You have to give NBC credit for even considering that a reboot of Heroes - the 2006 series that helped launch the superhero craze sweeping through television today - might be a good idea. Heroes debuted to rave reviews and excellent ratings but crashed and burned in its second season, with confusing and often irrelevent sub-plots, boring scripts, and a storyline so twisted that it made the final seasons of Lost seem like Oliver Twist in comparison.
Heroes ended with Claire (Hayden Panettiere) revealing her super powers to the world; Heroes Reborn (Thursdays, 8 pm Eastern on NBC) begins with the super-powered now public knowledge and called "evos" (presumably because "mutants" was already taken.) And much like the X-Men, the "evos" are welcomed by some and feared and discriminated against by others. When the PrimaTech Corporation holds an international fair to welcome evos into society, we see a large shadow hover the festivities and then watch in horror as the entire town of Odessa, Texas is blown to smithereens. Among the survivors: Claire's father Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman,) one of the holdovers from the original series. Apparently Claire, despite her invulnerability, died in the blast. We see Noah call her hopefully, only to hear her voicemail. (Of course if he really wanted to find her, he'd only have to go to Nashville.)
An evo named Mohinder Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy) is blamed for the disaster, which is dubbed "June 13," a date as historically catastrophic as "9/11." Noah, perhaps due to the blast trauma, returns to a very ordinary life as a car salesman named Ted, until things start to happen...
And that brings us to Heroes Reborn's tangled and twisted multiple storylines. Like the first series, you almost need a program to follow along: There's the callow high school kid (Robby Clarke) who can teleport people, the Japanese girl who can enter a video game and fight with ninja powers to save her kidnapped father and the video gamer who's sucked into her alternative universe, the war hero with a dark secret who picks up his dead brother's mantle as a costumed vigilante, and the "June 13 truther" (Henry Zebrowski) who's enlisted to help Noah find out what's happening. And there are two psychopathic vigilantes (Rya Kihlstedt and Zachary Levi) who are murdering evos to avenge their dead child. There's also the mysterious stranger (there's always a mysterious stranger) whose agenda we don't know yet, who pops up from city to city to save the evos.
I won't give more away, except to say that the pilot suffers from the same problems that doomed Heroes: Too many characters, too many storylines, and uneven plotting. The action scenes when Miko and Ren discover the video game world provide thrills and excitement, but there are just as many moments when nothing happens except some force exposition to connect all of the show's disparate parts. What we learn in the first two-hour episode is that there's an apocalypse coming, and the evos (or heroes) have been sent to stop it.
Give it a try and maybe you'll get sucked into the narrative. But it's not a show you can just watch once in a while for some action or humor. You'll just wind up shouting at your screen wondering what the fuck is going on.
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