being in Season Three, we're now in Volume Four, where there are no real supernatural enemies at all. I know, pretty shit right. I want to watch people blow each other up with fire powers, not the fucking West Wing. But this, dear view... reader, is my favourite of the five volumes. Why? Let us see... Written between 16th and 17th July 2013.

Still in Season Three. From BuddyTV

The show turned a different direction after the crushing blow of yet another shitty volume, and created a story which surrounded government espionage and living in hiding instead of randomers from across the globe coming to fight/help one another.And, while at times it manages to be as effortlessly naff as its predecessors, there's a strange focus towards character development that reveals our characters as real people for the first time, giving them empathisable traits and taking the show to a higher level of sophistication.

     The volume's plot sees politician Nathan ask The President to set up a secret organisation working out of the mysterious Building 26 in order to round up, inprison and neutralise evolved humans for the benefit of the General Public. He does this with the reluctant help of Emile Danko (Željko Ivanek), a ruthless but tired individual who suspects Nathan's turncoatism from the very beginning. This breaks down rapidly as the evolved humans, with the help of what little remains of The Company, fight back against the project. Sylar tries to find his real Dad and eventually works with Danko to pick off Evolved Humans for himself, before the Petrelli Family come together to stop Sylar's plan to use a new shape-shifting power to impersonate the President of the United States.

Emile Danko From Wikia

     The Petrellis are the centrepiece of this Volume, even more so than usual as Angela Petrelli finally gets to come into her own as the wonderfully sassy old lady that she is. She is the centrepoint of my favourite episode from the Volume, "1962", where she and the Petrelli family she's managed to round up come together and uncover the Coyote Sands incident, a similar round-up in the 60s where evolved humans were accidentally massacred. Nathan and Peter are also more clearly developed than befor, even is Peter is still managing to hold the Idiot Ball with both hands on all occasions.
     Danko is quite a complex and interesting villain, personally obsessed with hunting down evolved humans for no reason other than he can - his apartment is empty, he has no personal relationships besides a strange Czech girl who only knows his by an alias. Ivanek gives him a strange prominence that makes one constantly wonder what his plans are, mainly because we see how far he's willing to go to get his point across. When he teams up with Sylar near the end of the season it's a classic odd couple scenario and Sylar's ability to understand his personality in depth makes their dynamic all the more entertaining.
    Sylar comes off a bit weird this season, although his path is more focussed as he tracks down his biological father on a long road trip and then seeks to exploit the situation with the Building 26 project in order to carry on his quest for power, including his second attempt in-story to become the president of the United States. At the end of the volume he gets mind-wiped by Matt Parkman, who uses Sylar's new shapeshifting ability to brainwash him into thinking that he's Nathan, whom Sylar killed in the series finale. It's an odd decision that, while theoretically sound given Angela's distressed mindset after the loss of her sister and her eldest son, is not very well planned out and it does come to a head in the next volume.
     Hiro's story, which is always considerably detatched due to his being in Japan and all, initially circles around his kidnapping by the Building 26 project, but it later develops, thanks to spy Rebel (revealed to be technopath Micah in his final appearance), into taking care of Matt Parkman's son, who rather hilariously has the ability to "turn things on and off," resulting in a deus ex machina where Hiro's powers are miraculously returned to him. Not that I can really call anything a deus ex machina in a show whose internal logic is as spotty as a leopard with the measles.

The Petrellis get the development they need.
From Fanpop

     Volume Four sees the first attempt to develop real complexity in the characterisations, and despite the fact that the show was clearly on borrowed time it managed to exude a strange sort of charm that makes me like it regardless. The drama in the second half of the volume and the development of Angela Petrelli into a total bad-ass old lady brings out some of the best episodes that Heroes has ever produced, and no matter what people think about the awesomeness of the first volume, this will forever be my favourite.

Thanks.

Overview: Heroes: Volume Three - Villains

Welcome. As ratings peaked and then dropped faster than a very heavy thing in a vacuum, the show moved towards a different approach which tried to recapture the lightning of the first season's popularity. This failed. The series continued but its popularity continued to steadily drop, not helped by a set of characters whole allegiances seem to change as often as The Cat changes his outfit in the average season of Red Dwarf. Written between 20th and 21st June 2013.

Heroes. Villains. Get it? Yeah, I didn't actually notice this until
my rewatch. Talk about slow.

