Ten Common-Sense Ways to Fix Heroes

So, Heroes. Volumes Three and Four. Pretty sloppy stuff.

Can Heroes be fixed? Sure, provided more time and care is spent with the scripts. Will this happen? I doubt it. Last season’s most promising behind-the-scenes development was the return of Volume One’s celebrated writer-producer Bryan Fuller to the fold. The first episode he penned after his return, “Cold Snap,” was the strongest episode of the season. However, two of Heroes’ worst-ever episodes, the filler-heavy “Into Asylum” and the execrable “1961,” also came after Fuller rejoined the staff. This does not bode well for the health and longevity of the series.

Here’s a list of my common-sense--one could say blatantly obvious--suggestions for cleaning up and improving the show. Much of this rehashes material covered elsewhere on this site, both in my episode recaps and the comments that follow them. This is a key point I’ve made before: while there’s no consensus of opinion as to what constitutes a good plot (if anyone’s interested in seeing what I would do with the new season plotwise, I direct you to my Heroes Volume Five spec script), there is a consensus on some general rules of effective writing. Heroes violated those rules, flagrantly and chronically, and the show suffered.

1. Make sure the characters take priority over the plot. If you’ve got a great plot idea, but you can’t make it work without forcing your characters to behave in uncharacteristic ways, you must abandon the idea. Let’s take a look at how Mohinder was established in Volume One: book-smart but gullible, idealistic and morally pure to the point of self-righteousness, mild-mannered but sometimes caustic and prone to the occasional hissyfit. All of Mohinder’s actions must fall within the parameters of these qualities, or his character won’t seem believable and the plot won’t seem plausible. Simple enough.

So you have this idea for a plotline: Mohinder develops a serum which gives him bug-like powers. He then uses these abilities to capture people, stash them in cocoons made from his own bodily excretions, and perform weird genetic experiments on them.

Wait, what?

Is there anything in Mohinder’s character description to suggest: a) he’s always secretly coveted powers to the extent of being willing to perform untested and dangerous genetic experiments on himself, and b) if given the opportunity, he’d kidnap and experiment upon innocent victims? It’s nonsensical from the standpoint of his character, and thus this plotline is doomed to fail (which it did, in a spectacular manner. Really, I don’t think you’ll find too many people willing to champion Volume Three’s “Mohinder turns himself into an evil bug-man” arc). You could adjust the story to better fit Mo’s personality (for example, you could establish that the serum affects Mo’s brain chemistry, thus forcing him to behave in an out-of-character manner entirely against his will), or you can jettison the whole idea and come up with some better use for Mohinder. I vote for the latter.

2. Knock it off with the death-o-rama. Noah Bennet gets shot in the eye, but Claire’s blood brings him back to life. Nathan gets riddled with bullets and dies on the operating table, then comes back to life for reasons which, a full season later, have not been explained. Sylar murders Nathan, but a combination of Matt’s Jedi Mind-Tricks™ and his own shapeshifting ability results in Sylar replacing Nathan. Producers drop hints about looming Major! Character! Deaths! with alarming regularity (there are already such hints emerging about the barely-in-production Volume Five, and frankly, I have no more patience for it). It reads like a cheap ratings grab, and it’s punching holes in the integrity of the show. Give it a rest.

Regular viewers, especially those who have hung in there through the onslaught of shaky scripts, are loyal to the show because of the characters and the actors who portray them. Understand the debt Heroes owes its cast (and its casting director) and ease up on the threats of imminent death, at least until viewer confidence is restored. Yes, Lost regularly kills off main characters to great effect, but Heroes has surrendered this privilege, thanks to too many teased threats and false starts. You won’t lose any viewers by keeping the cast intact, but you will lose them if they feel like they’re being jerked around.

