Monday, October 02, 2006

Heroes, Second Show. I object to the gruesome corpses. I don't think I've seen anything like that on TV before. With TiVo and its ilk, there is no such thing as putting such "adult" material safely on after the kids go to bed. It made me think of the meticulously mounted travesty, Sin City, that also drew its inspiration from the graphic novel/comic book genre. (I did/could not sit all the way through that one.)

What is really disturbing about the corpses is that none of the characters seems to be particularly disturbed by them. "Oh", thinks one of the lead characters, slightly crinkling her pretty nose, "A corpse in the trunk of this classic, red convertible Cadillac, to which Cadillac I have been given mysteriously a set of keys. Oh well. I'll just close the trunk back up, put my little boy in the back seat, and then drive to wherever this bloody map I found on the corpse tells me to go." (Oh, I get it. This lady is a blond. This is a blond joke! How could I have missed that the first time?)

I guess that, with all the bending of the space-time continuum that is surely to follow, we will get explanations for all these corpses and red Cadillacs. Maybe the heroes will go back in time and keep the bad guys from killing all those people so there won't be, after all, these gruesome corpses. I guess that makes it all right: the corpses really didn't happen. But somehow the images live on in my brain. I can't go back and not watch this episode.

The space-time continuum bending makes you think. I have to give them that. Is that the way God does it? He let's our free will reign for a period time, then He runs the film back and tweaks this or that, so that when our free will restarts back at the point where the film was run back, we will make a new decision that advances the Kingdom? If we don't make that new decision correctly, He just keeps running things back, like Groundhog Day, until we get it right. That surely makes life meaningless and dishonest. I don't think I like that God. I feel, well, manipulated. So, instead of God, we have this elite bunch of "heroes" who manipulate us. That's not too satisfying, but it is entirely consistent with the medium.

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