In the first Heroes Reborn recap and review, the story picks up a year after a tragic explosion that cost many lives and caused a rift between humans and those with abilities…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
When it was announced over a year ago that Heroes was getting rebooted at NBC for a 13-episode event series called Heroes Reborn, expectations were high that the writers and creators behind the once popular series could recapture the spirit and story that made the original so great for a season before a writer’s strike, convoluted story telling and an inability to kill anyone for good dissolved the show into a disaster by the final year.
The highly anticipated two-hour debut of Heroes Reborn finally premiered on Thursday night and the sad fact is the series may have been better left on the pile of rubble where NBC tossed it five years ago.
When Heroes debuted in 2006, the age of superhero movies wasn’t yet upon us quite yet so the series was really a breath of fresh air at a time when comic book fans were clamoring for a show like that on television. Fast forward to 2015 and the TV/film industry is permeated by superhero stories and while it may become overkill one day, for now fans have just learned to flock to the really good ones (The Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Flash) and ignored the really, really bad ones (Fantastic Four over and over again).
So Heroes Reborn was already fighting a bit of an uphill battle by coming back this year because now there’s plenty of competition for the comic book dollar, not to mention both DC and Marvel have hit shows spread across several networks with loyal fan bases already built in. Heroes didn’t leave long time viewers of the show very satisfied when it was over, so it was tall order to come back and promise things would be better.
Well they aren’t.
The new series takes place approximately four years after the original Heroes ended when Claire Bennet outed herself as the incredible unbreakable woman to the media and now those people with abilities are called evo’s (because FOX owns the rights to the word ‘mutant’ because of the X-Men, shows are forced to come up with alternatives and this one is just awful) and they are all running for their lives after a peace summit unifying humans and evo’s ended in disaster as a bomb blew up and killed almost everybody.
One of those people supposedly killed in the blast was Claire Bennet (or more likely she had to go because Hayden Panettiere wasn’t going to return) while her father Noah survived. It seems after she came out as a person with abilities, Claire’s relationship with her father became strained and they hadn’t talked in several years.
Meanwhile, the rest of the show introduces us to a ton of new characters, a few new bad guys, and a random mix of stories that will probably all fit together in one way or another but the first episode just felt like a really complex puzzle that someone was trying to put together from the inside out without ever giving us any kind of frame work.
With that let’s recap the first episode of Heroes Reborn titled ‘Brave New World/Odessa’:
The Man with the Horn-Rimmed Glasses
So the one common thread between the two series is Noah Bennet, who played a company man tracking down people with abilities in the Heroes and now he’s a former agent turned grieving father in Heroes Reborn.
The series picks up with Noah making a call to his Claire Bear four years after they last spoke as he apologizes for whatever rift came between them. He plans to reconcile with his daughter at a special peace summit in Odessa, Texas but when he arrives there a gigantic explosion is set off, which wipes out almost everybody in sight except for Bennet and a few lucky others.
The bomb is blamed on Evo apologist Mohinder Suresh (who doesn’t actually appear in this first episode) and the world immediately reacts with hate and disgust for the people with abilities, who are now forced to register with the government or live in fear of being exposed in the first place. Yes, this storyline has already taken place in several comic books previously, most notably in X-Men and partially in the Marvel miniseries Civil War.
Long story short, Noah survived, his daughter didn’t so he quit his job, moved to Austin where he’s now a car salesman named Ted Barnes, who is about to get married to a new woman (no mention whatsoever of his ex-wife or his other kid).
In the midst of his happy new life, a truther named Quentin shows up asking for Bennet’s help to expose Renautus, a tech company that actually owned the Primatech paper company (that was a front for Bennet’s former job) that’s holding onto a secret about why they are tracking down evo’s. One of the people they tracked down was his half-sister and so now Quentin is on a mission to hopefully save her and get some answers about this evil company.
Noah has changed his name, changed his job and changed his family but he’s not completely oblivious to the events that happened on June 13 a year ago, but there are still missing pieces to his memory.
Finally, Noah tracks down his old friend Rene aka The Haitian, who is running a secret operation of his own in Dallas, Texas. The Haitian returns Noah’s beloved horn-rimmed glasses, but then tries to choke his former colleague to death. Noah fights him off and ends up shooting and killing Rene (that was a short reunion).
Rene reveals that he wiped out part of Noah’s memory per his request and tried to kill him after his former partner told him to do so if he ever came looking for answers. Apparently what Noah had wiped out was worth killing for — even if it meant killing himself.
Noah and Quentin return to the scene of the Odessa disaster to hopefully find Molly Walker — the little girl from the first series who could find anybody with abilities by just concentrating on them like a mini-human Cerebro — and use her to track down all these evo’s who have gone missing. Unfortunately when they arrive, everyone at Renautus is dead (more on that later) but paperwork recovered shows that Molly Walker and Claire Bennet were unaccounted for when the final body count was tallied in the Odessa disaster.
Now Noah wants answers more than ever to find out what happened to his Claire Bear.