(Television writers and producers often talk about having exhausted the dramatic possibilities of a character. This sounds good, but it’s a cheat: if you can’t think of anything interesting to do with a character, it means you have failed as a writer. Here’s an example of the hazards of offing series regulars. Look at how many characters inherited the late Isaac Mendez’s precognitive painting ability: Sylar, Peter, Usutu, Arthur Petrelli, Matt... This is ridiculous and, in Matt’s case, nonsensical. The show wants to keep incorporating Tim Sale’s iconic, series-defining artwork into the plot, and justly so, but you know what would have been a much better way to accomplish this? Not killing off Isaac in the first place.)

3. Find the right balance. Set clear goals for each major character and have them work toward those goals. Throw all the characters in the mix together and have them interact as much as possible. Get rid of single-character vanity plotlines (Hiro mucking about in feudal Japan, Peter mucking about in Cork, Sylar searching for his real father). Yes, Hiro and Peter and Sylar are among the show’s most popular characters. Yes, we all enjoy watching them. However, we especially enjoy them when they’re interacting with other characters we know, as opposed to farting around on their own solo adventures. Make an effort not to marginalize characters: Mohinder was absent for almost as many episodes as he was present in Volume Four, and even then his primary purpose was to get captured, repeatedly, by Danko’s goons. If you can’t think of something interesting to do with each and every character in each and every volume, keep thinking.

4. Commit to the plot. If you’re going to have Claire take a job at a comic book store, that job should last for more than one episode. If Matt is going to fall madly in love with Daphne, to the extent of trying to murder an innocent woman to avenge her death, he shouldn’t seek a reconciliation with his estranged wife in the very next episode. Take some care with the plot, and understand that some actions have lasting repercussions.

5. Ease up on the glut of backstory. Back in Volume One, we learned plenty about the family histories of our main characters. We learned that Peter and Nathan’s father was a shady lawyer who committed suicide while under federal investigation. We learned that Mohinder’s father was murdered by Sylar. We learned that Hiro had a domineering but secretly cool dad. We learned that Nikki’s older sister Jessica was murdered by their abusive father. We learned that Sylar was a vicious rat bastard who chafed against his ordinary upbringing and his ordinary parents and became a power-stealing serial killer solely out of a desire to be special.

The revelations continued: We learned that Matt’s absent father was super-powered and evil. We learned that Peter and Nathan’s father didn’t commit suicide after all: Angela tried to poison him, but, unbeknownst to her, he survived. Oh, and he’s super-powered and evil. We learned that Mohinder’s dad was involved in shady US government experiments with super-powers in the 1960s. We learned that Nikki was one of a set of genetically-engineered triplets, the others being Tracy and the still-unseen Barbara. As for Sylar… Oh, lordy. We learned that Sylar’s real father (who was, naturally, super-powered and evil) murdered his real mother, and that Sylar witnessed this as a child but repressed the memory.

When you pile shocking revelation upon shocking revelation like this, it dilutes and damages the characters: We had a solid, effective understanding of why Sylar turned out so rotten, but now all these additional junked-up layers of backstory have negated that understanding. Instead of making him a multi-faceted character, it’s made him a mess. Trotting out a series of shocking family revelations is not the best way to give your audience more information and understanding about a character. Keep building consistent, current character development, and leave the flashbacks in the past.

6. Don’t contradict established past events. Hey, Sylar and Elle are a couple of hot tamales, right? Seeing as they’re played by two of Heroes’ hottest commodities, Zachary Quinto and Kristen Bell, wouldn’t it be great to mix them up in a romantic relationship? Maybe their romantic history could pre-date the start of the series. And maybe Elle could be directly responsible for turning mild-mannered dweeb Gabriel Gray into psychotic killer Sylar, by goading him to use his ability and murder someone at the behest of Noah Bennet and the Company.

Wait. We’ve already seen the genesis of Sylar back in Volume One: after being spurned by Chandra Suresh for being insufficiently special, Sylar murdered Brian Davis and used his ability for the first time to steal his telekinetic power. Therefore, Elle can’t be responsible for turning him into a killer. Sylar did that already, all by himself.

