Heroes has been described as a good series for those who don’t usually like super-heroes. Well, that may be but I do like super heroes and I love Heroes too. I love nothing better than watching seemingly ordinary people discover that they possess special powers like being able to fly or read people’s minds. That’s why I loved the first half of Spiderman I, before he started fighting the Green Goblin and the special effects got out of hand. Heroes, feels like one big first half of Spiderman I

So you won’t see any green goblins flying around and cackling in Heroes, but you do get to see a wide variety of very ordinary people discovering and experimenting with their personal ’special abilities’. We are introduced to many of these people through a geneticist as he attempts to discover the source of their abilities and also their increasingly complicated connection to eachother. The main plot in series one is that an artist who can paint pictures of the future has painted an apocalyptic canvas of New York City exploding. The characters with special abilities are on a mission to avert that disaster and there’s a particularly nasty villain, Sylar, who goes around slicing people’s skulls open and has a rather intimidating array of special abilities that appear to make him invincible.

Heroes has more of a thriller / philosophical feel to it than a sci-fi feel as a much bigger plot is revealed episode by episode. After a while you may feel inclined to start drawing some lines between characters on a sheet of paper to keep track, but the characters are generally ‘down to earth’ and their powers are logically presented and explored. That is to say, the rules within the ’special abilities’ universe are generally adhered to, making it feel almost realistic. It could easily be compared to The 4400, but 4400 was atrociously acted and had awful main characters and simply didn’t hold my attention. There’s some bad acting here and there in Heroes too, by no means is it flawless, but it is well made, in a good tempo and with gripping storylines and plot twists.

The Season One finale (episode 23) was broadcast this week in the U.S. A season finale is always an exciting, yet ambiguous moment as you really want loose ends to get tied up yet you also want there to be more to come. So there’s always gonna be a cliffhanger, the question is, how frustrating a cliffhanger? I was pleasantly surprised at this particular season finale as it felt like a finale, but certainly offered many possibilities for a second season and they even showed a first scene of that second season to whet our appetites.