'Heroes Reborn' Premiere Review
Sabrina Petrafesa ’18 / Emertainment Monthly Executive Publisher
“Save the cheerleader, save the world.” It’s the well-known quote that gives Heroes fans some serious nostalgia of the glory days. The two-hour premiere of Heroes Reborn reintroduced two familiar characters in this episode, but one of them was not on screen for long. For the most part, we followed Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman), in his attempt to remember what really happened on June 13th, when a convention center, with both Evos (heroes) and regular people inside, was blown up.
This episode introduced a few new characters, and as much as the original characters are incredibly missed, these characters are really interesting. Carlos Gutierrez (Ryan Guzman), Tommy Clark (Robbie Kay), and Miko Otomo (Kiki Sukezane), are a military man, a teleporter, and a sword-wielding girl who gets transported into a video game every time she unsheathes her sword, respectively. They are each very different characters. Gutierrez is set up as a masked vigilante to help Evos get to Canada safely, like an Underground Railroad. Otomo is looking for her father, who was kidnaped when she was a little girl. Tommy, however, is a bit boring as of now, but his powers make up for it, since he can teleport anything anywhere in the world.
In this world, there are actual Evo hunters, angry humans who think Evos are freaks, and set out to kill all of them. It’s an interesting part of this world to see. It looks like this season of Heroes Reborn will be following the story of Luke and Joanne Collins (Zachary Levi and Judith Shekoni), a husband and wife who lost their son in the explosion on June 13th. They are pretty much serial killers, but Levi and Shekoni are amazing in their performances of the heartbroken, and quite frankly crazed, parents who lost their child.
With the introduction of so many characters, most of the two hours felt incredibly slow, interspersed by very few fight scenes that piqued interest, then immediately went back to being unfortunately slow and a little bit boring. The most interesting parts of the show were any time Otomo was on screen, and whenever Noah Bennet was off looking for what happened to his daughter by finding Molly Walker (Francesca Eastwood), who could track anyone by just thinking of them. This character was a child during Heroes run and would now be an adult, or on the older end of a teenager. It’ll be interesting to find out what she’s been up to, and how life’s treated her. The real incentive for fans here is to wait it out to see characters they knew and loved in Heroes.
The premiere of Heroes Reborn was trying to establish itself as a separate television show, while the writing and editing suggested that the style was trying to stay exactly the same. The premiere was sending mixed signals, and fans of the original show would have liked to see more of the original cast and understand more of what has happened in the last few years. There were a lot of gaping holes in the plot, and a lot of questions that the writers made no attempt to answer for viewers of the original show.
Overall, the episode was very disappointing. It was partly from expecting Heroes 2.0, it was also from expecting to see many more familiar characters. In the end, fans are going to have to sit through a few more episodes to see what happens and finally see the characters they’ve missed on their screen for so long. Fans didn’t get that same impact of a line like, “save the cheerleader, save the world,” but maybe fans just have to wait for an episode that’ll give the same type of impact.
Episode Grade: B