Contradicting the past like this makes the audience lose faith in the series. Here’s a telling incident: In the (wretched) episode “1961,” Chandra Suresh is shown via flashbacks conducting experiments upon super-powered kids in the United States the 1960s. This seemed like a glaring example of altering past events, since we knew Sylar was the first super-powered individual to make contact with Chandra. The writers later explained that Charles Deveaux wiped Chandra’s memories of the events that took place at Coyote Sands in 1961. That’s a fair explanation, and if Heroes had been consistently smarter and less sloppy, and if huge contradictory blunders hadn’t been made in the past (and if we’d ever seen that Charles Deveaux had Haitian-esque powers of memory-wiping), maybe viewers could have naturally drawn this conclusion. But take a look at the discussion thread following my recap of “1961.” All of these commenters are Heroes’ ideal target audience: we watch the show actively, we analyze it, and we discuss it in depth. And not one of us raised the possibility that Chandra’s memories had been erased. We all assumed the writers once again rewrote established events to suit their latest plot idea. This is how much chronic carelessness has damaged the integrity of the show.

7. Own the past, warts and all. Cutting your losses might be a decent strategy in financial matters, but it’s disastrous in storytelling. Heroes has had plenty of bad ideas that it would like to forget. Claire’s blood was established as a magical, cure-everything, raise-the-dead substance in Volume Two. Yep, that’s really, really dumb, and yep, that’s the sort of too-convenient plot idea that’s going to raise problems down the road. But it must be dealt with, not ignored, and unfortunately, the show has chosen to ignore it. In his blog, Jack Coleman valiantly offers up an explanation as to why Claire’s blood wasn’t used to bring Nathan back to life at the end of Volume Four. Points for effort, but it’s not good enough: if you ignore the existence of Claire’s Magic Blood, every time a character dies (in particular, a Bennet or a Petrelli), the audience is going to wonder why Claire isn’t opening a vein. If you don’t want Magic Blood stinking up the place as a lingering plot device, find some way to eliminate it.

Incorporating past events into the current story is a far better way to make the characters seem realistic than just giving us a glut of backstory. At one time, Matt and Mohinder were raising a small child together. It’d be great if they’d sometimes refer to this--in fact, it seems downright odd that the subject of Molly never comes up. For a while, Sylar thought Peter was his brother. Mohinder shot Noah Bennet in the eyeball. Nathan slept with Tracy. An evil future version of Matt interrogated and beat Hiro, while a kind future version of Mohinder saved his life. These sort of events should define who the characters are in relation to each other, yet too often, the characters seem like ships passing in the night: they meet, they exchange impersonal chunks of dialogue, they battle each other, but they don’t really interact. (Seriously, why is Hiro always happy to see Matt?) It’d improve the show greatly if they did.

8. Weed out filler. So Matt paints a precognitive image of Hiro and Ando in India. Hiro, who is currently powerless, sees this painting and (somehow) deduces that this means he is destined to go to India and stop a wedding, which will (somehow) restore his powers. Hiro and Ando do exactly that, except Hiro doesn’t get his powers back. Hiro and Ando return to the United States and rejoin the main plot already in progress.

Does this plotline provide any character development or further the plot in any way? Is it anything more than a crude attempt to pad an episode out to full running length? Does it do anything other than waste the audience’s time? No? Then junk it. Volume Four was a scant twelve episodes long; there shouldn’t have been any time to waste on crappy filler like this. And yet Peter and Angela still found the time to hang out in a church and feel sorry for themselves for an entire episode…

9. Weed out lazy writing. Here’s another reason why the Indian wedding plotline should have been scrapped (and why a very clever individual has suggested that “stopped the Indian wedding” should replace “jumped the shark” as the catch phrase of choice to describe the phenomenon when a television show outstays its welcome): it was lazy. It featured a slew of stereotypes about Indian culture (arranged marriages and abusive husbands), it was paternalistic and condescending (silly women, always getting married to the wrong guys! Good thing those two strange men happened to be on hand to take the decision out of the bride’s pretty hands!), and it stunk up the episode. Ditto for:
a) any scene involving stereotypical mean cheerleaders, and
b) any scene involving stereotypical comic-book geeks.
If you’ve seen it before in a movie or on another television show--especially if you’ve only seen it in a movie or television show and have no experience with it happening in real life--it has no place on Heroes. Seek out fresher waters.

