Damn you Dixon, damn you to hell!

Shaking my fist at the air, impotently raging at myself for listening...

Ah, calmer now, back to the beginning:

Will, among a few others, alerted me a while back to a show called Heroes. Thought I’d get around to flicking through an episode or two, just to humour him. Curses, it’s good!

I watched the first episode and thought “Hmmm, it’s not bad, a little clunky in places, but there might be something to it, so I’ll give it another episode or two to see where it goes.” Now I’m sat, gnashing my teeth, having watched the first six shows and have been thoroughly drawn into its quirky little universe.

My initial lukewarm reaction is undoubtedly due to being able to cherry-pick some outstanding (mainly US) shows against which I subconsciously compare anything new. The scarily high-budget Lost, Battlestar Galactica’s consummate spectacle, Deadwood, The West Wing, etc, etc, all predispose me with a very high expectation of any given new show.

This is not to say that Heroes is in any way bad, but more that I’d been spoiling myself a little, thinking that as soon as the bar had been raised, there wouldn’t be any more tat (silly boy...).

The show has gone for a nice, slightly off-beam take on the whole ‘normal person becoming endowed with superpowers’ thing and brought it to bear on the lives of some fairly ordinary people. None of the Smallville ‘what do they do with the regular, non-gorgeous people in this town?’ syndrome or, worse still, the Torchwood ‘he’s a weapons expert, she’s a ninja death assassin, she’s a whore with a heart of gold and none of them suffer fools gladly’ tosh.

Nope, these are interesting, flawed, complicated characters with a good amount of depth, set against a world of murky grey areas, with an unfolding series of plotlines that pique interest without being just ‘bloody mysterious’ for the sake of it.

A fuller cannonade of blather will no doubt follow this as the series progresses, but that Will Dixon keeps on finding the tasty visual nibblies for us greedy types out here. Well done, sir!