It’s likely Coyote Sands, but I’ll concur with you that THAT wasn’t addressed enough. Could’ve led to a decent story for Angela if her and The Company disowned Samuel down the road. Then you can have Angela trying to redeem herself, and Samuel trying to show that they CAN live in society.

But that would require 22 eps, I reckon. So I’m not sure how feasible it ever was.

“The downside to that is I think we’ve seen a lot of it before, with Nathan and Pinehearst, with Danko, with Building 26. I’ll be curious to see how this volume sets its core elements apart from the ones in previous volumes.”

This puzzled me for days. Not because I couldn’t think of an answer - but because once i realized the answer, i was puzzled as to why this wasn’t addressed in the first place: bring the real world back into the show. Now, don’t get me wrong - the show has done an amazing job of making the cast believable again with real world issues at the root of their problems, but not since season 2 have we been given real human beings to juxtapose the fantastical reality of Heroes to our reality. And not since season 1 has it been done effectively (say what you will about Simone, but i liked her). We almost got that feeling back in Volume 4 with Danko, but it was never developed enough. Four seasons in, we know the core characters and their motivations from top to bottom. Heck, when your first super-villain ends up becoming a hero, you know you’ve run the gamut of ideas for them. Introduce the human, non-super powered element into the show again. Both good guys and bad, and a few morally gray ones in between. Have people the supers have an involvement in protecting beyond their own circle of family and friends. Have people that hate the Heroes that the Heroes are still struggling to protect. have human villains with ulterior motives like those of the average citizen: money and power. Enough with the world domination.It’s a lofty goal, but it really doesn’t leave you any room to grow. Honestly, what would one of these guys do if they actually succeeded in taking over the world? Sit on their porches drinking mint juleps? So yes, the show needs to come up with new ideas for their main cast for sure. But I for one think it would be nice to see those ideas and plotlines interract organically with the reaction of the general public. This is where season 2 and beyond has been severely lacking, and I think if the show had realized this, the seasons following season 1 would have been more emotionally and mentally compelling. I finally understand why the fanbase dried up: The world our Heroes live in seems very isolated these days…

If that’s true then I think it needed to be expanded. It looks to me like one of those Things That Fell By The Wayside. Knowing whether Samuel genuinely cared about his community isn’t something we can glean from him razing a police precinct or telling Amnesiac-Sylar what a cruel world they’re living in. Those are manifestations of his issues, but they don’t hint at the source, and they don’t provide a rationale. Moments like those imply that Samuel loathes the non-special population, and I guess those moments explain why Samuel would want to gain enough power to bury them, but they don’t establish where that loathing came from in the first place, and they don’t really tell us whether Samuel actually cares about his “family” beyond harnessing their power. Does Samuel hate non-supers because of Coyote Sands? Is it from growing up feeling like a second-class citizen? Is it that he believes in subjugating non-specials because they’re a step down in the evolutionary rung? Is it all of those?

That’s where I think Samuel’s character arc suffered. That’s where we needed more than outbursts and an implicit “Well, it’s obvious, you can figure out the rest…” Samuel telling Lauren that the world owes him doesn’t even scratch the surface. I think that’s why it’s difficult to reconcile Frolicking Samuel with Precinct-Razing Samuel. Part of it’s that Vanessa was introduced, written out and then never mentioned again; which ties in with Pas’s point about characters serving as disposable plot devices, and which, looking back, seems to have done more harm than good to Samuel’s character arc. But to me, it’s mostly that Samuel’s backstory and motives were never clearly defined. Far too much was left to speculation and guesswork. There’s a balance between respecting the audience’s intelligence and leaving gargantuan pieces of a character’s backstory undeveloped.

“You chaps believing him is great, except arguably that’s the point. You believe him until you see the true character emerge, and then you hate him.”

I’m not sure it’s a case of hating him (which, I agree, was the intended idea). I think it’s more a case of hating the way he was written, at least as far as the finale was concerned. If we’re to believe that Charming/Conniving/COMPLEX Samuel and Frolicking Samuel were both an act, and if we’re to believe that Pathetic/Cliche-Spouting/CARICATURE Samuel (the one we saw once the carnival members walked away) is the real character, I have to say I find the act to be more compelling than the reality. Whether it’s an act or not, though, my point is it needed to be developed more than it was. Considering Knepper appeared in every episode, I’m amazed I’m even saying that, but the whole “What’s his motive?” issue seems to be an ongoing issue (Danko… the unknown Angola backstory; Arthur… Who knows?).

We’re saying a lot of characters were introduced during S2, but there has been at least as many during V3 and S4 (I agree that V4 balanced it really well). The difference is how they’ve used them. I’ll put aside the case of the new main (Adam and Monica with who I had no problem, and Maya who was annoying as hell), I never felt the recurring stepped aside from their role. They always served the plot or one of the main characters’ arc. The little/no character development they had (- Maya is a crybaby. - West can fly, was abducted as a kid, now he uses facebook, and I think that’s it.) and the fact that they were disposable (as in they either died or vanished with or without explaination) just reinforces my opinion that they just played their role in the story, without eating screentime for no purpose (Maya aside).

