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Heroes Reborn – Game Over Review

With only 5 episodes left, “Game Over” significantly moves the plot and starts the consolidation processes of the many different storylines.

With a show that started out with far too many individual stories, “Game Over” mercifully starts to bring us to the finale and merges many of the storylines together to their natural point leading to the final big bad. Now we are down to four major arcs, Noah and Hiro, Carlos, Tommy, and Luke and Malina.

The weightiest of the arcs tonight was of course Noah and Hiro, and it gives us the sad exist of a few of our characters. Miko sacrifices herself for the good of the mission to free Hiro from the Evernow prison. Imprisoning the master of space and time in a video game where space and time do not exist is actually one of the few clever things Heroes: Reborn has presented. Unfortunately, we also get the untimely and fairly pointless death of Quentin at the hands of his own sister Phoebe. While he is successful at stopping her long enough to give Miko a chance, her immediately turning around to kill him is a little strange. I have to commend the show for not falling into the typical trap of a redeemed sister saved by the power of her brother’s love. Quentin did provide a lot of comic relief when he wasn’t the stand in for us trying to figure out what’s going on. As for Miko, I feel that in a short series, we aren’t ever really going to understand how Miko was created beyond her purpose as a construct to release Hiro.

HEROES REBORN -- "Game Over" Episode 106 -- Pictured: (l-r) Gatlin Green as Emily Duval, Robbie Kay as Tommy Clarke -- (Photo by: Roger Do Minh/NBC)
HEROES REBORN — “Game Over” Episode 106 — Pictured: (l-r) Gatlin Green as Emily Duval, Robbie Kay as Tommy Clarke — (Photo by: Roger Do Minh/NBC)

Tommy on the other hand spends a lot of time being the most cliche rebellious teenager which is tiring on a number of levels. For what little screen time Tommy and Emily spend in Paris, (which by the way is apparently in the same time zone as Illinois), the show rushes though the “teen so rebellious that their arrogance almost gets them in huge trouble” part onward to the “falling in love with his only friend part” in mind breaking speed. I can’t even wrap my head around it as it just moves so fast without any real depth, never mind that Tommy’s rebellious arrogance is off the charts. And in the end, is seeing a comic he had been looking for for years really all the sign he needs to go back? The comic and the idea that the artist could predict the future is probably the most forced call back to the original series of any show ever. At least he finally gets rid of his tracker, which I’m not sure why he didn’t do so at the beginning. Of course any good will he might have earned with that is immediately destroyed with the gag inducing line “I feel like you’ve known me forever.”

In a strange twist, Luke and Malina end up on the same pier together. I’m not sure how these people are traveling, but I’m pretty sure only Tommy has the ability to teleport. Heroes Reborn has an insane way of completely ignoring the fact that everyone is driving (or walking) around from one place to another, seemingly crossing the country in a matter of hours. All of Luke’s scenes take the “distraught towards suicide” attitude of Luke to a continuously rapid fashion only to have him conveniently saved by Malina. I’m not sure if it’s the acting or the direction, but the complete and sudden 180 he’s made in the matter of 3-4 episodes just feels so forced. You can’t help but not really feel sorry for him. Carlos finally just seems like the typical Batman character, except he’s a Batman who is an idiot and likely is allowing Dearing to turn him in and escape.

I’ve mentioned a few times where this show seems to pull from other material, but “Game Over” is by far the most atrocious example of unoriginality. The entire episode is an exercise in outright plagiarism of all the major science fiction tropes of the last 20 years combined with multiple instances of brain scratching logic holes.

Ren, in an effort to sneak into Renautas literally hides inside a box like Solid Snake. Did the crews that picked up this random box not feel there was a person inside of it?

Miko fights a dark mirrored version of herself that looks completely like they copied the color style of Dark Link from the Zelda series, completely with grey colors and red eyes. Even right before she enters the game for the final time, Ren confess “I love you Katana Girl” to which she responds with the most unoriginal line “I know.”

Even after Miko releases Hiro, the scene where he pulls the cable out of the back of his head couldn’t be copied harder from The Matrix. In fact, it doesn’t even make sense that there is a cable. Where was the other end of it? Yes it dematerialized, but why did it come with him in the first place?

With only four more episodes of Heroes Reborn I can’t say I don’t have the patience to see how it unfolds, but my patience for this lazy show wears so thin.

Other Observations

  • With all the commotion at the marina, why didn’t anyone report Malina? Did no one other than that kid see it?
  • Another Leeroy Jenkins call out? Ugh.
  • That glass might have been bullet proof, but it clearly wasn’t chair proof as it almost broke. I know budget is cheap, but they didn’t have to make it obvious that it was cheap plexiglass.
  • Why didn’t the feds storm Emily’s place as soon as Tommy popped back in? Or when he took the tracker out? Or when he poofed it wherever he did? Or when he popped to Paris?
  • Malina is looking for Tommy, which likely means he needs to teleport her around the globe to control the solar flares.

By Kien Tran

Based in Dallas, Texas, Kien Tran is an avid television enthusiast. After spending hundreds of hours wasting away on a couch, he decided to actually do something creative with his hobby and created this very blog.

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