As I said, there was a response to the strike's effects. That effect being the second volume's remarkably poor reputation amongst its fanbase, which led the writers to take extreme methods to try and recapture that popularity in some of the most misguided ways possible. Instead of trying to evolve and move, as the original plan would have allowed Heroes to do, the show felt like it was becoming stagnate and convoluted, with the show failing to retain narrative coherancy within the same volume. While I still enjoy it by some absurd amount, I am not ashamed to call Volume Three my least favourite of the five.
     The plot sprung up a series of new lines in order to keep things interesting, with minor Volume Two villain Maury Parkmen turning into the worker for Peter and Nathan's dad Arthur, who it turns out survived his wife's attempt to poison him. (It's okay, he's an ass.) As Nathan is led off track by Maury's mind-tricks and Nathan's miraculous healing, his assailant, a Peter from yet another Bad Future, picks his old self up and warns the world of a Formula (held by Angela Petrelli and Hiro Nakamura, eventually stolen by new girl Daphne) that will give everyone powers.  Arthur awakens by absorbing powers from Adam Monroe, and steals Peter's powers too. His company Pinehearst becomes competition for Angela Petrelli's Primatech, crumbling after Sylar went in and let a series of dangerous super-powered criminals out. He also thinks he's Peter and Nathan's brother for this Volume, because Angela is manipulative and the writers are worse.
     Like I said, complicated. I will address a few of the subplots in detail cos if I don't I'll have nowt to talk about, but suffice to say that the constant shifting and twisting, despite making for a series of exciting revelations, doesn't exactly make for a cohesive one. The first two Volumes had themes - Genesis was about the capacity of normal people to do great things, and Generations was about the young making up for the mistakes of their elders. Villains' main theme is that some people are just assholes, and some aren't assholes, and most people can't decide, and most people don't really know. Which explains the fact that I need a fecking chart to tell me who's on whose side.

Sylar helping Noah is perhaps the cutest thing in the world.

     First, Sylar. This volume has been given a lot of the blame for the character's "pussification", which as inappropriate a term as it is does give description to a character who, mere hours after violently murdering one man (Bob) and trying to murder his daughter, wants to be a goody two-shoes and work with Noah as his bestest-buddy-o-pal. It's rubbed off by the end of the volume anyway. He falls for Elle, works for Arthur, decides he's evil and kills the two of them before returning to Primatech to psychologically torture the Petrelli females. (And Noah.) It doesn't make sense for him, and worst of all, it makes his eventual "permenant" turn at the end of Volume Five that little bit more meaningless.
    With Hiro and Peter, you have two characters whose sheer invincibility proved to be stifling to storytelling in the previous volume. It's always been the truth that invincible people make for boring characters, because they have no vulnerabilities. Villains goes about nerfing its characters in the most painful ways possible, and I don't mean in the "oh my feels" sense, I mean in the "makes me cringe" way. Peter has his powers stolen when he gives his dad a hug after turning into an psycho after absorbing Sylar's hunger, and Arthur later gives Hiro the mind of a child, forcing him to visit a comic-book store to know to travel back in time and get healed by his momma. (This would be repeated somehow in Volume Five. Do not ask me why or how.)
     Another odd feature of the volume (which I almost forgot) is Tracy Strauss, a character played by Niki Sanders actress Ali Larter, whose resemblance is explained as due to being one of three triplets given superpowers via the Formula. And if that is not the most comedically soapy plotlines you've ever heard, I congratulate you on never having watching much TV. As it stands, I prefer Tracy overall but I think that Niki had more consistent character development, at least in the first season. Tracy doesn't feel right until Volume Four, where she's fully integrated and awesome. Volume Three, she's just some crazy woman who looks like a desperate bid to keep Larter on board.

Also, there's this episode where Elle and Claire
get all shippy and I sorta love it.

