When Heroes appeared a few years back it was met with universal adoration from critics and audiences alike. It made the initial hype of Lost seem luke warm by comparison. A story of ordinary people with extraordinary powers - mostly just trying to live their lives and yet all being drawn together by fate. Most people would agree that it was probably one of the most easily compelling pieces of TV for many years. In short - it was a well conceived and well executed, developed its characters and built up and up and up to a

The show - like many others - was somewhat inconvenienced by the Writers Strike but regardless, ploughed on. Naturally, when your entire first season is generally considered a televisual masterpiece -that's going to be a hard act to follow. Especially as almost all the storylines brought up were resolved - aside from a few people who may or may not have been alive or dead.

In many ways, this created an almost immediate problem for the show. There was no inherent direction for it to go. While the destruction of New York is far from the top of the scale of epic, the ending didn't really create any particular reason for the characters to stay together. This led to one of the biggest differences between season one and season two. With season one, we hit the ground running. We know there are all these people with special abilities and continue to build momentum with their interwoven tales. Season two was, by contrast - ponderous. As events pick up four months after the climax of season one - we find that, indeed - many of the characters have moved on and so we spend a considerable amount of time establishing this. Also, it's worth noting that a season slated for twenty four episodes became one that was eleven episodes... you'd think that would mean it was MORE intense.

It was lacklustre and introduced some characters that... just went nowhere... and a lot of story lines... that went nowhere. We had a whole character arc with Hiro that seems to have had pretty much no effect. We had Peter go through a character arc... that seems to have had pretty much no effect (beyond depowering him). Ditto Sylar. Ditto Claire. Ditto EVERYONE.

Season 3 was just a BIG mess though. Oh, we had plenty going on! It was just that we traded the sort of... real people dealing with powers angle for SUPERHERO SOAP OPERA! Now, that's not bad per se but we had so many "Oh, I wasn't really dead." And so on type stuff... and "I'm your father... no, not really." And so on. It's a soap opera in the truest American sense of the word.

The ante is upped in season 3, in that THE WORLD IS AT STAKE! Also, we go all X-men - because apparently everyone with powers must be contained... The Company was SO much more interesting than generic government goons taking people down. Yet, here we are in that scenario. It all feels so contrived. People feel as if they're being pushed around like bets on a roulette table, not drawn in by the string of destiny.

Obviously, when your first act is so full of win... it's hard to follow it up - BSG didn't have smooth sailing but almost managed. Lost utterly failed... but Heroes... just went to pieces.