Tonight's Heroes

Okay, if you missed tonight's episode, you really missed something! That flat-out rocked; this is the kind of show Heroes started out being until it fell off the wagon a few episodes in. But, like any baby, it had to wobble a little before it learned to walk. Now we just have to sit back and hope it gets the hang of things without winding up in the emergency room.

I noticed that this one was neither written nor directed by Tim Kring, and that just may make all the difference. I've said over and over how he has mentioned over and over that he never read comics, and that makes all the difference in the world when you work on a show... based on comic books. I don't know that either person who wrote or directed tonight's episode grew up reading comics, or read them at any point, but I can definitely say they had a better grasp of the concepts involved than Kring seems to.

Of course, that's a tough call, since he set everything in motion, and the beginning anything is always the hardest part -- that, and the ending. At some point in-between, whatever you do becomes its own thing; no matter what you intended nor what you thought you were going to say or where you thought you would end up, you hit your stride somewhere along the way and it takes on its own motion and sense of weight and goes its own way.

Then, if you try to force it back onto any predestined path, it becomes very obvious that someone is controlling things -- the audience can see "the man behind the curtain," as it were. So it's hard for me to say that Kring can't write or direct his own show, I just think he's better at producing it than he has performed in other aspects.

I could be wrong about this, and only time will tell, but after seeing tonight's episode -- and thinking back on the ones I've seen before where I've noticed someone else's names on those credits -- this is the conclusion I've come to for now.