The second season of Heroes was, thankfully, a short one. It only had 11 episodes and the most memorable thing in these 11 episodes was Zachary Quinto's awesome rendition of Sylar. Even without any of his powers this guy is creepy. The sad part was that he did pretty much nothing except travel for the entire season - until the final episode, that is. Overall, I wouldn't say it was bad, but not much really happened and it failed to stretch the world and the premise further.
Details: (SPOILERS)
The replacement villain Adam really didn't work for me. This is mainly because it was almost impossible to figure out what his story was and whether he really was evil or not. Until the last moment I was still unsure and I kept wanting him to turn out to be a good guy - because someone really needs to take that company down already.
The company is another disappointment. I mentioned in my season 1 review that they didn't develop it well. This season didn't do any better. I got tired of hearing the same speech about how the company had been developed 30 years ago bla bla bla by about five different characters, but we never really got any interesting details about it. Also, instead of showing us more of the headquarters and inner workings of the company they reused old spots like Isaac Mendez' loft.
The plot stagnated as well. There wasn't much happening for many episodes and even though they widened the settings with the whole Kensei thing in 1600s Japan and Peter hanging out in Ireland this had almost nothing to do with the plot and they failed to actually widen the horizons of the show. I mean, why couldn't it have been Ireland that gets hit by the Virus first or something? Or why couldn't Peter have met some Irish Heroes? I just fail to see why that whole story arc happened in Ireland in the first place - the way they wrote it it might as well have been in a different city in America for all the difference the setting made.
This brings me to a point I made in the previous review of season 1: they aren't making good use of the diversity of their characters (and this time, their settings). I was highly dissappointed by Kensei being a British guy and the fact that it was "really" Hiro didn't help too much. Also the women are still pointless: Nikki had better stay dead, Claire just redid the same story over, and the new girl Monica had nothing to do with the main plotline. The Haitian remains intriguing because we still don't know what he's up to really, but again, he's vastly underused.
My favorite character last season was Peter, but his story failed to go anywhere until the final episode. He was also being really stupid in general for the entire season, which didn't help. Another character they destroyed was Mohinder. I really did not appreciate his inner conflict about the company.
Matt Parkman was probably the only character that improved. They gave him more time and he was actually doing something for the entire season - he had a goal and he kept going after it and the story-line with his father and their developing power was cool.
Overall, I think the second season was ok, but it failed to go where it could have. There was alot of potential to expand on the universe that had been already established, but it didn't live up that potential. I hope season 3 does, because I may just stop watching...or at least slow down, lol.
World-Building Rating:
I'm going to have to bring this season down a notch and rate it Shoddy. The plot and characterization problems didn't help, of course, but even by itself the world-building failed. New settings were horribly underused, the company is still not well-developed, and even the superpowers aren't developed very much.
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