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Message: <blockquote data-quote="coyote6" data-source="post: 5184501" data-attributes="member: 1225">The problem is that I don't think there was a way to keep him as an effective bad guy for long; either he'd win, and kill everyone (end of show), or he'd keep losing but somehow survive. After your villain has lost a million times, the villain tends to be less scary. Or maybe he's especially horrific, and keeps upping the ante; then people's suspension of disbelief begins to fail spectacularly when the heroes don't kill him or otherwise dispose of him completely. It's kind of a lose/lose situation. That's why actual superhero comic books have rosters of villains; you beat one, then he goes off to lie low for a while before he comes back to lose again.I think one of the core problems with the show was that Hiro's, Sylar's, and Peter's powers were lousy for an ongoing show. Hiro's powers, once he's mastered them, are basically an I Win Button. Something happens? Teleport there, freeze time, fix it. Peter has Hiro's powers, plus everyone else's who he meets. Sylar has the powers of anyone he kills (and eventually, he doesn't have to even kill them). The characters either have to be stupid, the situations have to be incredibly contrived, or they solve them way too easily.So the writers struggled with those problems. I think the last season was better than season 2, and light years better than season 3 -- and look what they did: restricted Hiro's powers, changed Peter's (mimic one power at a time), and messed with Sylar's brain such that it took most of the season for him to recover, and then stuck him in a loop for years, so he could change his personality (and thus make an anti-hero turn plausible, whereas the previous attempts foundered horribly on the simple fact that he was too crazy for any epiphany to seem plausible, and didn't have time to change organically).I'm not sure if it took them that long to figure out how to change the characters, or if it took them that long to figure out that they needed to make those changes. In the meantime, we got two seasons of Peter and Hiro carrying the Idiot Ball, Sylar carrying the Mopey Ball, and them introducing way too many characters while keeping all the old ones. Combine that with the unfortunately common stretching out of storylines, and we got months where no storyline advanced appreciably, or they'd move forward two steps then back two.I'm kind of sad that it's cancelled, in that there was theoretically a chance for it to be good -- especially if they didn't play stupid "we're going back to the status quo" games with the finale's public revelation of powers thing. If they went forward with a changed and changing world, that could've been neat. OTOH, Hiro's powers were back to full strength, and Sylar was maybe a good(ish) guy and his powers were fine, so they were probably headed right back to "and why can't Hiro + Sylar + Peter solve this" territory again. So I'm kind of relieved that it was cancelled, and the chance of even greater suckitude was avoided. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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