TV

Critics have been grousing all season about the "problems" with this second season -- Entertainment Weekly had a feature a few weeks ago about what had gone wrong with the show this season and what could be done to fix those missteps that included creator Timothy Kring responding the general consensus that this season has been a disappointment and had gotten off to too slow a start and bogged down in tangential side-stories -- the proof of all of this being the lower-than-expected ratings.

Well, I have a message for all those nay-sayers: They're wrong. A television show can only be a breakthrough phenomenon once and Heroes' turn at that was last season, its first season. Given the absurdly over-the-top build-up to this season and the expectation that build-up produced, it's not surprising that the ratings have fallen short. But I'll let you in on a little secret: this season was even better. Not in some new, unexpected, wow-this-is-cool sort of way, but in a real, deep, ideas-spinning-out-of-ideas sort of way.

I'm not going to attempt to re-hash the whole season; I should have been writing about it all along and I didn't and here I am. But I will say this about Monday night's finale: It really had me thinking about the complaints and even my own frustrations early on in the season. After the first couple of episodes, I was like what are we doing back here in feudal Japan, how long are we going to be here, come on, enough with the sappy love story between Hiro and the princess. In that way, I was like all those Sopranos viewers that always drove me crazy by complaining that there wasn't enough whacking going on -- nobody got whacked this episode, it was so boring.

But one of the great things about the finale was how everything the show has been building through this season came together. The final showdown between Hiro and Adam -- can you imagine how it would have worked if the show hadn't spent all that time 400 years ago establishing the roots of their relationship and the cause of Adam's anger. It wouldn't have had nearly the depth or impact and it was just one of the many, many ways that you see the attention-to-narrative-detail at work in this series. Can we all just agree that Mr. Kring knows what he's doing better than we do and just enjoy his storytelling without all this armchair quarterbacking?

I loved Nathan's execution at the press conference. Not that I'm glad he's dead but just that it was a perfect moment that felt inevitable and I'm glad the show didn't shy away from it. Also, how great was it that the scene of the shooting was a Texas town (Odessa) police station. There's always been something Kennedy'esque about Nathan's political ambitions and the whole family clan thing going on with him and Peter and their -- ack-- mother, it was a moment of poetic irony to have Nathan's death recall Lee Harvey Oswald's shooting at the Dallas jail.

So who was that unknown man -- the presumable shooterwe see walking away from the shooting as everybody else was rushing forward? Theories, needless to say, abound. Was it Noah, the man in the horn-rimmed glasses? Or Claire's fly-boy sweetheart? Who knows, I don't think it was Noah -- that would be too easy and obvious. I don't know about fly-boy being the shooter, but when he came over to visit Claire, as she was packing and preparing to go public with her secret and out the Organization, and told her that he wasn't there to help her but to stop her, I thought, 'oh I get it, he's really a double agent, he's working for the Organization.' We'll see, but I think he's not the innocent-in-hiding he's been pretending to be.

Another question: Is Niki really dead? That building certainly was consumed in a really impressive fireball, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say yes, she is dead and not coming back. Can you transfuse a pile of ashes with Mohinder's miracle blood elixir and revive her? I hope not -- that would be uncharacteristically cheesy. That's one of the things I admire most about Heroes: it's willingness to pull the trigger, on characters and plot points. Other shows, when they're lucky enough to generate good characters or storylines, cling to them as if the shows depended on them. And, often, they do. But not Heroes. It kills off characters and resolves storyline when it's the right time and doing so serves the greater good of the show's narrative.

Like last night, when that vial full of deadly virus was spinning through the air, about to crash to the ground and release its deadly contents. A lesser show would have frozen on it in mid-air, as Heroes did, and then cut away, leaving that as the season-ending cliff-hanger. But not Heroes. We watched as Peter froze it in mid-air, caught it and destroyed it. That's the end of that storyline. Just like killing Nathan. He's been great, interesting, complicated, the relationship with Peter has been a rich source of feelings, developments and suspense. But it was time for him to go and Mr. Kring and company killed him.

Heroes can do that because it has stories yet to tell and characters yet to introduce and develop and maybe, someday, kill. That's great television.

One final question: So who was that wicked wicked mother talking to on the phone at the end when she approved of her son's execution but then cautioned " You know that you've now opened Pandora's box?"