Tuesday, April 24, 2007 Covington: Heroes By Gary Covington
ASTOUNDING news! Last week TNT & G, the super-lawyers of Channel 23's Justice, lost a case. Their client, whom we know didn't do it, was found guilty of murder and sent down for the term of his natural life.
Wow. I honestly thought we were in for a series where, as regular as clockwork, every week, TNT & G would triumph but - Justice is a Bruckheimer production and from Mr B. We should expect the unexpected.
Another show stuffed with surprises and featuring some wonderful end of episode hooks is RPN's Heroes.
Here's a show I was in two minds to watch, yea or nay. It's about super beings -- folks with extraordinary powers, differently-abled I suppose we'd call them in today's idiotic politically correct terminology and I'm not a mutant ninja X-man sort of guy.
But, the first episode ended with such a glorious hook -- a fellow jumping off the roof of a skyscraper (Will he fly? Hit the deck? Get whacked by a passing helicopter?) -- and the second week's even better -- a massive explosion wiping out New York (Nuclear? Aliens? An Iraqi WMD finally arriving?) that I was well and truly caught.
Six episodes on and it's obvious that Heroes is a re-working of the Seven Samurai theme. The original 1954 film (marvelous -- see it if you can) told the story of six ronin - outcast samurai -- hired by a village headman to halt the depravations of a local warlord. Here, with Heroes, we have six super people coming together -- eventually; they live all over the States and one in far-off Japan -- via the efforts of the seventh, a Mumbai, not Apache Wells, Indian research assistant.
The six comprise a guy who can fly; an indestructible teenage cheerleader who can suffer appalling injuries and then literally pull herself together; an apple pie mom burdened with an evil and ferocious alter ego; a plodding cop who can hear people think; an artist who paints canvases depicting the future; and, lastly, a Japanese guy who plays with time.
Quite a cast and so far so good with the good-guys-see-off-bad-guys Samurai plotline but the show's writers have slipped in a bunch of secondary plots peopled with not so secondary characters. Thing is -- are all these folks the innocents they seem?
For starters there's the flier's brother, not one of the magnificent seven but he too can fly. Okay, he's lacking finesse; losing pants and shirt in the slipstream, landing with all the grace of a sack of onions flung off a truck and -- a major failing - not knowing where he is when he does come to earth.
He's also involved -- between the sheets involved -- with the apple pie mom who he met on a junket to LA. What he doesn't know is that their bedroom fun and games was filmed, that her husband is a homicidal seven-foot body builder on the run from a murder rap, that there' s two million dollars stuffed into a suitcase hidden in the roof space, that it's mob money and they'd like it back, but let's leave it there. Later on things get complicated.
Outrageously suspect is the cheerleader's father. He's straight out of The Twilight Zone or (for non-oldies) The X-Files. Respectable, sober-suited, trimly barbered and yet not at all the doting dad he makes out to be.
He can fly too -- not a usual dad accomplishment -- bullets bounce off his shirtfront and he whisks through time and space as the fancy takes him with the greatest of ease. And no thumping into the desert dressed in his Y-fronts either. This fellow is organized.
But is he a good guy? He looks to be throwing a wrench into the works by spying on the super seven and yet his daughter is a hero too. Is he even human?
The show's opening and closing titles feature a planet pocked with the circular blooms of multiple nuclear explosions. We assume its planet Earth but is it? The plots multiply, tangle, unravel, there's loose ends everywhere. Watch this space. Better; watch Heroes.