10. Exotic trumps pedestrian. Speaking of fresher waters… Let’s revisit some of Volume One’s main players: you had mixed-race couple Isaac (the smack-addicted artist) and Simone (the upper-crust art buyer). You had mixed-race couple Nikki (the stripper running afoul of organized crime) and D.L. (the ex-convict). You had Tokyo office drones Hiro and Ando, subtitled dialogue and all. You had Mohinder, fresh from Chennai, who chanted in Sanskrit at his father’s funeral and called Thompson a gunda. Why, what a refreshing batch of entirely atypical major characters on a prime-time American network television show! No wonder everyone latched on to Heroes in that first season. It was different.

And now… Isaac, Simone, Nikki, and D.L. are all long dead. Mohinder has been shuffled off to the sidelines, and in all of Volumes Three and Four, he had no opportunity to display any trace of his ethnic background (sheesh, we don’t even see him drinking chai anymore!). Other characters of diverse racial, economic, and ethnic backgrounds, like Maya, Alejandro, and Monica, were introduced, discarded, and never replaced. Even the Haitian was absent for all of Volume Four. The show now rotates around two interrelated white upper-middle-class American families: the Bennets and the Petrellis. If, as seems likely, Matt reconciles with Janice to raise their son together in Volume Five, that will make three white upper-middle-class families (Matt might be a working-class ex-cop, but Janice is a lawyer). Look, there’s never been a deficit of television programs about white upper-middle-class American families. The show voluntarily gave up the cool multi-culturalism that set it apart from the pack. Congratulations, Heroes. You just became every other prime-time network show. Want to get back some of the viewers who bailed after the first season? Work, aggressively, to pull the show back from the middle of the road.

Arts & Crafts Interlude

(Because I can't write about Heroes all the time...)

This used to be a solid white pasteboard IKEA bookcase someone was throwing out. Several years ago, I hauled it home and covered it in black acrylic paint with a Chinese red interior. It was time for a change, so yesterday I painted it entirely black, then covered the shelves in some cool black-and-gold craft paper my sister sent me.

As anyone who has ever seen my rejection letter coffee table knows, I'm a huge fan of decoupage as a cheap, fast, foolproof decorating technique. This is extraordinarily easy to do.

(As you can see from these strangely non-fuzzy photos, I have a real, grown-up person's digital camera now, with a working flash and everything, thanks to my sister. It's an awesome camera. Samsung, adorable, blue, works a treat. Let's see how long it takes me to destroy this one.)

After removing the shelves and repainting the rest of the bookcase in solid black (I love acrylic paint -- it's cheap, it has good coverage, it's durable, it dries in no time, it's odorless, and it's endlessly forgiving of my half-assed painting skills), I cut the paper to fit the shelves. I covered the shelves with great gloopy handfuls of white school glue, then soaked the paper in water and applied it to the gluey shelves, making sure to smooth out all bubbles and wrinkles. (True decoupage usually involves small cut or torn pieces of paper applied in an overlapping fashion for more of a mosaic effect, as in my rejection letter coffee table. This is more like wallpapering, actually.) The moisture will make the paper expand some -- any overlap can be trimmed with a box cutter when the paper is dry and stiff. After the paper had dried, I covered it with a coat of varnish. The stuff I use (Delta Ceramcoat) is fast-drying, odorless, and costs about three bucks for an eight-ounce bottle, which should be enough to last until the end of time.

To lend a little cohesion to my living room, I used the same paper to cover the front panels on this... console thingy (I don't know what it is. Is it an old-timey telephone stand? Some kind of overly fussy media stand?), which I'd salvaged from the trash a few years back (no, I don't ever buy furniture. Why?). I also painted the hinges and clasps gold to match, then polished the whole thing until it gleamed.

