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Spoiler alert!

Geeks that we are, we watched the premier of the second season to Heroes last night. There is no way to discuss my reactions to what it promised without giving away some major plot points. Even if I limited my comments to apparently innocuous material, there’s no way to be sure it won’t become important somehow, because Heroes is a complex, and very serial, show, with events and characters continually weaving back upon themselves. And frankly, there’s nothing to discuss about the innocuous material.

So past this paragraph, I’m going to make no effort to avoid giving stuff away, okay? If you want to see Heroes for yourself first, go see it. The archives will be here indefinitely. All righty. Let the spoilage begin.

The second series is off to a wobbly start. Whereas the first series began with various characters becoming aware of their powers, and clearly intended to progress through their respective self-examinations, mixed with frequent brushes with bad guys and other menaces, the second series feels like it’s groping for a direction. Everyone’s gone to ground, presumably on the advice of Mr. Bennet, who is convinced no paranormal is safe while the mutant-kidnapping and recruiting organization (hereinafter known as “The Organization”) for which he used to work still exists. At least some of them are keeping in touch; the Indian geneticist shares an apartment with Officer Parkman and Molly, and informs Mr. Bennet when The Organization contacts him. They’re planning some kind of sabotage or overthrow of The Organization, so any character willing to join that crusade might well want to hide out.

It’s less clear why Nathan Petrelli has dropped out of society on a drunken bender. He was (as far as anyone knows) elected to Congress. He’s got a job to do, and he proved the future is mutable by flying his brother up to explode in the sky rather than incinerate New York City. There weren’t any witnesses to his flight at the close of last season who didn’t already know about superpowers. He’d draw more attention to himself by resigning his office than by filling it. Mr. Linderman isn’t around any more to pull his strings, and if he’s part of the resistance movement against The Organization, he’d be a heckuva lot more valuable to it in Washington. For that matter, why isn’t he dead? Didn’t he meet a fiery doom with Peter in the skies over Manhattan? Well, maybe not. Read on.

Similarly, Hiro’s trip to Tokugawa Japan seems a little forced. Yeah, maybe he’s on some kind of journey of self-discovery, but didn’t he complete that in the first season? Meanwhile, Ando and Hiro’s father wait in New York for Hiro’s return. The time-traveling fanboy is already four months late. Hiro’s absence becomes critical when his father receives a death threat—Hiro isn’t around to save him, and there’s no way to get him a message. But…presuming Hiro returns at all, why doesn’t he just return at the time of his departure? The comic relief he provides, so welcome in the general tension of the original series, is redundant in the more generally silly scenario into which he drops: discovering the legendary Kensei is a Brit posing as a samurai, and a flippant, self-involved Brit at that. Both ends of the situation are awkward.

Mr. Bennet’s new job as an assistant manager for a copy shop is also played for laughs before comic relief becomes necessary, and in a way that made me uncomfortable. Putting up with a petty tyrant boss could broaden the character, and highlight how the family is suffering from being on the lam, if they weren’t still living in a big, rich-looking house. Assaulting and bullying the boss is just creepy in a supposedly sympathetic character.

Several new characters are introduced, including a brother-sister pair trying to hop the Mexican border to find help in the US for her condition, an unexplained and as yet uncontrolled ability to kill people around her. Their development should be interesting to watch, although not every superhero needs a sidekick with which to discuss the angst of superpowers. There’s also a guy with the power of matter transmutation, who reinitiates The Organization’s attempt to recruit Suresh, and a teenager at Claire’s new school who flirts with her, divides the world into drones and weirdos, spies through her bedroom window at night, and flies. I’d like to see a real mix of new characters, but I doubt we’ll get much of a change-up, given how many old characters remain.

The list of return characters includes Peter Petrelli, who presumably died in an uncontrolled nuclear explosion over New York. Peter is amnesiac, shorn, and inexplicably locked in a freight cabin, but he’s still decidedly not a radioactive cinder. I won’t say that’s unrealistic; in a world with superpowers, anything can happen. But it is unfulfilling. Reincarnating Peter negates, at a stroke, the pathos of his own death and his brother’s redemption at the end of the first series. After Sylar’s survival and escape to the sewers, I shouldn’t be surprised at the show’s refusal to close off plot lines, but I am. Each individual decision to keep spinning out some fanboy’s favorite character or plot line pleases the fanboy, but the collective effect is to cheapen the story for the rest of us.

Much of the fun of the original series lay in knowing the major characters were playing for keeps. Claire survived death, but that’s okay, given that her lone power is indestructibility. Isaac Mendez and Eden McCain and even super-healer Linderman died and stayed dead, along with a host of minor characters. Plans that got upset stayed upset. This kind of finality is only possible when the writers know where they’re going.

The second series needs a clear sense of purpose. The first series began with the characters seeking to understand and master their powers, along with their various personal issues; only later did the core motivation of preventing a nuclear explosion in New York emerge. Perhaps the plan to overthrow The Organization will fill this role, although clearly many of the major characters aren’t yet on board. Maybe it will be the genetic plague which, unchecked, will kill the mutants prematurely, although it looks like only Suresh cares about that at the moment. Maybe it will be something entirely different. I trust the second series of Heroes to deliver another central purpose, and, with its emergence, to anchor these disparate and generally disappointing elements into a compelling whole. So far, however, none has emerged, and the show feels a little lost without existing crises to keep the characters occupied in the meantime.

(Postscript: I’ve written before on the current era of fan-driven television, fueled by internet chat rooms that make it easy to monitor what the fans like, and what they don’t. The second series’ wobbly start makes it hard for cynics like me not to suspect the writers don’t quite have a plan in mind yet, and are waiting to see what stirs up the liveliest response.)