
Universal Studios
Like the genre it drew it’s inspiration from, Heroes and its sequel series Heroes Reborn starts strong out of the gate and then steadily crumbled over it’s poor execution despite it’s interesting concepts and intriguing characters.
Created by Tim Kring, the series aimed to explore the lives of ordinary people who discover they possess extraordinary abilities.
Heroes promised a fresh take on the superhero genre, tapping into themes of legacy, destiny, morality, and the consequences of power, often borrowing liberally from the work of Chris Claremont, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, and J. Michael Straczynski.
The first season introduces the major characters and focuses on various individuals across the globe discovering their superpowers.
The primary storyline revolves around a nuclear explosion foreseen in New York City and the heroes’ attempts to prevent this catastrophe. Also weaved into the first season is a serial killer, Sylar (Zachary Quinto), who targets those with abilities to steal their powers.
Jack Coleman plays Noah Bennet (aka HRG), who works at the Primatech Paper Company, which is a front for a group that tracks and experiments on people with superhuman abilities. Despite being considered a Company Man, Bennet’s true allegiance is to his family. That family includes his daughter, Claire (Hayden Panettiere), a high school cheerleader with the power of high pain tolerance and rapid cellular regeneration.
The Petrelli family includes matriarch Angela Petrelli (Christine Rose); her son Nathan (Adrian Pasdar), a politician running for Congress; and his brother Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) a hospice nurse.
Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka) was a Japanese otaku office worker who has the ability to alter the flow of time, teleport and time travel. With co-worker and best friend Ando (James Kyson Lee) acting as his sidekick, Hiro sets out on a journey to discover his destiny.
As the series continues we quickly start to see the series begin to be overwhelmed with its own mythology. A new sinister force begins stalking and murdering heroes. H.R.G. and Claire attempt to live as inconspicuously as possible… which proves to be easier said than done. After landing in feudal Japan, Hiro meets his hero Takezo Kensei. And twins Maya and Alejandro Herrera hope to make the crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, in hopes of finding help with their deadly abilities.
By the third season, alternate timelines, conspiracy theories, and just plain silly or confusing plot devices sends the series into a downward spiral from which it never recovers. The final season included a superhuman carnival, new abilities, secrets revealed, and a final reveal to the world that superhumans exist.
The set also includes the limited series Heroes Reborn which is set five years after the finale of season four. We find the world a different place which changed with a terrorist attack in Odessa, Texas a year after the original series concluded. The government blames those with abilities (evolved humans, or “evos”) for the attack, forcing those with superpowers to go into hiding.
A couple, who lost their son at the Odessa bombing, have become vigilantes who systematically hunt and kill evos. Several characters from the original series make appearances including Noah Bennet, Matt Parkman, Angela Petrelli, Micha Sanders, Mohinder Suresh, The Haitian, and Hiro Nakamura.
The series finds these first generation characters crossing paths with the Reborn evos, who have teamed up with to save the world from a geomagnetic reversal that will leave the planet vulnerable to lethal solar radiation. Overall, Heroes Reborn was a noble effort, but ultimately did nothing to restore the promise that the first season held.
Extras are plentiful and include every supplemental feature from previous releases making it the ultimate and complete collection of the Heroes brand. Bonus features include the never-before-aired series premiere, an alternate ending to the Season 2 finale, featurettes, audio commentaries, deleted scenes, all of the web-series, and more.
Heroes: The Complete Collection starts promising, but to much disappointment, it just doesn’t work. It’s a shame though, as revisiting the series on Blu-ray gave me hope that reassessing the series would leave me with a more positive outlook, but instead it’s hard to see it as anything other than a series of failed opportunities. Glaring plot holes, absurd twists, and missed opportunities eclipse nearly every redeeming quality of the series.


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