Broken Frontier

Reviewing Heroes, Episode 20: Five Years Gone without spoilers would be like hearing The Ring trilogy with a two-ply burlap sack over your head: blah blah blah … blah blah.

So beware: Spoilers Abound! The faint of heart should go right now to your nearest computer and check out the download from last night. And if you have any doubts about the Heroes time/character/plot continuum, then put a quarter on the La-zee Boy, order pizza and a six pack of Mountain Dew, and start from Episode 1.

Vignettes are great. They provide the bones of a show without destroying the deliciousness of the actual plot and character development if you have half a mind to watch it … and you should have at least half a mind to do so. So, refer to the introduction for the subtitles, and here goes with a quick vignette approach for Heroes, Episode 20: Five Years Gone :

Time Travel: Hiro and Ando arrive five years in the future and Hiro meets his future self, now a terrorist (aka: freedom fighter), after which he gets captured. Ando and future Hiro escape together.

Urban Ruin: It turns out that Peter was the bomb and he destroyed half of New York when he exploded.

The Cheerleader: Claire is in hiding, hoping to ride out the storm in anonymity.

A Criss: Nathan became President, mutating the Dept. of Homeland Security into a dark force seeking vengeance on people with special talents.

A Cross: Amazingly, Peter, scarred from his explosive experience, has shacked up with a very bitter Nikki, providing the show will more than a little sizzle. Powerful Nathan is shielding Peter by blaming the catastrophe on Sylar.

A Criss-Cross: Except that Nathan isn’t Nathan. He is Sylar (tapping new shape shifting powers he appropriated from Candice). Sylar killed Nathan and took his powers along with his place in the Oval Office.

Okay, so I left off the “Tight Dialogue” intro item, but I’ll get to that later!

I’m also leaving out sizeable ‘end of episode’ spoilers because if I ruined the delicious closing sequence to this episode I would also be wracked with Hiro-sized remorse. There has to be something for readers of this article to enjoy if/when they go back to watch an online version of the show, catch a repeat, or purchase the season on the inevitable DVD box set.

This show has gone beyond being one of my guilty pleasures. It’s just too well written and thought provoking for it to be associated with guilt in any way.

While watching "Five Years Gone" brought back memories of some of my favorite movies, comics and novels (A Beautiful Mind, “Days of Future Past”, as told in X-Men #141-142, and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine come to mind), this episode maintained its freshness because the parallels to the office of the current US President and his ties to 9/11, the War on Terror, Guantanamo, and immigration issues are as raw as a paper cut. The reveal that it was actually Sylar who turned slick talking but freedom loving Nathan into a politically oppressive thug was dramatic in the extreme.

What strikes me most about this episode is the virtuosity of the acting performances, in particular the dramatic change actor Masi Oka brings to the Hiro of the past and the character he becomes after only five short, tortuous years. Much of this can be attributed to the startling transformation in Hiro’s appearance, but Oka’s acting chops cannot be diminished in any way. The episode is Emmy worthy; a lesser actor might not have been able to pull it off.

Also noteworthy was the performance of Adrian Pasdar as Nathan. Under normal circumstances, Pasdar imbues Nathan’s character with great depth and complexity, but he was never more effective than when he was transforming the tragedy that befell New York to his own use. “At first the world will mourn. They’ll be united in grief … Then they’ll just be united.” Superb dialogue delivered by a superb acting performance, and it made the speech he delivered to commemorate the anniversary of the city’s destruction all the more striking. Finally, it was his understated but malevolent performance in Five Years Gone that made the transformation of Nathan into Sylar pay off so well.

Without great dialogue, even the best actors are just meat puppets, but Heroes has great dialogue aplenty and "Five Years Gone" is no exception. The writers follow all the rules. The dialogue is purposeful, such as when Claire, now in hiding as a waitress in Midland, Texas, says to Bennet “All I want is a normal life!” It is also distinctive, for example when Nathan is talking earnestly with Mohinder Suresh about his plan to exterminate people with powers, he says, “I need to know if you’re with me or against me,” but Suresh’s answer is implied, not stated. Last, but not least, a question is occasionally followed by another, such as when Suresh asks Hiro, “You’re trying to change the past, aren’t you?” and then Hiro says, “If you could save millions of lives, wouldn’t you?” 

All of this makes Heroes in general, and "Five Years Gone" in particular, a pleasure to listen to, as well as a joy to watch.

While "Five Years Gone" may seem a little gimmicky at times, as in “let’s show one pivotal guy what the future holds so he can go back in time and make it right,” the Heroes creative team has so far shown that they are extremely adept at getting the audience to look one way while they are actually moving the story in a completely different direction.

But the proof is in the pudding.

Three episodes to go.

I have every expectation that his creative team will deliver… in spades.