Remember when I used to have a blog...?

I do.

A new job where I have no Internet access, combined with near constant activity of one sort or another on the home front when I'm there, have all conspired to keep me out of the Blogger web interface these last several weeks. When I do get a shot at the one computer we have with an Internet connection, I usually expend it getting caught up on the various websites I like to read, and find I have little or no time left over to post. All that, and, you know, the miserably low comment count here, as opposed to the 70 or 80 minimum threadcount responses that the new, comparatively crappy contributors over at Sadly, No! see whenever they post some rambling, forced, unfunny drivel, has all taken its toll.

Still, apparently, if I don't post anything about HEROES, Jeremy Slater will have nothing to say about the show, either, and we can't have that. Thus, so --

Everyone has their own tipping point. Here in this household, we seem to have reached it two episodes ago. For Nate, it was the spectacle of Peter Petrelli getting a tattoo that finally drove him away from the show in disgust. For SuperWife... well, I don't know what it was for SuperWife.

Maybe, like me, there was no one specific moment of mindwrenching stupidity, perhaps it was simply the aggregation of ALL the mindwrenching stupidity the HEROES audience has had thrown at it this season -- Hiro's utterly retarded time travel subplot, the ghastly foreign accents we've had inflicted on our ears by 'actors' who were apparently recruited directly from a high school theater club, the constant, high pitched gay vibe coming off Greg and Mohinder as they squabble over just how best they should raise The Adorable Little Girl Who Can See Everybody, the temple-pounding headache that is every new character introduced to date this season, starting with the Sensational Spics of Life and Death and continuing right up through Claire's apparent new romantic interest, Flying Emo Douche (hat tip to Jeremy Slater for that last coinage), and certainly not failing to include the Dumbass White Samurai In Medieval Japan and all those idiotic "Irish" guys.

Or maybe, like me, what truly turned her away from the TV screen in appalled dismay was not even any or all of these things, but the simple horrified realization that this show, rather than moving forward and building on the intensely flawed yet still interesting or even compelling arc of the first season, was simply going to pointlessly reset itself so that Tim Kring and his stable of captive scripting slaves could essentially recycle all of last season's characterization bits and storylines, with any and all 'new' material being confined to various bits they could blatantly steal from PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, X-FILES, or LOST.

Whatever it may be, the last two Mondays have been HEROES-free here in Castle Anthrax, and honestly, we only ever notice at 10:30 or so, after the Magic games break up, Nate heads out to his own place, and we're getting ready for bed. Then, inevitably, one of us will look at the other one and say "Whoops, we forgot about HEROES again". Then we'll shrug, and turn out the light, and go to sleep.

Now, I have no idea how well HEROES is doing in the ratings this season, and am trying to be careful not to simply assume (as is natural to me) that simply because I (and everyone else I am immediately acquainted with) has abandoned the franchise in disgust, that means that the show's overall ratings have dropped like Britney Spears panties at a Paris Hilton slumber party. For all I know, the show is doing better than ever, and network executives are ecstatic and euphoric with this seasons scripts, and all over the blogosphere, HEROES fans are going into euphoric raptures about the utter brilliance of plotlines in which, you know, Claire and her family are once again hiding the secret of her powers from her mostly high school social context, Greg is once more trying to be a cop while concealing his own special abilities, Peter is trying to learn to use his powers all over again, Hiro is sending messages to the 21st century by hiding scrolls inside secret compartments in the hilt of what must be one of the most carefully examined historical weapons in the history of the world, and Mohinder, dear Mohinder, is still utterly goddam useless.

Heh. You know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of that time I tried to drill a hole through my head...

Still, for those few of us who actually try to think about stuff, any stuff, from one consecutive moment to the next, it seems safe to assume that HEROES is a dead loss. After nearly half a dozen episodes of this horrifying bullshit -- say, have the Spics of Life and Death gone through that "We Somehow Get Separated, Cute Girl Spic Kills A Lot of People With Her X-Files Eyes, and Cute Guy Spic Shows Up Right After And Resurrects Them All" sequence in every single episode this season? Could Tim Kring really be that in-fucking-sanely bad a writer? -- it seems to me to be very nearly safe to say that HEROES is entirely unsalvagable. There is absolutely nothing anyone could do with this wretched reeking mess that would get any sort of sentient, discerning audience back in front of the sets again. (Although there are plenty of non-sentient, undiscerning SF fans out there apparently willing to lap up any drivel anyone throws at them, as can be seen by the rave reviews that the new, dreadful BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series keeps getting throughout the blogosphere.)

But of course, that assumption would be wrong. HEROES could be saved, even for those one in one hundred thousand potential viewers who actually demand intelligence and some sort of quality in their entertainment. How could this even be possible?

Simple. Pull a Matrix.

Here's what I'd do, if a kind and benevolent God dropped creative control of HEROES in my lap -- I'd take whatever horrible, crappy Kring-produced episode had most recently been created, crop off the last crappy, wretched, horribly miswritten fifteen seconds of it, and substitute:

There is a flash of static. Abruptly, we see Hiro's eyes, in close up, opening wide, as if he is waking up in shock from something. We pull back. Hiro is lying on a slab of metal, naked except for a pair of shorts. He has some kind of metal band running around his forehead, and electrodes with wires fastened all over his body.

HIRO: [sitting up, causing several wires to pull free from his body] What in the name of Lucas and Roddenberry...?

HIRO stares around in stunned shock. We pull back away from him, revealing other cast members, also lying on metal slabs, apparently asleep, nearly naked, festooned with wires and wearing metal forehead bands. The walls of the large room seem to be covered with blinking lights and dials and high tech control boards...

HIRO screams...

TO BE CONTINUED.

Probably in a future blog post.

Sure as hell not on TV anywhere.