[Spoilers – Read With Caution]

1.  They learned from their mistakes last year.  While this Season Premiere was full of holes (as I’m beginning to accept the show will be) it was far and away better than the ‘stab my eyes out rather than watch’ premiere of last year. 

2.  Claire should not try to “be a badass dark-haired future chick”.  This is beyond Panettiere’s acting ability, and was laughable at best.  She looked gorgeous actually with the dark hair, but the acting.  Yikes. 

3.  Hiro should be kept doing what he is great at – comedic relief.  He and Ando are a great funny pair, and a welcome bit of levity with all the serious stuff that goes on in the show, but either the writers don’t know how to write him serious or Oka is not capable of the performance.  Like Claire, the “serious” scenes with Hiro are laughable.  And while I adore Hiro in theory, the more they have him harping on being a “hero” and “saving the world” the less likable he is.  Call me naive but to my mind real heroes don’t run around desperately looking for people to save, they just are.  If this is an attempt at future character development it’s a really clunky attempt that is painful to watch. 

4.  Niki is a terrible character no matter what they name her (Jessica, Gina, Tanya, etc.) it doesn’t seem to matter.  She sucks.  Get her off the goddamn show.  I’ve never had a serious problem with Ali Larter outside of Heroes, which is to say that I rarely have thought much one way or the other about Larter, but she just sucks on this show.  And it’s too bad, because the idea of Niki is a good one (and one I actually had when I was a kid and created a comic book character called Angelica – who had three split personalities that all had power over different aspects – one body, one mind, and one soul – combining them would have made Angelica a very powerful hero – or villain – but her mind was so fractured she couldn’t control them and usually operated as only a shell for one of the other personalities) so OBVIOUSLY, I personally think this character has a lot of potential and is an interesting idea – but between Larter and the writers they’re botching it.  Royally. 

5.  Maya is a terrible character and Ramirez is a terrible actress no matter who she’s on screen with.  Every single scene is over acted, and always with those huge eyes attempting to get bigger with every word spoken.  This is not acting. 

6.  Suresh is the stupidest scientist in the history of time.  Duh, of course you were going to mutate you moron. This is why only idiots in comic books try out their own serums on themselves.  See: Dr. Hank McCoy aka The Beast (a personal favorite of mine, despite the idiocy of using his own serum on himself).  Even major villains like Green Goblin and Dr. Ocotopus usually have an “accident” with their experiments before turning into something horrible, rather than purposefully injecteing shit in their arms.   I know they wanted to drive the Suresh character here, but I believed he was smarter (and more “moral”) than this. I didn’t buy it, it seemed forced.  Good work Heroes.  Good work. 

7.  Nathan is still a good character and Adrian Pasdar is still a good actor one that brings some much needed acting chops to the table.  I am a little sick however of watching him weigh good versus evil for an entire season before he remembers that he’s good.  Let’s give him something different to do okay?

8.  Heroes loves some convenient plot points! 

• Suresh puts Molly on a plane with a stewardess to look after her.  Really?  Really. 
• Peter’s mom blames future Peter for what happened with Claire, because he told her to stay home after Nathan got shot, and because of that she was home for Sylar to get her.  But if Nathan hadn’t gotten shot wouldn’t she have been home watching the press conference (etc.) anyway?  I guess we are supposed to assume she was getting ready to run out and buy milk or something and that Sylar obviously wouldn’t be able to find her while she was out getting milk.  Yeah, Sylar is that limited, for sure. 
• Future Peter can do almost anything – turn invisible, stop time, time travel, fly, heal, read minds, apparently vanish people into other place (or other bodies) and yet he had to run into the supply closet to hide the gun?  Wha-?  Yeah, that made no freaking sense. 
• HRG leaves all his highly confidential files on people with powers in a little brown box marked “Dad’s Office” on the kitchen table.  Really?  I don’t care that he’s in prison and we’re all in mourning or distressed, his family freaking know how serious his work and their lives are – it’s life and death on a daily basis – you think they’d be a LITTLE more careful.  It’s a given that Sylar could probably break into a safe, or find the files eventually, but we can’t just make it a little bit difficult for him?  Jeezus.

9.  The “new” villains don’t seem that scary to me.  Not compared to Sylar.  They do seem like jerks and killers that should be locked up, and I’m not saying they’re not a force to be reckoned with, but they also seem like kids who leave horrible destruction in their wake but are pretty unfocused.  I guess I’m more of an intellectual villain kind of girl (Sylar) than a mob mentality brute force villain (the rest of these guys – thus far).  I suppose it’s possible they’ll turn out interesting, and I know Heroes needs to up the stakes, but they just seemed like The Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants, Magneto’s villain team from the X-Men comic books, and quite frankly, The Brotherhood always seemed as lame as their name.   

It did look like Adam Monroe (aka Kensei) is going to show up though later as part of this gang according to Mama Petrelli’s future vision, so maybe there is hope for this rowdy group to be impressive.  It also looks like maybe Monroe was at some point married to or maybe more likely related to Niki as one of his alias’ is Richard Sanders (at some point in the past).  Maybe he’s her great grandfather?  Who knows – could be interesting.  It also looks like Sylar is going to walk the side of the angels, at least temporarily this season, which I’m unconvinced they can do successfully.  I’m a huge Sylar fan, so they better do it right, which is unlikely.   

10.  When Heroes gets it right, they really do get it right – the scene with Sylar and Claire was AWESOME.  Good writing, good acting, great plot development. 

• Future Peter was completely badass, just casually using his powers for good (possibly well-intentioned but bad good, but whatever), popping in and out wherever he wanted, changing shape, it was great. 
• Elle remains an interesting and complex character and Bell continues to up the acting level, which this show is in desperate need of. 
• The Sylar as Petrelli brother reveal was good, not really unexpected, but still good.  I’ll be interested to see where this takes us. 
• HRG’s reaction to realizing that Sylar could heal and had taken Claire’s powers was moving and great – although the follow up reunion was mishandled in my opinion – that reunion could have been much more powerful without being over the top.  It was kind of a let down. 
• Sylar was a stong point throughout the show – back to his true (and awesomely terrifying) form.  His exchange (and the reveal) in his scene with Claire, was the highlight of the entire two hours. 
• Peter in a villain’s body is a nice plot point.  It’s interesting.  I love when Sci-Fi shows have people in other people’s bodies.  It’s a favorite trick of mine.  Any Buffy fans remember Faith switching bodies with Buffy – that was a great little arc.  Let’s hope Heroes can be as successful with it here. It’s opened up nice questions.  Does Peter still have his powers in there?  Does he have this other guy’s (apparently so terrible we can’t say what his powers are) powers?  A good set up. 

So overall, hit and miss.  But they did a good enough job that I’ll stick around for a while and see if they can hang onto it.  A lot of good, and a lot of bad land us at about 2.5 stars.