    Talking of character derailment, let's say hello to the beginning of Mohinder being a bit shit. The scientist is totally wasted in his short bursts, and when he does get unique plotlines they surround the fact that his attempt to create his own Formula have turned him into a non-descript monster with webbed hands and potato-chip scabs on his back. It's almost as if Heroes has no concept of long-term thematic devices like call-backs or foreshadowing, or character consistency. I fail to see how Mohinder trapping people in a white sticky substance serves to give the series anything except innuendo.
     As Volume bad-guys go (Sylar, Adam, Arthur, Danko and Samuel), Arthur is perhaps the least well-characterised, too. Boy, I sure have a lot of crap to give to Volume Three. But Arthur isn't any kind of interesting evil. We were given an interesting set of ideas back in the second volume about how Arthur, Angela and other bad-guy Linderman were all diciples of Adam Monroe and followed his ideas about saving the world through some kind of mass human die-back. Arthur's aims and intentions are never very clear; we never really know why he wants to give powers to Humanity for any other reason than to spite his wife and to look all evil and cunning. It doesn't work.
     This is the last Bad Future scenario, given the absence of one in the next volume and a whole host of crazy time-travel retcons made in the last. Here's it's done and dusted in the first five or six episodes, with the trip failing to accomplish anything except to send Peter off into painful character derailment and to dangle a genuinely good-guy Sylar at us before killing his son and turning him into a genocidal murderer. Future Peter, despite having some cool powers, is ultimately useless and sorta kinda dies in the attempt. To Claire, if I remember rightly, who this volume suddenly decides that she wants to be an Action Girl. One of the main problems this time was that they ran out of Isaac Mendez paintings to prophesise the future with, and so it was never as iconic and wonderous. The only future-painter in this season is Usutu, and there never feels like there's any reason for him to be there besides being playing to the unfortunate Wise Black Man trope.
     Format-wise, this volume features two tidbits for our enjoyment. The first is our scheduled flashback episode, the titular Villains, which flashes us back to just before the beginning of the show and proceeds to re-write several key events in ways not internally consistant with the show's continuity. Not really a big fan of that, apart from the subplot where Angela, as the abused wife, gets her revenge on Arthur and poisons him. The other tidbit is the odd two-parter The Eclipse, wherein everyone loses their powers during an eclipse for some reason, opening a million plot-holes and making us wonder how in the hell you can have a two-parter in a serialised show.

Volume Three makes you love Daphne, just so that the next
Volume will tear your heart out. :D

     Picking my favourite episode, however difficult, brings me back to the volume's final episode, Dual, which sees Sylar trap the members of Primatech in their base and slowly torture them psychologically, in an episode that comes after the solution of the vast majority of the season's plotlines and seems to exist soley to let us have fun watching Sylar fuck with people's heads. It had a lot of stuff in it that seemed prime to confront the season on its own bullshit, especially with my favourite character Angela Petrelli andher very thorough yet character-building explanation of her long-winded Volume-long plot.
     So yeah. If you made it through that article, then you'll know that I don't have a lot of good things to say about this particular Volume. I enjoyed it at the time, but it also marked a period of the show's history for me where both I and many others felt that it lost its way. Now of course, the next Volume just so happens to be my favourite, which is wonderful, but there's no shaking the fact that Volume Three saw an end to a lot of the stuff that made the first few seasons great, for the sole reason that they tried so hard to replicate it and they ended up just making a season that was as messy as I think they could have made it.

Thanks.

Overview: Heroes: Volume Two - Generations

Welcome back. As Heroes' ratings skyrocketed, the new season was a given. But a great evil loomed over the horizon in those halicon days of 2008, as angry writers took up pitchforks and ripped up contracts in protest of poor pay and a high workload. The result was catastrophic, and affected dozens of US Shows. It would go down in History as the Writers Guild of America Strike of 2008, and as well as shorter seasons of LOST it gave us this much, much shorter second volume... Written 31/5/13

Adam Monroe. Evil badass. Awesome mofo.

The difficult second album. Heroes had originally meant, in the planning stages, to have a rolling cast which showcased new stories with each volume. With that scrapped, the writers instead planned a three-volume second season, which would have taken all sorts of weird and wonderful directions. The Writers Guild of America Strike, however, cut that short, and the resulting season could only manage eleven episodes, making this the shortest of the five volumes. It was a season ravaged from all directions by characterisation trouble, new characters who didn't mean much, crazy plot twists and a pace that failed to match its more brief running time. (And yet somehow, it's still better than Miracle Day.)
     I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of the Volume's troubles fall down to the Strike, but even despite that there are a few weird issues here or there. Peter is given soap amnesia, Hiro spends eight or so episodes in the 1600s, Claire and HRG have assumed a suburban life again. It feels like the writing team had a bit of bother in trying to fit the old characters into the "brand new world" after the finalé, where by rights everyone should know each other and be out doing daring do. This could have been used as the build-up to something truly spectacular, looking better in hindsight, but unfortunately the storyline that would have followed had to be cut off.
     The big trauma of this Volume is that of the Shanti Virus, a disease that only affects Supers. In the 1970s, the company that HRG worked for (and spends this season trying to bring down, to no avail) mutated the virus into one that could infect normal humans, and in a Bad!Future Peter sees the effects of the virus in the deaths of 93% of the world's population. The original brief for the series would have seen immortal badass Adam Monroe release the virus, leading to eight episodes of death, destruction and quarantine that sounds totally awesome. The strike forced the writers to reshoot several key scenes, instead ensuring that Peter caught the vial of the virus just in time, and had Nathan shot by a mysterious assailant. The potential of that scenario tears my heart out cos it just seems so good.

