Heroes: 1×20 - Five Years Gone

With this blog being relatively new, and there being no new TV episodes, I thought the best place to start was Heroes. So I thought I’d go with my favorite Heroes episode of all time, “Five Years Gone.”

What’d I think? Awesome or anticlimactic?

This episode was AWESOME!!!!! To me, it felt like a movie in the way it was shot, and the way it was acted by the core Heroes cast. If you notice, the episode was lit differently from the other Heroes episodes. It also had a darker feel, which contributed to the darker atmosphere of the darker future portrayed in this episode.

First off, I have to give massive props to Masi Oka. Masi Oka really shines in this episode, as he plays two different Hiros, the one we all know and love and the one who we’ve really only seen very few times. We have only seen this Future-Hiro very few times in the series, and those appearances being very few and far between. The way Masi portrayed the two Hiros in this episode was so amazing, I had a hard time believing Masi Oka was Future Hiro and present Hiro. No wonder the guy got nominated for an Emmy.

The storyline for this episode is not totally unfamiliar to comic book fans. In fact, this episode’s storyline is about as “comic booky” as the show gets (and that’s a good thing, mind you). This episode is very reminiscent of the X-Men storyline, “Days of Future Past,” where Kitty Pryde (AKA Shadowcat, for all you X-Men fans out there) lives in a time where mutants are hated and hunted down, and goes back in time to change it. I like how the writers were able to take a classic comic storyline, and give it a Heroes twist.

That Heroes twist also served up some great twists that we weren’t expecting. I think you know which twist I’m talking about: the whole Nathan is Sylar twist. Some people I talked to saw this twist coming a mile away. It took me by surprise, when Nathan transformed into Sylar, and I could not wait to see what else the episode had in store for us, and then realized that the episode had almost ten minutes left in it.

This twist also was able to showcase Adrian Pasdar’s unique acting ability. We all knew that he had great acting ability in all the episodes before this, but I think any actor looks for any moments in which he’s able to stretch his ability as an actor. In this case, Pasdar was given that chance by literally playing another character: Sylar.

The episode contained many foreshadowing elements that could bear some dark moments for the series. Some has actually happened in the series, now that season 2 has come and gone. One to note was being Sylar killing Candice (which occurred at Sylar’s return episode in season 2), so who’s to say that many things that are supposed to occur in this episode won’t occur by the show’s fifth season?

It also raised the question about the fate of the character of Claire. The scene where Claire is killed by Sylar, caused me to think that Claire’s death had been prolonged by Peter saving her in “Homecoming.” Is it Claire’s destiny to die? One can only speculate . . .

Now, I make it no secret to anybody that my favorite character in the show was Peter Petrelli. People ask me why, and I tell them that next to Hiro, he is the most comic-book character in the series, and it is clearly evident in this episode. Throughout most of the first season, we have been able to watch Peter able to live with his strange empathic ability. Since this episode is set many years in the future, we see Peter know how to pull out, adapt, and use every ability he ahs come into contact with in the last five years. We have seen a little bit of this growing and adapting abilities easily throughout the second season. This got me really excited as to what direction Peter’s character after this season.

This episode is a very Hiro-centric episode, due to the fact that there are two Hiros in the episode. We were able to learn much of Hiro’s offscreen character arc over the past five years. Some things that we learned were Hiro is a master swordsman, which he obviously picked up from his father at the end of the season and his time in Japan. Another thing that we learn about Hiro is that he speaks English perfectly now, which after being 5 years in America will do that to you. It will be interesting as the series progresses, what direction the Hiro character will take, and if he will choose to be this merciless warrior-character that he has evolved to in the future, or if present Hiro will change the future and become a “hero.”

Now, this episode could’ve been a total filler, and a waste of an episode due to the fact that it hinges on the fact that none of this will happen if the “exploding man” is stopped. This is not true, as I’ve said many times in this review, just because one aspect of the future has been fixed, doesn’t mean that it won’t come back in a big way.

This episode was not a filler as it fueled the story arc on how the bomb might be stopped, and how the Heroes would have to come together to stop this craziness. It also gave Hiro motivation to stop the bomb once he returned to the present. The episode also fueled Ando as Hiro’s (both present and future) motivation for stopping the bomb.

