So, here are my thoughts regarding tonight's episode. It was a decent enough episode, and I imagine a lot of people will like it. I am particularly annoyed by it though because of elements of it that are too similar to elements of Avatar The Last Airbender.
I've posted on one element that I suspected was coming based off of reading an advance blurb description of Meredith and her "hot headed" brother. I even posted pictures from Avatar in a past post in this thread in talking about that. Tonight's episode proved my suspicions correct, but tonight's episode of Heroes included multiple other elements from Avatar, and it's really gotten under my skin. So, my comments here about tonight's episode will include me ranting about those uncanny similarities. If you want to watch Avatar yourself without any spoilers, then perhaps my comments are not for you. Otherwise, here are my comments on tonight's Heroes.
And so what I suspected with dread is true: red fire wielding Meredith has a crazy blue fire wielding brother, Flint. I have a problem with it because of the same thing having been done on Avatar The Last Airbender with red fire wielding Zuko having a crazy blue fire wielding sister, Azula, which is something I posted about a couple weeks ago, complete with pictures. Meredith tries to run from the company with her brother, and in the process of the Company trying to catch them, Meredith sets the train on fire. This train on fire is the one that Claire ran through in the first episode of the show.
And so Elle and HRG were working together to follow and track and interact with Sylar after he had taken telekinesis from his first victim? Kirsten Bell continues to be the strongest actor on this show. Not only did he know Sylar was a murderer, HRG worked to give Sylar other victims. HRG even watched Sylar kill one on camera. In the end, HRG tells Elle that the Company wants Sylar loose. So when did HRG actually start giving a shit and try to stop Sylar in season one?
There was an advertisement for something called "Heroes Destiny" or "Heroes Destinies" about some hero that was created through some progressive online fan voting process, which produced some dude name Santiago. They've apparently filmed live action story pieces about the character that they're releasing online. In the clips shown during the advertisement for it, those story pieces also includes a character played by Andrea Thompson, aka Talia Winters of Babylon 5.
Arthur can control minds and erase thoughts, and did it a lot to Angela. Linderman healed her so that she could remember the things Arthur took from her, and so she remembered Arthur's wanting to kill Nathan. Using the Haitian to block Arthur's powers, Angela proceeds to try to kill Arthur with poison. Arthur, on whatever medical machines that he was revealed to be hooked to a few weeks back, uses his power to make the doctor tell his family that he's dead and provide ashes of some other person for his family to bury.
I'm annoyed enough as it is over Meredith and Flint compared to Avatar's Zuko and Azula. But I'm further annoyed now. Angela, in an effort prevent her husband from killing her son, tries to kill her husband. In Avatar, Zuko's father was going to kill him under orders from Zuko's grandfather, and to protect Zuko from his father, Zuko's mother killed Zuko's grandfather instead. Hell, let's go ahead and throw in Hiro's white eyes and sort of "disembodied spirit" and "between worlds" description from the African Isaac. Aang on Avatar could travel between the regular world and the spirit world, during which his spirit would become disembodied and his eyes would glow white. And now they're heading to some big dramatic event centered around an eclipse, which happened on Avatar too. The first episode of Avatar was shown on February 21, 2005 with a lot of the details of the story arc already established prior to writing, much like Babylon 5. The elements of the eclipse, Aang's glowing eyes, the spirit world, Zuko and his sister, Zuko and his father and his mother, were written prior to the start of the show out of creating a backstory and in preparation for turning the narrative into the individual scripts for the show, season by season. The first appearance of Zuko's sister was in an episode on June 3, 2005, though her blue fire wasn't first shown until March 17, 2006. The first reference to the impending significant event involving the eclipse occurred in an episode on July 14, 2006. The events surrounding Zuko's mother killing Zuko's grandfather in order to keep Zuko's father from killing Zuko were first introduced on May 12, 2006.
The first episode of Heroes was on September 25, 2006. Yeah, all these similarities are probably all coincidental, as multitude as they are, but the coalescing of them in tonight's one episode has really, really gotten to me because of how much I love Avatar. In fact, I'd say that Babylon 5 only edges Avatar out for the position of my favorite show out of a sense of nostalgia I have for B5; if not for that, Avatar could very well be my favorite tv show of all time (not counting something classic like I Love Lucy).