Needless to say, Noah’s story was by far the most compelling and the best connection to the past series. The rest of the show, not so much. Let’s run down the characters we meet and what relevancy they had to this debut episode.
LUKE AND JOANNE
These two parents lost their son during the Odessa attack and now it’s their live mission to kill any evo they can get their guns on. They show up to a secret meeting where evo’s are trying to figure out a way to survive and Luke shoots everybody dead.
The grieving parents are basically just going from place to place killing people and they are just about the most unconvincing bad guys to ever appear on screen. Maybe that’s the point because they will eventually find redemption at some point this series, but so far these two are about as convincing as criminals as George Costanza was trying to be a bad man.
I’m a huge fan of Zachary Levi, who plays Luke, but he’s just not pulling off the bad guy routine. Nothing about him says ‘grieving and avenging father’ and while he’s probably fighting against being type cast as ‘the good guy’, Levi is a clean cut hero who just isn’t villain material so far anyways.
TOMMY
Tommy is a high school-kid with an ability to teleport anyone or anything he touches to any place he visualizes in his head. He’s been on the run with his mother for years trying to escape persecution, but with checkpoints everywhere and no chance of escaping to a more sovereign nation like Canada, they are stuck running inside the United States.
Now Tommy is a student at a high school where a girl he’s crushing on named Emily finds out about his secret while her asshole boyfriend doesn’t like that some new kid is checking out his lady.
Tommy ends up at a secret meeting for evo’s just before everybody in the room is slaughtered by Luke and Joanna and he ends up zapping them back to the basement of the Renautus warehouse where he was once held captive when they try to grab him later in the episode.
Eventually, Tommy makes nice with Emily’s boyfriend after he’s tasked to transport the kid’s drunken stepfather to anywhere else but their home. Tommy can’t bring himself to do it, but there’s a mysterious man with the ability to manipulate people’s minds by showing them a penny who has been following the kid around during the entire episode.
Tommy now has a new job at an ice cream parlor with Emily while her boyfriend his new best pal and he’s got a guardian angel (or something) looking out for him around town.
MIKO
This is by far the dumbest of all the new characters we meet in the debut episode.
Miko is apparently the inspiration for the featured character in a video game called Evernow. She finds this out after a gamer shows up at her apartment and says that he made it to level two on Evernow and it gave out her home address.
He’s convinced she’s the living embodiment of the character ‘Katana Girl’ and all she needs to do to transform into the bad ass ninja is find a sword her father left for her in a secret panel in his study. She convinces herself that it’s all real and when she finds the sword and pulls it from the sheathe, Miko is transported into the video game as ‘Katana Girl’.
FYI: The sword is the same one Hiro carried in the first Heroes.
If the story sounds confusing and makes no sense, trust me it doesn’t.
Eventually, Miko teams up with the weird gamer kid to track down her father who has been kidnapped as she transforms between a human and video game character throughout Japan. I’m guessing this will eventually tie back into Hiro’s return to the show, but so far this is the least relevant and most mind numbingly stupid story thus far.
CARLOS GUTIERREZ
Then there’s Carlos Gutierrez, who is a revered war hero returned home to East Los Angeles where he spends his days drinking liquor while giving inspirational speeches to school kids and hanging out with his nephew. Carlos was estranged from his family after he went into the army, while his brother Oscar stayed at home to raise his son and take care of his father’s auto repair garage.
In reality, Oscar is moonlighting as a superhero dressed as a Mexican luchadore who helps evo’s escape from the United States to Canada where they will be safe. Unfortunately one night while attempting to help some people, Oscar is drawn into a trap before he’s shot and killed.
Now Carlos is on a mission to find out who killed his brother while carrying on his legacy as a hero.
How It All Comes Together
So Luke and Joanne were the people who busted out of a holding cell where Tommy transported them and they ended up killing everyone at Renautus, but not before they found a file with a full listing of names and addresses for evo’s across the country. Now this parental pair of revenge seekers are going to go house to house killing people with abilities.
Bennet’s mission to find Molly Walker ends in Odessa when he finds the paperwork claiming that both she and Claire weren’t present when the bomb went off that claimed all those lives a year ago.
In reality, Molly has been on the run (because she’s now like 21 after being about 7 or 8 years old while on Heroes), working schemes to get money to stay off the radar of the bad people hunting her. Little does she know the latest crook she’s trying to fleece is actually one half of an evo couple that’s been tracking her for some time.
Now Molly has been captured and handcuffed but what will this nefarious pair do with the most sought after evo we’ve ever met? As of yet, we have no clue.
All told, the two hour debut of Heroes Reborn was a major letdown, but that doesn’t mean the show can’t be salvaged.
The show’s biggest mistake was not bringing back more familiar faces in the first episode rather than force feed a ton of new characters with tedious back stories that felt drawn out and not original. One of the problems with the first version of Heroes was how the show constantly introduced more and more new characters while refusing to kill off any old ones still hanging around. By the end of the run, Heroes was just a jumbled mess of no names with a random mix of abilities.
So far Heroes Reborn is a carbon copy dud but we’re going to stick around for the full season just to see if this resurrection was worthwhile or a complete waste of time.