Do I feel the episode was needed in already tight season? Absolutely. It was an action-packed, story-filled episode that could’ve been done a lot worse. I think the episode was much neede to provide the necessary drive to stopping the bomb and saving the cheerleader. The theme for the group of episodes in which Five Years Gone aired is “It’s time to save the world,” and it definitely had that feel.

The episode was also able to build off of the events that had happened in past episodes (i.e. “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”) and also provided some nice foreshadowing and changeups with the current status quo of the show as it had been.

What do I mean by that? Well, one thing that Heroes is good for, and does really well I might add, is the character pair-ups (Peter & Claire, Hiro & Ando, Peter & Hiro, Nathan & Matt etc.). I think this episode really goes to show that even though after the bomb, the core-cast kind of dispersed and went their separate paths, they were still connected and were still interacting with each other. They were able to build upon the relationships that were still in the show, and were able to provide some new ones. For example, we had seen Mohinder and Nathan kind of interact before earlier in this season, and it seemed to work. But one relationship that we had not seen (or seen very little of, I should say) is Peter and Hiro. This is a relationship/connection that I would like to see explored more in the series. As these two characters have only interacted a couple of scenes together, I would love to see the evolution of their friendship.

On that same note, I must admit I was not a fan of the Peter and Niki relationship. I know how they met was explained in the online graphic novels, but I just did not buy their relationship. They didn’t seem to have any connection onscreen, not as much as Nathan and Niki did. On a Niki note, I would’ve liked to see other than being a stripper, bereft of her family, how Niki has been coping, post-bomb scenario, but I do understand that you only have 43 minutes to tell a lotta story, so the Niki story can be sacrificed. Having said the graphic novels did a good job of that too.

The Peter-Sylar interaction was great, as it always is, in the episode. I really got the sense that throughout the five years, Peter and Sylar had dueled pretty extensively. However, I know that in the context of the storyline, this is impossible, as Sylar has been presumed dead by the entire world (and that includes Peter). I do believe this feeling is attributed largely to Milo Ventimiglia and Zachary Quinto’s performances in their short but sweet standoff scene together.

Now we can’t talk about a Heroes episode without mentioning HRG or Noah Bennet as he has come to be known. I thought where the future placed him was very nice as well. The fact that he was hiding and protecting innocent “special people” in the same way that he has been hiding and protecting Claire. Did Claire kind of give him the idea of using all his resources that he had at his disposal for good? Who knows? But I do think it’s rather unbelievable with all the Company’s resources and their edginess that they have not been able to catch Claire after five years. I mean, is she really THAT good?

But I think this episode works really well and really changed the way I watched Heroes from that point on. Every time a character (that was still alive at that point) did something after this season, I would always use this episode as an endgame reference point as to where I think the characters should end up.

As a sidenote, not relating to the episode at all, the writers of Heroes had planned episode 13 of season two to be a future-centric episode, featuring the return of sword-wielding future Hiro. When I heard this news, I was excited. However, the WGA strike put an end to that when they had to close out the season early because of this. I, for one, would’ve loved to see this episode and how they would fit it into the season’s post-bomb storyline. Hopefully, this new future-centric episode will make its way into season three when Heroes returns!

This episode was written by Joe Pokaski, who has written two other episodes of Heroes and those actually turned out really good (Fallout and Cautionary Tales, for those who were wondering). I think he did a really good job with this one, able to give us a great episode set in the future, and was able to move the series forward in a great direction. He also was able to give us one heckuva roller coaster ride of an episode.

Five Years Gone was directed by Paul Edwards, whose directing credits include Lost, Drive, and Pushing Daisies. He has also directed some noteworthy Heroes episodes (Seven Minutes to Midnight and Kindred). So this episode was helmed by a great writing-directing team. Definitely check out those two episodes to get a sense of Mr. Edward’s directing style in Heroes.

In conclusion, I would like to reemphasize how much this episode rocked. It was shot, like all Heroes, like a comic book, and the lighting was gritty and dark. I think everybody, acting-wise, who participated in the show was on top of their game. The effects were top-notch and realistic, as they often are in Heroes. This episode totally raised the bar in so many ways for this show (and they raised it so many times in this epic first season). Everything about it was great!

RATING: 10/10

This entry was posted on 15. April 2008 at 19:10 and is filed under Heroes Reviews, Tv Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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