Unexpected

Last night, as my girlfriend and I contemplated what to do (after playing a board game with a friend who went to bed early), I hit upon an idea. Knowing that NBC offers its shows free for viewing on-line and knowing that we were both vaguely interested in seeing what it was all about, I suggested that we watch the first episode of the show Heroes. We loved the first episode and couldn't wait to get to the second... except NBC.com didn't seem to offer the second episode! We could get hooked for free on the first episode, we could watch the 5 or 6 most recent episodes, but the 10 or so episodes in the gap weren't available. We could get 2-minute summaries of them or we could go to iTunes and purchase them for $1.99 per episode.

Suckers that we are, we did the latter and ended up staying up until all hours watching the first four episodes (and downloading the rest to fill in the gap. We've come to it late, but we're hooked so far. Four episodes in, we've bOeen introduced to a broad array of characters and enough mysteries to keep us watching. Our favorite character so far is Hiro, the Japanese man who reads comic books, watches Star Trek, and can bend space and time. He's just so cute in his naive enthusiasm for being a hero (he takes his guidance from the X-Men and Spiderman). Other characters, however, see their developing superpowers in different ways. For one they are inconvenient and/or irrelevent, for another they are an abnormality that could make her a test subject or in a freak show, while another finds in them some combination of salvation and damnation, or in the case of the character who can see the future, as offering insights that he seems compelled to reveal yet powerless to effect or get anyone to believe him (and he also helps to hang the threat of the nuclear annihilation of NYC over the show, just to add a bit of dramatic tension). These super powers, seemingly, are all things to all people. We also have the mysterious man who seems to be hunting them down and doing experiments on our budding heroes (who's also the adopted father of one of them--d'oh!) and at least one (other?) super-villain in the works.

So far, it's been a smartly-written, compelling watch--there have been a few moments where something has rung false, but by and large we're really liking it. Anyway, we have a lot of catching up to do. I'd better keep this entry short and get to it!

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