Look, we all make mistakes, people. Let’s remember that at the outset. At one time or another, we all do something that we regret in the cold light of day. Maybe you yelled at someone you shouldn’t have. Maybe you didn’t let that little old lady take your seat on the train. Me? I once made out with a girl I knew for a fact to be a racist just so I’d have someone to kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve. This stuff happens, is all I’m saying.

And “Generations”? Well, it happened as well. And “Generations” very well might be the racist drunk blonde of Heroes when all is said and done.

About halfway through the season, I knew we were in for a rough ride. The show kept taking one step forward and then two steps back, lurching along instead of hurtling along, with characters we’d never met alongside characters we barely even recognized. The one thing going for it? An intriguing murder mystery centered around the elder statements of Those With Powers. Someone was picking them off one by one, for a reason understood by the older generation to be discovered by the younger.

And then Heroes went and screwed that up as well, at which point I just prayed for Maya to start crying within my general vicinity to end my pain.

Here’s the thing: I don’t actually get mad at shows that straight up suck. I don’t have the time or the energy to rail against a show like Rules of Engagement. Just not worth my time. But when a show as good as Heroes was last year sucks this hard, I get mad. When a show like Heroes contains some really, really interesting ideas, and then either violates or forgets them, I get mad. And Heroes suffered from both a lack of quality and an inability to identify what was working really, really well.

Last season worked thanks to a unified theme: people from all walks of life slowly made aware of their purpose and then inexorably drawn to Kirby Plaza to save the world. Fan-freakin’-tastic. It allowed the show to take us wherever we wanted to go, because everything ultimate merged on the horizon. Moreover, the showed earned patience on the viewer’s parts by connected the dots slowly but surely, until the web was incredibly tight-knit by the time they all reached New York City.

This season ostensibly DID have a unified theme: the sins of the parents visited upon their children. And that’s a great, if unoriginal, premise. But this is a comic-book infused world: I require not originality, merely entertaining execution. But the show barely remembered this theme until the finale episode, at which point nearly every character said some variation of, “How long are we gonna have to pay for their actions?” I kept waiting for someone to flip on the television and see Bono at Red Rocks singing, “How long must we sing this song?”

What actions, exactly, reigned down on the present-day heroes? Essentially, they didn’t clean up their own mess. They didn’t kill Adam Monroe, aka Takezo Kensei. They didn’t destroy the lethal strain of the Shanti virus. And then they acted all surprised when Adam started picking them off one by one. That doesn’t make them guilty so much as extremely sloppy. It’s not that they didn’t know how to kill Adam; they did. (Victoria told Peter how to do it.) It’s not that they didn’t know how to destroy the virus; they just chose not to do so. But here’s the kicker: why Papa Nakamura would ever be surprised that Adam Monroe sent them the cryptic messages is beyond, beyond, beyond dumb. Saying something like, “Of all the people, I never would have guessed it was you,” makes for good television, I suppose, but it doesn’t make any bloody sense. WHO ELSE COULD IT HAVE BEEN? Dude, you know he escaped from prison, you know he’s coming after you for revenge, you know this symbol comes from his sword, and you’re still surprised?

So that’s a bit of a problem: if you’re central murder mystery could be solved by one of five people at any point saying, “Yup, it’s him.” Moreover, the Shanti virus plot actually took away from the murder mystery, in that no man out to claim such revenge would call such attention to himself while trying to locate a virus that will destroy the majority of the world. Adam should have simply gotten the virus, released it, and THAT would have more than likely wiped out his intended targets. Two birds, one stone. Instead, he calls broad attention to himself, gives them time to disseminate information as well as triple dog dare lock down the freakin’ virus he’s after, along with a memo to be distributed to each Primatech employee with a picture and the instructions “Shoot him in the face”.

As such, you had a virus plot that took over from the murder mystery plot, as if for some reason billions of people we don’t know dying would be more dramatically interesting than a handful of people we do know in constant peril. Call me crazy, but having a very small, intimate threat after the cataclysmic threat of Season 1 would have been the more creative, more satisfying narrative choice. A season built around the Petrellis, Parkmans, Bennetts, Bishops, and Nakamuras, as a way of explaining the history of the Company with Adam Monroe as your villain would have been a fantastic 11-episode arc. Not every story has to be about saving the world. Saving one’s parent or child can be every bit as dramatic. Apparently, the show disagreed.

Then again, we barely recognized the familial bonds between existing characters this year. Let’s take the two biggest example of this: Peter Petrelli and Claire Bennett. Peter turned into a reject from “America’s Most Smartest Superhero” and Claire turned into a cast member of “The Hills”, what with her self-centered nature, disbelief in her father, and her inability to see that her boyfriend was 84% pupils. Neither character resembles the pillars of strength and moral clarity that he/she was last year. You may not have liked their characters, but you never doubted their conviction. This year, they were two of the most unlikeable couples on the show, and this is a show with Maya and Alejandro on it, and the less said about them, the better. (If you have a show about a lethal virus, and then insert a character who can cure his sister’s ability to produce a virus, and then kill them off without every actually introducing them into the freakin’ Shanti virus plot, then you don’t deserve me talking about them.)

The Blunder Twins were only two of many unnecessary characters this year: did the show really need Sylar? Niki, DL, and Micah? Did it need to introduce Monica? Heroes should steal this idea from its comic book roots: not every hero need be involved in every volume. It didn’t help that these storylines were not very strong to start, but to have them completely unrelated to the main thrust of the season is almost inexcusable. It’s an eleven-episode arc: there’s no time to waste on these characters if they don’t contribute to the main storyline.

The worst addition to the series, however, was the introduction of “superblood”: the notion that the blood of Claire, Adam, or Peter can cure people and/or bring them back from the dead. My brother pointed this out in a comment a few days ago, and the Boob Tube Babe and I have been lamenting this development as well. Having a built-in thing like this means every single death on the show is ultimately meaningless, which is why I won’t spend time eulogizing Niki and Nathan. Even if they don’t need the blood infusion in order to live, we can never truly worry about a character’s fate. If the threat of mortality is removed, then what drama can there possibly be?

Are there silver linings to all this? Well, I can see two. One, there’s no way they can possibly produce a volume this terrible next time around. Looks like they are gonna go all Justice League on us, FINALLY, with a Sylar-led Legion of Super-Villains against (hopefully) a cadre of superheroes, led by anybody besides Peter “Hey, Anybody Seen My Shirt?” Petrelli. That would be a step up. Two, I really, really hope they’ve set up Matt Parkman to shift from hero to villain next year, as Sylar’s right-hand man. The episode in which he used and abused his newly learned power was one of the finest all season, and easily the most intriguing idea the show’s introduced in a while. In the season finale, he was using this mind massage for “good”, but the temptation will hopefully be too strong by next volume. We’ve seen how powerful The Nightmare Man was; here’s hoping his son is even more powerful.

So, that’s a wrap on “Generations”. And I suppose we can all breathe a sigh of relief for that.

Leave any and all thoughts on this volume below!