Ok, I just recently finished catching up on the “Heroes” television series. (Assuming there are no new episodes past the season finale of Chapter 3: Villains). I had originally watched most of the first season when it first aired, but for one reason or another, missed out on two and three. I have some complaints.
Ok, for starters — I am aware of the concept of “suspension of disbelief”, but I occasionally feel compelled to abandon it. Generally, this happens when a work of fiction goes into great detail to explain the mechanism behind something, but gets their facts completely bonkers.
Some of you may have seen that awful movie “The Core.” I won’t go into details, as the movie has been nitpicked to death (go look at any nitpick website for details), but it’s essentially the poster-child for movies “in desperate need of a science consultant that didn’t sleep through 8th grade earth science.”
Other movies, particularly those involving time travel, have similar irksome properties. There are some movies that do time travel in an acceptable manner — 12 Monkeys, for instance, poses no mechanism — they just show the “time machine” and leave it at that. “Back to the Future” skirts the edge of irkage (what with the “flux capacitor” and all), but does it in such a madcap fashion that it is quite obviously implausible.
The big offenders are where the film/television show attempts to explain why some particular phenomenon is happening, and they use terms that sound realistic.
Heroes is one of those examples.
In Season 1, the left the cause of the powers vague. Was it related to the eclipse? Was it supernatural? Was it, as Chandra Suresh believed, something related to an “evolution” of humanity? Nothing was really specified, and the viewer is able to focus on the plot, the character development, and just accept the plot device that “ok, people are acquiring these supernatural powers, I’ll just suspend my disbelief and enjoy the show.”
But as the series progressed through seasons 2 and 3, the telewriters for the show fell into the “mechanism trap” and began to use a very contrived mechanism as a plot device.
Essentially, the show canonized the following explanation for the powers:
- The superpowers have biological origins
- They are triggered / activated by adrenaline
- An eclipse causes them to COMPLETELY DISAPPEAR
- A “formula” (pictured right), is how you can synthetically create these abilities. (although the formula contains no nitrogen bases, I believe the show referred to it as a protein. Incidentally, a fellow blogger discovered that the “formula” pictured is actually “maitotoxin“.)
- In addition to the formula, a non-synthesizable “catalyst” is necessary — this is the “supernatural” ingredient to the show; it can only be transmitted human to human, except when it’s being used to catalyze the formula.
- The powers can be inhibited by a virus (Shanti virus), or by certain medicinal compounds (i.e. Primatech’s meds), or by other powers (the Haitian).
My main beef with these notions being officially canonized by the show is that it creates a ludicrous amount of suspension of disbelief necessary to accept some of the powers.
Essentially, if it is to be believed that these are GENETIC properties (i.e. the byproduct of genetic modification via the “formula”+catalyst), then it follows that the abilities are the byproduct of certain proteins being generated. (Which is ludicrous when you consider the “spooky-action-at-a-distance” powers of Sylar, Arthur, the pyrokinete siblings, etc. etc.)
Claire
Claire, who can not only fast-heal but REGENERATE (there was an episode in Season 2 where she clipped off her toe with a pair of scissors, only to see it IMMEDIATELY grow back completely). The fast healing, while definitely a push, I could let slide — it’s a metabolic process, so it seems reasonable to think genetic modifications could cause it. (The show certainly pushed this envelope when it allowed her to come back from the dead….twice… and heal broken bones…. many times… but I’ll let those slide.) But where exactly does the energy / mass come from to produce an entirely new toe?
I am pretty sure that when lizards regenerate, it is over a period of days and weeks, where food consumed by the lizard is slowly converted back into flesh. But how can Claire regenerate or fast heal if it’s entirely a metabolic process? Is it limited by her fat-stores? Does it make her hungry when she heals a whole bunch? Where does the energy come from?
Telekinesis / Pyrokinesis / any of the “spooky action at a distance” psychic warrior guys
The genetic explanation is TERRIBLE for this. It really irked me that they went to the trouble of explaining a mechanism for the powers to be granted, but then completely balked at explaining HOW the mechanism can provide some of these powers.
Sylar attempts to explain this to…Elle, I think (or was it Claire?)… by citing that urban legend that we only use 10% of our brains. (Snopes handily debunks this myth, if you’re interested.) Sorry, Tim Kring, this doesn’t fly (nor does it make things fly!).
Consider the villain Flint — he produces a blue flame, with apparently limitless potential, that shoots from his fingers. Where exactly does this energy come from? Let’s take a look at this… Flint can make blue fire. We’ll ignore the color (since I’m willing to just accept that it’s a cosmetic issue) and just say that “it’s really damn hot fire” and assign it a nice medium 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. (That’s only a little hotter than a candle flame, so I’m being REALLY conservative here).
Flames are produced by the liberation of energy from chemical bonds; they generally require oxygen. (And as Claire’s biological mother showed us in Season 2, her flames do indeed consume Oxygen, as it was making Claire run out of breath when they “trained” in the shipping container). We’ll further assume that, since this is a biologically-based power, Flint is converting his own bodily calories into pure energy, which he uses to ignite the oxygen in the air. 1 kilocalorie (“calorie” if you’re reading the Nutrition Facts on your food) is equal to 4.184 kilojoules. The law of conservation of energy (Thermodynamics #1) would theoretically prohibit this free energy from being created out of nowhere. Either he’s producing the raw energy from his body, (in which case why doesn’t he waste away?) or he’s agitating the ambient energy, which still requires an input of energy (think “microwave”) in order to escalate them to the point of flame. And what of Ted Sprague from Season 1, who could create Nuclear blasts emanating from his body? How does he not waste away with that?)
Time Travel
*sigh*
I’m thankful they didn’t try to explain HOW Hiro is able to move through time and space; Although I am disappointed that it falls into the “genetically based powers” category.