Another example: here's an end table I embellished a few months ago. I painted the base with black acrylic paint, then covered the top with some pretty craft paper patterned with gold ginkgo leaves. Easy, breezy.

(Look closely. There appears to be a small, fuzzy, possibly dangerous and certainly flash-dazed beast of some kind lurking in the shadows behind the table. Strange.)

Throw Sendhil from the Train

Let’s start with the obvious: Death, Deceit and Destiny Aboard the Orient Express is a miserable excuse for a title. Off the top of my head, I can drum up a handful of perfectly serviceable alternatives: Terror on the Orient Express, say, or Millennial Terror, or, my personal pick, the spoilery yet evocative Throw Sendhil from the Train.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Death, Deceit and Destiny Aboard the Orient Express is a 2001 joint Canada-UK-Bulgaria-Italy production. Judging by the end result, it’s probably fair to assume that none of the aforementioned countries saw a return on their investment. It was filmed on location in Bulgaria with a largely Bulgarian cast and crew. Many of the actors appear to be speaking their lines phonetically. It stars Richard Grieco. These are not the elements of a breakaway hit.

It’s New Year’s Eve at the turn of the millennium, and a bunch of the world’s richest and most gullible are onboard the Orient Express bound for Istanbul as the guests of a mysterious benefactor. The setting led me to hope we were in for an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery, with Grieco as a do-rag-wearing Hercule Poirot, but alas, this was not to be. The mysterious host turns out to be a top international terrorist (future Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz, a long way from his star turn in Inglourious Basterds), who has lured everyone onto the train for the purpose of extorting exorbitant ransoms for their release. The passengers include Grieco as a world-famous action star (don’t giggle. Twenty years ago, in the early days of the Fox network, Grieco was sort of famous, almost), a blustery Australian titan of industry, a blustery American titan of industry, a Russian ballerina and her sinister escort, a female pop duo, a washed-up actress, and sundry hangers-on. There’s also Heroes’ resident hot little piece, Sendhil Ramamurthy, who plays the sweet, shallow, slutty, party-boy son of the billionaire ruler of the totally made-up oil-producing nation of Bassan. As is so often the case with important Middle Eastern scions, his name is Nikki.

(There’s a nice moment during their initial meeting where Nikki shyly tells Grieco he’s seen all his movies, complete with mutual bashful smiles and blushes. Either there’s some freaking phenomenal acting going on, or Sendhil just outed himself as a longtime 21 Jump Street fan. In any case, it’s wholly charming.)

Shortly after departure, terrorists take over the train, murder the entire crew, and wire the train with explosives. After this promising start, the terrorists quickly descend into rank incompetence: instead of controlling and intimidating their hostages, they spend most of their time fetching champagne and caviar for them, all of whom seem more bored and irritated than terrorized. Early on, Grieco accidentally kills the Russian thug during a quarrel over the ballerina, and the terrorists pretty much shrug it off. I’m no expert, but it seems like this should be one of the ground rules of kidnapping and hostage-taking: try not to let your valuable captives murder each other. Grieco and the ballerina also spend a good third of the film’s zippy 83-minute running time scampering about on top of the train defusing bombs, and the terrorists can hardly be bothered to notice their absence.

In a superfluous yet welcome interlude, one of the pop stars lures beautiful Nikki back to her room for a champagne-fueled hand of strip poker. Nikki, I am delighted to say, loses. Yes, we do get a precious glimpse of Sendhil’s lovely ass, and isn’t that worth the 5.5 GBP I shelled out for the DVD on eBay right there, particularly in light of the current favorable exchange rate? (My copy, by the way, came from the Netherlands. I left on the subtitles, just because Dutch is the world’s most awesome language. For example, “We’re all going to die!” is translated as “We gaan allemaal dood!”)

