QUICKIE -- Heroes Reborn - (Premiere) "Brave New World"

I'm going to talk about this briefly as I have a few friends who wanted to hear what I thought about the premiere, so I'm going to give this a shot. Keep in mind that I haven't watched nor followed Heroes since the first/second seasons whenever the writers' strike occurred that caused everything to go downhill, so a lot of this stuff that they are referring to from the previous series is a bit over my head. I will comment on what I did and didn't like about this show so far.

The Verdict:

Introduction

As soon as they started to referring powered people in this show as "Evos" my mind went towards thinking about Generator Rex where people marked with bizarre abilities thanks to the power of malevolent nanomachines were referred to the same title. Plus, I couldn't help but laugh after the "mysterious" explosion during the peace conference that showed shades of a similar event in both X-Men: Destiny and Wolverine and the X-Men. From just the first few minutes, this show wasn't leaving a positive mark on me in terms of writing.

Katana Girl

Out of the new powers introduced by this revived series, I have to admit that this one was the most intriguing. The ability to transfer oneself into a video game and acquire the combat prowess and skills of that avatar is definitely original unless there's someone who wants to point out that it's essentially being the One from The Matrix.

Much like just about almost everything in this premiere, the whole subplot of "rescue my kidnapped father" seems a little cliched to the point that you would expect in a bad karate movie. My biggest complaint during this subplot was that the computer-generated effects looked like something you would see in the late 90's to early 2000s (circa: original PlayStation) video games instead of present day. If NBC were going that route, you would think that they would bother with a bigger budget to make the "game" look a little more top notch.

The Troubled Teenager

Out of the new "heroes" introduced in this premiere episode, I think the kid was the easiest to relate to. The creators were wise to go with a grounded background story here. I'm anxious to see where this goes with his cheerleader crush, the football jock with the abusive step-dad (isn't that cliched enough in media nowadays?), and the mysterious (possible pedophile...) old man that's following him around mind-erasing people without the means of the Men in Black.

I thought his power ranks second behind Katana Girl's in terms of creativity and originality, even though it's almost identical to Hiro's power in the original series. Instead of mere teleportation, the teen's power seems to be a clever "remote transporter" power, similar to Nightcrawler from X-Men.

The Luchador Vigilante

Now this was a treat. One thing that was heavily criticized in the original series before the boom period of the superhero genre in present day media was the lack of proper costumes for these heroes. Here, we get the first glimpse of a costume hero for this series and it looked pretty bad ass. I hope his successor adopts something similar or puts his own spin to the costume.

The Anti-Evo Bonnie & Clyde

The couple that slaughters the group of Evos meeting in secret within a church that the troubled teen was called away from prematurely are the most captivating actors out of the newcomers and are natural villains in this premiere. Sadly, they lack Skylar's sheer terrorizing presence, but I think that will come in due time. Out of all of the characters introduced in this premiere, they have already bleed over into multiple subplots involving the other characters. I think they will be the bridge that links all of these subplots together into the one universal plot over the course of this mini-series.

Noah Bennett

One of the only returning main characters (so far) from the previous series finds himself living a pretty average life throughout the course of this premiere until discovering that his memories have been tampered with after the "death" of his daughter. I thought the entire premise of the original series was "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World"? Sounds like this world is screwed right off the bat already.

Watch it or Don't Bother?

If you liked the original Heroes or just want something else on your plate within the superhero genre (like you don't have enough to watch already...) then give this a shot. This mini-series is only going to stick around for 13 episodes and that's more than enough time that I'm willing to give this show. There were moments where I was looking at the clock wondering when they were going to wrap this first episode up, but I'm trying to be optimistic that this series is straight-forward and to the point instead of dragging along at a sluggish pace like the original Heroes series was notorious for.