"Heroes": "I Am Become Death"

Let's get one thing straight: "Heroes" clearly has absolutely no idea what to do with itself. It's original, catchy notion - ordinary people discover they have superpowers - has been completely exploded. Now, you get superpowers by injecting yourself full of superhero juice, or by sipping some savant-African potion and putting on earphones, or by fixing a clock. "Now you have my power," said Future-Sylar yesterday, and apropos of nothing, Peter did! We've now seen three separate future-verses, all of them overexposed in "Minority Report" blue monochrome. The Future in the world of "Heroes" functions roughly the same as the Mirror, Mirror universe in "Star Trek" - every time you go there, everything you know gets completely turned on its head. This is nifty, but "Star Trek" had the courtesy to visit that universe once per series; "Heroes" goes there multiple times in a season.

Cause and effect have become irrelevant as a result. So far this season, Future Peter ruined everything by going into the past and Present Peter ruined everything by going into the future. Hiro traveled to the future and saw Ando betray him, which made him distrust Ando in the present, but his distrust is pushing Ando to betray him. Future Claire killed Future Peter, and then Present Peter killed Future Nathan. Meanwhile, in the two subplots which, so far, don't involve time travel, Nathan can't stop seeing Dead Linderman, and Ali Larter, god bless her, is playing a completely brand new character, thanks to a red-alert plot twist which will henceforth be referred to as the Triplets Protocol.

Anyone hoping that the show would bounce back this season has been disappointed even while they've been blown away. The choice to make time travel the central plotline of this season is ruinous, and genius. Any hope of rediscovering the beautiful simplicity of season 1 - "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" - has been thrown out of the window. In its place is a madcap overcomplexity which competes with "The Wire" in sheer amount of characters, shadowy motives, mysterious connections, and overlapping destinies. The difference is that "The Wire" had a good grasp of every single character - I couldn't tell you what that one bald detective's name was, but boy did I love him (especially when he grew that beard in season 5) - whereas on "Heroes," characters radically self-transmogrify every three seconds.

Mohinder was the sober voice of reason and humanity, until he rashly decided to inject himself full of super juice; Maya used to beg endlessly for a superpower cure, until she started grocery shopping and begging boytoy Mohinder to get out of his stuffy lab; Angela Petrelli was a goofy kleptomaniac mom, before she turned, brilliantly, into Angela Lansbury from "The Manchurian Candidate." Sylar, the most evil man on earth, takes just 4 years to become Gabriel, everyman soccer dad with a son named after his worst enemy.

It's not just that motivations shift. Everything that we understand about character origins keeps changing, too. All it took was one guest starring appearance by George Takei to turn Hiro from a lovable worker drone into the scion to one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. In Season 1, the characters were random, everyday people, slowly coming together. In Season 2, we learned that all the characters' parents used to get together on weekends for bridge and conspiratizing.

This is why the show is imploding, but it's also why this relentless Time Travel gambit makes perfect sense. A couple of futures ago, Parkman had a human wife and a baby; now, he's hitched to the speedster and has a different baby. The whole slapdash aesthetic extends to how people use their powers. Hiro can't control his time/space travel, except when he controls it perfectly; Claire knows she can't die, but still gets freaked out when her real ma gives her a fire-power waterboard session. Tracy Strauss never knew she had any powers until some reporter made her angry, and now she can freeze everything all of the time.

This wouldn't be a problem if the show didn't regularly set up a "Stand-off," like this week, where Claire held a gun on Sylar's son. Now, here's Sylar and Peter, two of the most powerful men ever, who could probably choose 10 different powers to defeat the situation, including superspeed, invulnerability, telekinesis, THE ABILITY TO STOP TIME, etc.

This makes it sound like I'm ragging on the show, but this week's episode was one of my favorite ever. For every ridiculous moment, there's a moment that works wonders, precisely because no other show could ever do it, because no other show has ever been this ridiculous. This is probably the first serialized show that's equally impossible to understand if you're watching it for the first time or if you've memorized every episode. Context does the show no justice, because context is ignored until it isn't. Things which used to seem new have by now become strange plot totems regularly around by everyone. Hiro Nakamura does nothing but try and save the world every episode; he's like the Brain in reverse (with Ando his Pinky.) Peter Petrelli also has no interior life besides world-saving. Nathan Petrelli is a power-hungry politico, until he has a change of heart, until he has another change of heart.

It's all weirdly reminiscent of something "The Daily Show" did with the Iraq war: taking a few clips of Bush talking about Iraq and reversing them chronologically, so that the narratives goes from a confusing Civil War to an ebbing insurgency to victory to bringing the troops home. Characters on "Heroes" who have seen the future are, bizarrely, even more doomed to repeat that future than characters who haven't. On the 5th year anniversary of Iraq, Bush said, "The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency; it is the right decision at this point in my presidency; and it will forever be the right decision." Choices in the contemporary world can now be debated separate from the action that follows from that decision, because the choice is the action. Technically speaking, if you believe in time travel, then you have to believe abortion is wrong. Of course, you also have to believe that a planned pregnancy is equivalent to first-degree murder.

Authors like Pynchon and Delillo and Wallace have tried to capture the sheer overwhelmingness of the modern world, but always through a lens of commentary, even subtle. "Heroes" has no commentary, which is why, watched closely, it seems to mean everything. References to current events are dropped in frequently, and a Buster Keaton movie plays in the background, and the Mona Lisa has been stolen. Read the list of offenses Mark Twain's proto-flame of Fenimore Cooper and ponder how "Heroes" violates every single one, every single episode.

If "The Wire" was the perfect portrayal of the modern American reality, "Heroes" is the perfect portrayal of what Americans think reality is. Sylar is a villain until he's a hero; McCain is a maverick until he starts calling himself one and isn't; Obama supports gay marriage but can't say it out loud, or that's what we liberals tell ourselves; baseball players actually did gain superstrength, and it left them looking almost as bad as future Mohinder. It's impossible to say that this show is good, but it's impossible to think of not watching.