Rather than talk about why Time Travel is ludicrous, I’d rather point out a few anachronisms created by all of the damn Time Travellers in this show. (It got really ridiculous in Season 2 when you had Hiro + both Peter Petrelli’s zooming around through time.) I just can’t tell if they adopt the single or multiple-universes model. (A single universe is like what happens in Back to the Future 1, when Marty almost scrubs himself from existence by wooing his mom — a Multiple Universe model is like Back to the Future 2, when he travels to 1985 and finds out the Biff used the almanac to become rich and powerful.)
When Sylar finally confronts Claire, he leaves her alone because “she is special” (due to the presence of the Catalyst) however, Hiro goes back in time to have his mother heal him and gets the catalyst transferred to him instead. The formula is torn in half right before he zips back to present time; The telewriters probably thought they were being crafty about this. But wouldn’t Sylar have not seen Claire as being “special” (since it would have been Hiro instead) if that was the time stream we were in?
When Ando receives powers and discovers he can “super-charge” other people’s powers (I really wish they would have introduced this sooner, I think that was one of the more interesting powers they created), they pull a Superman I move and have Daphne go faster than the speed of light in order to travel back in time. Matt Parkman even MENTIONS Einstein’s “theory of relativity” as justification for why it works, yet he fails to realize (as the telewriters did) that as Daphne approached the speed of light, her mass would approach infinity, meaning the energy required to run super fast would approach infinity. (See her entry below…)
And what was with the alternate universe where Ando gets powers and attacks Hiro with them. The powers look the same, except that Ando is using it like an electro-bolt. Will that be a side-effect? They never really showed it very much.
The comics drawn by Isaac Mendez are assumed to chronicle the events of the television show, implying that he foresaw all of the events happening. (i.e. there was not a situation shown where the comic was read and it did NOT match the events happening) His final work, the sketchbook, even had the “Hiro, lost in time” plot arc. This suggests that the universe is a single time-stream, and not really changeable, implying that in spite of all the powers the heroes had, they really didn’t have free will. That said — since every issue was released posthumously (and thus “already written”) why didn’t Arthur Petrelli simply get one of his minions to go to the 9th Wonder publisher, steal all the future issues, and then have complete foreknowledge of everything that was about to happen, including the eclipse?
The Eclipse
This was just ridiculous.
The best thing I could come up with was that the eclipse somehow caused a temporary hyper-methylation of their genes, epigenetically switching off their powers. (If we work under the inane assumption that their powers are based on their genes) But even that is REALLY pushing it.
This is just one of those areas where the show can’t decide if the powers are supernaturally or naturally based. I wish they would have just continued with the Season 1 vague-origin paradigm, rather than try to get all “Activating your Evolution” sciencey.
The whole “Activating your Evolution” travesty
Ok. It needs to be said. What was happening in the show was NOT evolution.
At *BEST*, it was mutation. The alternate future where everyone had powers would have been evolution (since it would have been a general shift in the population composition of alleles, presumably those that grant super-powers)
And the whole notion that these people took command of their own “evolution” just reeks of Lamarck. The American public has an already terrible understanding of Evolution, and this kind of garbage only amplifies the problem. Hollywood, please take note: get better-educated science consultants!!!
Daphne (the speedster)
Ok, last one.
Daphne moves really, really fast. Superhumanly fast. Faster than ANYTHING in nature. Some things that the shows producers never really considered:
The friction created between her body and the air would become formidable and probably cause abrasions on her otherwise flawless skin.
The faster she moves, the more massive she becomes (while in motion) — this is assuming she begins to move at speeds approaching the speed of light. (See above, regarding Ando’s super-charging power).
We can get an idea of how fast she moves based on her death in the alternate future: she wasn’t able to move “quite fast enough” when running from the nuclear explosion Sylar caused — but yet only her back was burnt; To me, this suggests that she was at the fringe of the explosion (as her hair was basically untouched), so we can assume she can move “as fast” as a nuclear explosion. (We’ll assume it’s a fission reaction, since they’re less potent. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.)
I found some ultra-fast photography of nuclear explosions on another site — check them out. One of the photos shows the explosion having spread to 300′ in diameter (so 150′ radius), and it happened after 20 milliseconds. So from this, we can assume that she can travel approximately 150 feet in 20 milliseconds. Doing some simple math, we get:
- 20 ms x (1 sec / 1000 ms) = 0.02 seconds
- 1 / 0.02 = 50 (the factor to multiply to determine speed per second)
- 150 feet x (50) = 7500 feet per second (approx 1.5 miles per second)
So she’s not going anywhere NEAR the speed of light (she’s actually moving slower than a rocket, which goes about 14,000 mph)
However, at 7500 ft/s, she’s going to be experiencing incredible wind resistance, possibly G-forces, and create an almost lethal backlash on any substances she runs on that aren’t firmly affixed to the ground. (i.e. imagine she runs over a bunch of loose tiles — those puppies would get shot backwards with LE FORCE!!!)
Where is the energy coming from for her to move that fast? There is only so much energy stored in those chemical bonds, and even if we were to conserve ALL of that energy, and convert it into kinetic motion, she’s still using HER MUSCLES to move! It’s not like she’s bending space-time — she’s literally just moving really fast.
She said in Season 3, while talking to Matt Parkman, that her perception of time is more fine-tuned, since she moves so fast. How is she able to talk like a normal person? (this is more of a ponderable question – I suppose she could just develop a habit of talking REALLY SLOWLY)
Anyways… I did enjoy the show, but why couldn’t they just have left it ambiguous instead of coming up with a lame mechanism? If they have to use a supernatural catalyst ANYWAYS, then why not simply have that be the ONLY ingredient necessary? Bringing Biotech into this just got ridiculous.
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