A geek's Heroes

On Monday night, I got round to watching something other than Ugly Betty. It turns out that my supplier also puts up a TV show called Heroes, which I'd seen mentioned a few times on ew.com. I knew that it was one of this season's successful shows but wasn't sure of its premise. All I had were vague ideas that it could be a reality show about ordinary people doing heroic acts.

What finally sent me checking out Heroes was an article about Ugly Betty, which said that the only other perky TV hero of the season is a bespectacled Japanese salaryman called Hiro Nakamura. And it turns out that Hiro on Heroes is played by Masi Oka, the same guy who plays Franklin, the lab guy on Scrubs. How cool is that? (Okay, maybe only a geek would appreciate it.) Masi Oka is a genius with a 180+ IQ. At age 12, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine as one of the Asian-American whiz kids. As an adult, he's done CGI work for Industrial Light & Magic (yeah, that company owned by George Lucas) and he still works there part-time. (Information courtesy of imdb.com - Oka's CGI-work resume is pretty impressive.)

So I stayed up all of Monday night and most of Tuesday morning to watch the first nine episodes of the show. What a ride. It's no reality show, but something rather like X-Men crossed with X-Files, and bursting with cliffhangers, revelations, embedded mysteries. Tim Kring, the creator, is best known for the show, Crossing Jordan, and he has a very able co-executive producer, Jeph Loeb, of comic-book and Lost-and-Smallville fame.

The show has an ensemble cast featuring characters who realize that they possess strange abilites and powers. Some are bewildered, some are indifferent, and some are just plain thrilled, like Hiro. He's a Trekkie, an anime and manga fan, and he loves that he can bend space and time. Telling only his colleague, Ando, about it, Hiro is determined to use his power to do good. And the good deed du jour is saving New York City from a nuclear explosion. To do this, he'll most likely need help from the other folks who are less enthusiastic about their burgeoning powers. The only other fellow whose desire to save the world equals Hiro's - but with less glee - is Peter Petrelli, a former male nurse with a Rogue-like ability to mimic other people's powers.

Perhaps it's because these two are so proactive and eager to help that I like their characters best. Peter's desire to make a difference in the world and in his own life, his quiet search for his destiny touched something in me, because really, don't many of us want to do the same? That is, those of us who still have a fraction of Hiro's wonder and excitement about being alive and delighting in it?

All this hero talk makes me nostalgic for Bonnie Tyler's "Holding out for a hero."

Posted by Monoceros at November 29, 2006 6:20 PM