The passengers, save Grieco, decide to give in to the head terrorist’s ransom demand. Grieco takes umbrage at this and sanctimoniously proclaims, “Who really is the bad guy here--him, or you?” Grieco, hon, it’s awesome that you’re too noble and/or foolhardy to kowtow to terrorists, but there’s no need to be a tool about it.

When Nikki calls his father to ask for the ransom money, the request gets intercepted by his evil twin brother, Yussef. Thus we come to the film’s most brilliantly nitwitty plot twist, which was probably just a happy accident when the filmmakers were unable to find a single actor of Middle Eastern origin, much less two, and just ended up asking Sendhil to play both parts. (Sendhil is, of course, not even remotely Middle Eastern. At first I considered being offended by the casting, then decided to let it go, seeing as: a) at least he’s not playing a terrorist, and b) at least the terrorists are all played by a bunch of white dudes. Progress! Or something!) It’s hard to have a bad plot twist involving an evil twin brother. That’s storytelling gold right there.

(Helpful hint for prospective parents of twins: You are courting disaster if you name one son “Nikki” and the other “Yussef.”)

Yussef, communicating to Nikki via a camera phone, is seen standing in front of a map of the Middle East. I’m all in favor of films keeping runaway production costs under control by not building extravagant sets for locations only used fleetingly, but that’s just sad. Anyway, Yussef, who is delighted at the prospect of terrorists blowing up his twin, gleefully refuses to cough up the dough for Nikki’s release. The terrorists manhandle Nikki a bit, then decide to throw him off the train. Here’s where I officially lose patience with them, for a couple of reasons:

1. Seeing as it’s a matter of a prospective fifty million dollars in ransom, maybe they should try a little harder to get the money before killing their cash cow, and:
2. Sweet, pretty, slutty party-boys are one of the world’s greatest natural resources and should be treasured accordingly.

Once it dawns on Nikki that they’re going to kill him, he pleads with Grieco to save him. Grieco, gutted by the impending slaughter of one of the few people who think If Looks Could Kill is a really good movie, caresses Nikki’s face a bit. This is sweet, but not of much practical help to poor Nikki, who gets tossed out the window. As this film ably demonstrates, it’s no small matter to toss a struggling adult out of one of those tiny, high train windows; I don’t mean to tell the terrorists their job, but trains have doors, too.

Enraged at the murder of doe-eyed Nikki, the passengers band together and set about karate-chopping and knifing the terrorists into submission. Now if they’d only been able to summon this outrage before Nikki got offed, maybe this movie would have been over before the train even pulled out of Paris. Mayhem ensues. Grieco and the ballerina scamper about on top of the train defusing more bombs. One of the terrorists rips off a rubber mask to reveal he’s actually… a totally different terrorist! I’m sorry -- I know it’s a pile of crap, but I’m incapable of hating any film that draws inspiration from Scooby-Doo episodes. The terrorists are thwarted, and the surviving passengers arrive safely in Istanbul in time for the turning of the millennium, fireworks and all.

One final note: the thrilling climax involves Grieco and the ballerina leaping off the moving train just as it explodes, whereupon they land safely on the ground. In light of this, and considering that we never see Nikki’s mangled corpse, I feel it is perfectly logical to assume he landed in an especially soft snowbank somewhere in Hungary and hoofed it to Budapest in his expensive loafers and cantaloupe-colored sweater, then made his way safely back to Bassan, whereupon he ordered his miscreant twin flogged in the public square before attending to more important affairs of state, like arranging to have Gwen Stefani perform at his birthday party. I’m pretty sure this is exactly what happened, and no doubt the director’s cut on the inevitable Criterion Collection DVD release will bear this out.

(Pictures used with permission from this cool site, which is a treasure trove of screencaps from some of the stranger backwaters of Sendhil’s filmography. Want to see a naked and bewigged Sendhil playing Adam in a Biblical epic? This is your kind of place.)

