It's funny that this is coming up now. Watching last week's eposide, I was struck with the now-familiar sense of uneasiness about this mess of a show. Mulling it over later, I decided that it was noisy and busy but had become an ultimately pointless exercise with no underlying theme or idea to hold it together. There are plenty of excesses to address here, but really it's an excess of all the excesses (characters, time travel, etc.) that make it almost unwatchable.

The gold standard for this kind of show is Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and one of the things that made that show so darn good was it's internal logic and structure. The "through-line" of even the most minor character was never, ever changed: who they were and what they liked or disliked, could do or couldn't do, etc.. was established early on and STUCK to, so that the characters always seemed like very real people, no matter how "unreal" the plot. The fantasy aspects always have to have that solid underpinning, or the whole thing disintregates, like Heroes did.

Your reasons for the show being lousy are bullcrap. Just look at Lost. 1) its NOT new. 2) They have a large cast as well.
It's all about the writing and the vision. Lost doesnt try to cram everyones storyline into each episode, leaving 3 mins of screen time for every single cast member, that is idiotic and unsatisfying. Lost focuses heavily on a particular cast member in its flashback, and ties that in to the current storyline. It's brilliant and it works.
They should have fired more that 2 producers of this crap-assed show that is called Heroes.

I wish the Heroes writers would read Squanto and alexmonty's comments. Yes, the problem is character consistency, folks!

Sure, characters can grow and change over time, but this is ridiculous. When I was a kid I used to make fun of my sister's soap operas, it was like the whole cast had Multiple Personality Disorder. A scheming witch in one story arc turned into a sensitive, sympathetic character in the next. I was amazed my sister tolerated such lazy writing - I stopped watching Heroes a few weeks ago after I realized I was tolerating it, too.

Since season 2 I felt like the writers are a bunch of teenagers trying to make a complex show in a day by day basis , there is no control of logic over the plot, almost every one's dialogue seems immature and out of character, they let things go out of their hands like having the wrong ppl getting the wrong powers that maybe were useful in season 1 (time travel, power acquisition) but now are just baggage and since the fan favorites are the ones who have it they can't get ride of them too easy.

I know this is a comic book based show, but come on, even super-heroes movies don't go with that cheesy dialogues that make any daytime soap opera look like written by Shakespeare. Grow up!!, this is not a Saturday morning cartoon don't let the protagonist go out of character just for the sake of the plot.

I love Heroes. I love the sci-fi and I like the comic book genre. I don't think there are two many characters. If you want less to keep track of, then watch Two and a Half Men. I agree that the show has many flaws and failures.

Traveling to Africa has been boring. Almost as boring as Hiro in feudal Japan. These story lines can be completed in one episode.

Let people die. Sure, make Claire special, but I better not see Adam again. Move the story along.

And the time travel is not a good plot device. These people are supposed to have amazing abilities. Continue to make the show about that and less about what may happen in some sort of future butterfly effect reality in the future.

I agree that the producers should have been let go. This is an amazing franchise. It would be extremely disappointing if Heroes was not picked up for a fourth and fifth season. Let the series end with a proper finale and wrap up.

there are too many characters and not to mention future and present characters so technically theres 2 of everyone. hrg is annoying. claire needs to learn how to act. mohinder is also annoying but its interesting to see who takes him down and when they find out what he becomes.

nathan and this triplet whatever her name is annoying they should have stuck with the original one.

I've heard all the clap-trap from Heroes apologists... I loved season 1. Smart, plot & character driven fun. Second Season, meh. Third, Super Lame. Here's my take on what went wrong: There is no internal logic to this world they've created. There are apparently no rules for them to follow or violate. All good Sci-Fi, or any drama for that matter, is based in a universe with its own system of logic. You write within these confines and it all works, if you arbitrarily ignore what has already been established than it's nothing more than hackery and smoke & mirrors. Aside from the time travel the core of the show takes place over the course of three years and none of the characters seem to remember what they even did a week prior. FAIL.

The biggest thing that Heroes lacks now is character development. The thing that made Season 1 stand out is that they took efforts to actually give the characters some backstory and enable viewers to build relationships with them. Now it seems that characters are coming in out of nowhere with no explanation and being killed or captured and pretty much not heard of since.

Take the character of Doyle for instance. He is by far the most interesting character of the past two seasons. He could've been built up to become the next Sylar but instead he got what.....1 episode? What's up with that?

You know, the first few eps of the first season were pretty crummy, too, but then it hit its stride. Of course, the S1 finale stunk, and everything since has been mediocre at best. The show is just too all over the place. We'll see if new writers/producers can save it. Doubt it.