It’s just another instance of “what if” because we just won’t know what would have happened without them. ie : If Bob didn’t send Elle after Peter, he would probably have stayed in Ireland untill Nathan showed up there (which was quite late in the season), Caitlin’s existence is a consequence of stashing Peter in Ireland, etc… We just can’t know if the plot would have moved faster, or if we would have had twice as much “Hiro in feudal Japan”/”Peter robs banks in Ireland”.

Rather, look at it this way. Samuel wanted to believe in those ideals. That he could be with Vanessa and live an idyllic life. But he still took revenge for Jeremy, he still sunk the mansion, he still wanted Danko dead. All season, Samuel hopped between anger towards the world and the belief he could change it. Like Peter. The only difference between them was that Samuel was prepared to do horrible things for his goal. And so when Vanessa dumped him, Samuel lost all semblance of his humanity.

He embraced his villainous side.

It’s what Joseph warned him about. Hell, it’s even a loose ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’ analogy. Samuel was never that charming guy in actuality, it was part of the rich fantasy life he created. An example of character (the charming guy) not being true character (a man who uses fear as a weapon.)

As for Samuel yelling at them… it’s about control. He’s been manipulating them from the start. Within two episodes, Samuel manipulates Hiro… Edgar and Lydia… he has Danko killed… and he threatens to kill Edgar if Edgard doesn’t follow suit. The character is a contradiction at all points. You chaps believing him is great, except arguably that’s the point. You believe him until you see the true character emerge, and then you hate him.

Which is the point of the character.

You go back to the Adam point… but that’s not liking the character so much as understanding that he believes his logic. And Samuel’s logic works for me. He draws strength from minions both literally and figuratively, if you take that away from him he’s nothing but a pathetic man-child. The show has repeatedly alluded to him being a cult-leader, and the bottom line is that every cult-leader is a coward who cannot function without the group to sacrifice.

“It was a front.”

I’m guessing (sadly) that this is true. But if it is, doesn’t it undermine a huge chunk of the character’s role this season? It effectively means that everything Samuel has said — over Joseph’s grave in 4.01, to Gretchen at the carnival in 4.12, to the carnival members in the valley at the end of 4.12 — was bulls**t. It also effectively means that everytime he inspired hope in the specials he was trying to recruit (Emma, Tracy, Ian (ha, ha )), he was basing his pitch on ideals he didn’t actually believe in.

I can’t believe that. I don’t want to believe that. If it was all a front, it amounts to another Sylar Petrelli hoax: it means we spent 90% of this volume becoming emotionally invested in a character whose endgame involved one giant season-long pretense. In my view, Samuel was more complex than that. He was about more than artful manipulation: he was about inspiring hope and optimism among people with abilities, and the twist was that he just ~*happened*~ to have a megalomaniac streak which compelled him to use the people he inspired to his own ends. I know what you mean when you say the villain eventually has to show their true colors, but I’m with Pas on this: there’s such a thing as showing your true colors without descending into mustache-twirling and fist-shaking. Which, to my mind, is what “YOU COWARDS! COME BACK HERE! YOU’RE NOTHING WITHOUT ME!” resembles.

“If we’re still siding with Samuel, that creates a vacuum of moral ambiguity that a show called Heroes doesn’t need.”

Sure, but I don’t think sympathizing with the villain equates to siding with him. I think it’s possible to believe that Samuel genuinely wanted what was best for the superpowered community and to STILL hate him for trying to bury Central Park. We hated Adam for becoming a genocidal maniac, but I think there was at least some part of us that felt bad for the guy back in 17th century Japan — the one who made a solid effort to be heroic and ended up losing his girlfriend to the man he looked up to and getting blown up. It *is* possible to sympathize with a villain without compromising the villain’s stature. That, to me, is an indication of a rounded, three-dimensional villain.

Pas, I’m glad you brought up Season Two when it comes to the “mixing and matching” concept, but I tend to agree with the “too many characters” criticism. You’re right that Monica and Maya were the main cast additions, but there were so many other supporting AND main characters who were also introduced over those 11 episodes: Kensei/Adam, West, Maury, Caitlin, Bob, Elle, Alejandro… I think it was the introduction of ALL of those characters — alongside the old cast, and in such a small batch of episodes — that created the sense of character-overload. But I also think TPTBs struck that balance perfectly over Volumes Three, Four and Five; a few supporting characters, most of whom served a clear purpose and added a new dynamic to the main characters’ story threads.

For proof? See S3 and the ‘they’re all dark inside’ rhetoric.

As for new characters, I’m all for a cast partly renewed, but more that what we want, it just seems like a necesity. Aside from Peter and Matt, whose arcs were partly determined by the Sylathan situation, it’s a fact that some of the characters’ arc, mostly Claire and Sylar, are running in circle.
It’s also part of a criticism that I don’t understand when it comes to S2 : “Too many characters” ? There was, like 2 new main characters : Monica, who perfectly integrated Micah’s life, and Maya who caused a problem by too many instance of screaming/crying. With Quinto mostly out for Star Trek, it’s not like they were eating too much time out of the other main characters.

It’s clear that they need clear directions - for the storyline and the characters’ evolution - and it’s obvious it’s gonna be difficult if the writers all have diverging opinions.