Fun with keywords (desperation edition)

The original plan was to post the second installment of my grand Heroes Experiment today. That turned out to be overly optimistic, as I lacked the necessary enthusiasm and gumption over the weekend to push through and finish the blasted thing. So there will be a delay.

Sort of in a funk these days, actually. In the interest of mood-boosting, I would be greatly obliged if anyone could point me in the direction of any of the following:

a) a job,
b) cool inside scoop on Volume Five of Heroes (feel free to just make crap up -- I'm not particular),
or
c) cheeky nude photos of Sendhil Ramamurthy (once again, fake is totally okay).

Thanks muchly in advance.

I know I did this just last month, but in the interests of padding this post out to a respectable length, here's a look at more search terms people have used to find this site:

why bother with heroes volume 5
Good question. I've been asking myself that as well these days. I guess it's because Heroes, warts and all, still has a great deal of potential to turn into something really cool and enduring. Most importantly, it features an attractive and likeable cast, all of whom are worth watching despite all the nonsense the show puts them through.

must they always be the apocalypse heroes
apocalypse heroes always
It's getting a little old, isn't it? To be fair, Volume Four didn't really feature the threat of an apocalypse. Oh, sure, Matt slapped together a precognitive painting about blowing up the Capitol, but that plotline sputtered out pretty quickly and was never mentioned again. But Volumes One through Three were fair teeming with narrowly averted apocalypses: Peter blew up New York! Everyone died from the Shanti virus! Sylar blew up Costa Verde! Someone blew up Tokyo for some reason or other! Enough already!

what episode did shaun cassidy sing in on the hardy boys
A whole bunch of episodes, actually. Shaun shakes his feathered hair and wiggles his bellbottom-clad hips and warbles his little heart out in "The Mystery of the Flying Courier," "Wipe Out," "The Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew Meet Dracula," and "Oh Say Can You Sing." Probably others as well.

max headroom anderson cooper
I get this one a lot. It confused me deeply, until I figured people might very well be confusing cool, WASPy cable news anchor Anderson Cooper with cool, WASPy investigative reporter Edison Carter (played by Matt Frewer) in the awesome and iconic 1986 ABC series Max Headroom. Similar, yet not the same.


is there male nudity in sex lives of potato men
I'm going to turn this one over to Lou, frequent PotA commenter and our resident expert on all things regarding Sex Lives of the Potato Men. Care to weigh in, Lou?

heroes show who pushed petrelli out the window
Depends upon which Petrelli you're talking about. Danko pushed Nathan Petrelli out a window, whereas Sylar defenestrated Peter Petrelli. And Claude tossed Peter off a rooftop.

famima difficulty in the usa
I haven't heard anything specific, but the Famima!! in West Hollywood recently closed, which seems like an ominous sign. If true, it'd be a shame -- I dearly love Famima!! (I'm not being overly excited -- the double exclamation points are officially part of the name). If you're lucky enough to have a Famima!! in your neighborhood, pop in for some steamed pork buns or an excellent chocolate banana parfait, just to boost their business a little.

buy heroes mohinder's map
buy sylar's watch
buy claire's sweater 1961
These are all excellent merchandising opportunities just waiting to happen. Instead, NBC keeps trying to interest people in buying helix necklaces and action figures (wait -- you can buy the Linderman action figure with either a live or dead flower? Is that right? And can anyone tell any difference between the Niki figure and the Jessica figure?).

among other highlights, this episode features joe, clad only in soaking wet white shorts, crawling on hands and knees through the surf, valiantly rescuing frank from about four inches of water; this should be a cheap thrill, but i found myself wishing shaun's mom had been on the set to tell him to put some clothes on. frank's innate mistrust of women asserts itself here when he somehow gets it into his pretty head that their girlfriends are conspiring with the gang of thieves, despite precious little evidence to support this.
Er... yes. You found the right site.

sendhil ramamurthy is skulky the turtle wonder
skulky the turtle wonder is he into breasts
hot mohinder turtle action
Boy-Morgan, my friend, are you having quite enough fun with my keywords?