Cool powers. Complex characterisation. Kristen Bell.
She had to be my favourite character,
you just don't understand.

     Despite its adherence to a lot of the old cast members, that doesn't mean that we didn't get some good new'ens. Company leader Bob Bishop is cool, as is his daughter Elle, who is my favourite Season Two character, mainly due to her deep-seated psychosis brought up around impressing her abusive father. We also have aforementioned British Badass Adam Monroe, whose tenure was far, far too short, as well as the slightly more useless Maya Herrera, whose power is to kill people with a plague at will, her brother Alejandro, whose power is to stop Maya's power, and Monica Dawson, Micah's cousin who can replicate anything she sees and who subsequently disappears (and was apparently always going to.)
     Talking of Monica, let's discuss her uncle, D.L. Hawkins, whose appearance in Season One was totes badass. D.L. suffered a similar fate to that of Nina in Being Human - a finale uses the threat of his death as a dramatic element, only for him to survive that and then die inbetween seasons. As we only find this out in a flashback episode that comes about eight episodes into the Volume, it feels like the most frustrating motherfucker in the world. D.L. might as well have just died at Kirby Plaza, because the overall effect is the same and the subplot used in that episode to explain his death is one of the most stupid things that the show has ever done and probably will ever do, featuring a second alter-ego of Niki's called Gina who never appears before or after.
     The vote for my favourite episode of the Volume is a bit difficult given the circumstances, but oddly enough it would have to be that aforementioned flashback episode, Four Months Ago... . It's a strangely absorbing episode that really fulfils that need to see the cliffhanger of Season One resolved. I think the choice to leave that resolution to episode eight of eleven was god-damn stupid given that that's not the way TV has ever really worked (It's a bit like showing Boom Town straight after the cliffhanger in The Empty Child and then coming back the next week and saying, "Oh yeah, that cliffhanger, here's how they got out of it.") In showing what happened to our characters between the seasons we are better able to follow them as people, and that is what characterisations are about.

Amnesiac!Peter has a relationship with Caitlin, an irish girl
who ends up trapped in the Bad!Future and is thus
subsequently never mentioned EVER AGAIN. Cool.

     So much potential; so much silliness. But I don't necessarily thing that it's a bad thing in the long run. Generations set the season off on a bad road in the public eye, and while ratings were steadily declining anyway, it was the season that gave the writers this impression that they needed to step things up. The results of that were... good and bad. I think that the knowledge that so many of the Volume plot lines will have very little impact later on gives the volume a reckless charm that for me at least makes it that little bit more enjoyable than otherwise. Think of this volume as a warmup for next time, where the plot twists run thick and fast and no-one really knows what's going on.

Thanks.

IN EIGHT WEEKS: Arthur Petrelli. Is Sylar really Peter's brother? Cool powers for everyone! Oh, except you Peter. Sorry about that. It's Volume Three - Villains.

Overview: Heroes: Volume One - Genesis

Like all Heroes episodes, I'm tempted to begin each of these overviews with a strange and unnecessary voiceover. Like those voiceovers, I may attempt to use grandiose clichés. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. See, I just did one there. You should probably read these in the voice of an Indian guy with a pronounced London accent. Or not, it's up to you. This is the first of five overviews to cover the five Heroes volumes, ensuring I don't have to come up with enough crap to review all of the sparsely written 78 episodes. Written 18/5/13.

12 main characters is only two fewer than Lost, you know.

