Christos Kalohoridis/NBCSave the cheerleader, save the world.
That's pretty much all I know about the original Heroes series. It sounds like a thing I would have enjoyed, but somehow I just never got into it. By the time I was interested, everyone was saying it was already not quite as good anymore, and if shows weren't rerunning on a regular basis, it was a lot harder to catch up. (2008ish was a sad time.)
I was also very busy obsessing over my other true NBC love at the time—Chuck—which brings us to today, when the only reason I personally care at all about Heroes Reborn goes by the name of Zachary Levi.
NBC has promised that you don't have to be a fan of the original series to enjoy the new series, so I jumped right in...and promptly got confused. There are a whole lot of characters and a whole lot of things going on with those characters and I ended up watching it twice before I felt like I knew what was happening.
Here's what I eventually gathered: the cheerleader from Heroes (Hayden Pannettiere) was not saved when some sort of disaster occurred at a pro-evo (cool word for people with superpowers) convention of sorts, and was blamed on a guy from the original series named Mohinder Suresh, and the world turned against the evos with a fiery passion. Claire's dad (Jack Coleman) was so upset about it that he erased his memory of all things superhero and became a car salesman, naturally.
Meanwhile, Zachary Levi and his wife, Joanne (Judith Shekoni) lost their son in the same disaster, which made them hate all people with superpowers so much that they wanted them all dead.
They killed a bunch of them during a superhero support group meeting, but Peter Pan (Robbie Kay, who can teleport things by touching them) managed to escape, got a job at an ice cream parlor with the girl he likes, and was tormented by a bully who was secretly a tragic figure with an abusive dad.
Then, a really cool girl in Japan (Kiki Sukezane) was secretly a video game character while Ryan Guzman worked in an auto shop and an old man walked around with a magical coin, and multiple people were on the hunt for an escaped EVO named Molly Walker because she's powering some evil machine with her powers of finding people.
I definitely felt out of the loop as Claire's dad tried to recover his memory, met up with a dude named Renee (Jimmy Jean-Louis) who may have been someone we were supposed to recognize, received some significant glasses, killed that guy, then discovered that guy was supposed to kill him, because he told him to.
There's also an evil company called Primatech, and another evil company called Renautus, and a seemingly crazy guy named Quentin (Henry Zebrowski) who's spouting a whole lot of conspiracy theories while on the hunt for his missing evo sister.
Honestly, a whole lot of things happened in those two hours, and I sort of lost track. I did generally manage to follow Zachary Levi's plotline, because the general gist of it was that he wanted the "freaks" dead, and he and his wife Joanne would murder anyone who got in the way of achieving that goal. Basically, this is the opposite of Chuck.
All in all, I've got no real idea what's going on or how all of these people are going to come together, and I definitely kept feeling like there were significant moments that I was not privy to as a new viewer.
Heroes Reborn airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on NBC.
(E! and NBC are both part of the NBC Universal family.)
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