Now, contrary to popular belief, Heroes was not a bad show. It was a mixed show, of course, and it certainly had its problems, some of which came from the wounding blow that was the 2008 Writer's Guild of America Strike and some of which came from lazy writing and lazier continuity. But the show as a whole is one I enjoy, not just for the coolness factor that it exudes (although that is the main attraction of the first season) but also because it manages to pump out some decent characterisations.
     The first season and the first volume stick to the series' premise the most snugly - a group of people around the world (read: The United States with two guys from Japan) discover that they have super-powers, all in good time to prevent the destruction of New York via a super-induced nuclear reaction. Along the way they run into the secretive Company that tracks and catalogues Specials, and try to foil the schemes of supervillain/serial killer Sylar. By far the longest of the five volumes, Genesis takes its sweet time to get going, being rewarded with a richer and deeper atmosphere than any of the others.
     The very early episodes often suffer from a How Do I Shot Web factor as our heroes discover their abilities for the first time, and the series tries to work out the kinks in its designs and idiosyncrasies. Geneticist Mohinder Suresh's accent changes wildly, the invulnerable Clare Bennet becomes a great deal less whiny and the Man In Horn Rimmed Glasses (heron in HRG, even when his real name is revealed) shows his more badass side. The triumph of the early season, though, is the slow introduction to series villain Sylar, first from the grisly scenes he leaves behind and culminating in the first character cross-over as power-sponge Peter Petrelli saves Claire from Sylar's attacks at Homecoming. The season's middle section features some fun developments, including a guest performance from Christopher Eccleston (the year after Doctor Who, no less) and reveals about Claire's parentage that err on the soapy side but work well in the long run. It culminates with what is my favourite episode of the season, "Company Man", which has a Lost-style focus on HRG, his adoption of Claire and his flashbacks to the painful decisions he made in the past. It's probably not a positive sign that my two favourite Heroes episodes are the ones formatted like episodes of Lost, but ho hum. The drive towards the finale is done exceedingly well, with confrontations abound until the final magnificent showdown which, despite not being as sheerly awesome as it could have been still left the series with a triumphant moment of glory.

YATTAAA!

     A lot of the plot in the earlier volumes is driven by precognition, which makes some funky problems regarding timelines. Sometimes the visions of the bad future are painted and are subject to metaphor, but often time-travelling characters like Hiro Nakamura (and eventually Peter) visit or are visited by people from the future. The first volume's bad future is one in which Peter exploded and wiped New York off the map, which of course means that he spends most of the season angsty about not wanting to blow up.
     I haven't spoken much about Matt Parkmen or Niki Sanders, and that's probably to do with the fact that for the majority of the season they have their own shit going on. Niki is a super-strong stripper with multiple personality disorder trying to fight her alter ego Jessica in order to keep her technopath son Micah and phasing criminal husband D.L. safe from the machinations of arch-villain Linderman (Malcolm McDowell, everybody!). Her storyline oft becomes frustrating; watching someone argue with themselves only has novelty for a while. Matt Parkman is a telepath who despite become a much larger key player later on spends the first volume as an ineffectual jerkass whose abilities lose him his job, his wife and his unborn child. Instead he takes on and adopts Molly, a girl he found hiding under the stairs in the house where her parents were killed by Sylar.
      The season's final grand conspiracy involving Linderman, Peter's flying politician brother Nathan and their mother Angela (my favourite character, but not quite yet) underlines a great number of the series' themes. Whereas the series' focus quite often talks about ordinary people doing extraordinary things, the opposite comes with elite groups trying to kill millions to make humanity as a whole better. It is a cry for personal freedom and responsibility over the "Greater good" peddled by literally all of the show's main villains.
     As I said before, my favourite episode of the volume (this will be a regular thing, you understand,) was Chapter 17, Company Man. Focusing entirely upon Claire, HRG and an invasion of her house by two specials wanting answers for HRG's activities with the Company, the episode examines in depths of depths of his moral ambiguity and the lengths he's gone to in order to protect his family despite his loyalty to the company that forced him into adopting her. If I had to pick a least favourite, it would probably have to be Genesis, the pilot episode, which is shoddy in the extreme and has several differences to the norm whose remedying is never incorporated into the plot.

Sylar, in all of his glorious undiluted evil.

     Volume One, despite probably being the most entertaining of the five, does often sacrifice character coherency in favour of spectacle and comic-book style allusions. Just because it has the most natural progression from origin towards the heroes' first triumph doesn't mean that the journey is a smooth one, and it hits many bumps along the way. Luckily though, the first volume is the one I don't really need to justify my love for - it's liked everywhere you go, and is accepted by the world's "official opinion" as the show's single decent season. Seeing as it isn't my favourite, I think we're in for some funtimes...

Thanks.

NEXT TIME Join me in eight weeks time (I know, I know) for the rather short Volume Two - Generations.