Random thoughts on a Thursday morning

Lacking a specific reason to write but wanting to experience the sensation of fingers tapping over a keyboard, I searched through my hard drive's nethers for inspiration. My software jumped at the sight of Fay Wray.

The images are 76 years old this year, but I'm still drawn to King Kong, one of the magnificent movies, and the performance of Wray, a beautiful woman and talented actress. Yet whenever I sit down and doodle my "favorite 10" or "favorite 25" movies of all time, the big ape and the ravishing woman never seem to make the cut. Maybe I should rethink the list. Again.

— The New Prez made a pitch for refinancing mortgage debt Wednesday. He'll confiscate the future cash from our children's and grandchildren's paychecks and give people a chance to stay in the homes they haven't been able to afford so far.

Why does it seem that everyone in America except the politicians have finally come to realize that debt is not a good thing?

— The current storyline of Heroes focuses on an attempt to round up super-powered folks for The Greater Good. The storyline highlights how much we've morphed into a surveillance society: The Heroes can run, but they can't hide from all the cameras. This is a positive development, although movies like Enemy of the State failed to rouse people from their comfort that Big Brother is watching us so he can, um, take care of us.

Sometimes there's just not much to say

I suppose I could write about how I've finished watching Jericho Season 1 and admit that I have a richer understanding of just how great Season 2 is.

I could make a fuss about how the State seems to bounce back and forth between administrations loaded with Bushian statists and those loaded with Clintonian statists — although JN's entreaty to take the attitude of "State? I don't see a state" seems the most sane.

Somewhere along the way I could mention that I was ready to stop watching Heroes altogether — what's with all the darkness and graphic violence? — until Hiro singlehandedly rescued the show by visiting a comic book shop.

And I could write about how writing "refuse to be afraid" feels especially like spitting into the wind lately with the atmosphere of fear that so many folks are hellbent to generate in this world in recent weeks.

Speaking of which, I could write with some satisfaction that Netflix and Janus Films have made available a much, much improved translation of Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear (also known as Record of a Living Being) that erased my unhappiness with the unwatchable previous version and made this extremely potent film accessible to my non-Japanese-speaking self at last.

But I don't have much to say beyond those opening lines.

I think what I would most like to do is shrug. And that a) is something one must plan much more seriously than I have planned to date; b) is something one doesn't announce.

Has Heroes jumped the shark?

You may recall that when the TV show Heroes first hit the airwaves, I was agog. A compelling, mysterious science fiction story with so many homages that it was geek heaven — complete with casting original Star Trek actors and frequent comic book references.

The show hiccuped and seemed to lose its way during the truncated second season, but you could chalk that up to the writers strike. The parameters of a great cross-generational heroes vs. villain epic were there, but it had to be squeezed into 11 episodes because the writers shrugged.

That doesn't explain the confused muddle of the third season to date. In this year's arc, titled "Villains," the gang is again faced with the goal of preventing a sordid future, but those we once considered evil are showing signs of goodness and those we once considered good are flirting with their inner demons. Toss in some new characters and the fact that the show thrives on withholding bits of the puzzle anyway, and it's hard to keep it all straight.

The jump-the-shark moment came early for me, when level-headed but naive scientist Mohinder threw his instinctive caution to the wind and injected himself with a serum that could turn him into a superhero. No. 1, the guy we spent the first two seasons with never showed any sign of doing something impulsive and stupid — and he always wanted to study the heroes, not become one. No. 2, the serum started turning him into Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.

Last week the show revisited its opening moments and showed those incidents from a different angle, and some of that first-season magic seemed to come back. Behind the scenes word came that a couple of lead producers were fired and the remaining team was given the task of reviving the show, which has lagged in the ratings. There was some sense that everyone knew what was wrong — Mohinder has apparently been de-insecticized, for example.

Monday night was a step backwards, as the muddle returned for a visit. And in another jump the shark moment, Hiro — whose childlike enthusiasm for his powers has provided much of the delight in this program — has been robbed of his last 18 years of memory and thinks he's 10. For now he not only has childlike enthusiasm, he is a child as he rediscovers his powers, playing pranks with his time-freezing powers and using his newly rediscovered teleportation powers to jump into the comic book shop. I'm not loving it.

The power of that first season was such that I'm still drawn to Heroes, but all of this heroes-and-villains flip-flopping has made many of the characters less appealing, less attractive and most of all — even though the intent was the opposite — less real. They may yet tie up all the loose ends into a boffo payoff at the end, but here's the trick of the first season: As confusing as it was, they made you care. At the moment, I'm not sure I care anymore. Heroes teeters at the brink.

Heroes and 24 still way far away

Two of my guilty pleasures seem to have been knocked off the air for the duration, despite this week's settlement of the writers strike. Producer Tim Kring says don't look for Heroes to return before fall, and I read somewhere else (and now forget where) that 24 will be back in January 2009. On the upside this means Zachary Quinto, the evil Sylar, will be available for the show's third story arc, "Villains." He was going to be otherwise engaged in filming the Star Trek reboot this winter, where he is playing the pivotal role of Spock. It would've been weird to have a story called "Villains" without Sylar in it.

Perhaps this is poetic. Kring seems to be enamored of Trek, to the point of casting George Takei and Nichelle Nichols for his show. The second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation was truncated by the last writer's strike, setting up one more little parallel for the pop culture history books.

Woo-hoo

The best show currently on television returns tonight. I plan to be parked in front of the glowing monster at 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

For unfathomable reasons, this moment has crept up on me and - despite the fact that I was giddy as the proverbial schoolgirl every week Heroes was on last winter and spring - I'm not overly excited about its return.

Perhaps it's merely skepticism that the quality can be maintained over a second season, and once 10 p.m. rolls around, I'll be salivating again. Time, as always, will tell.

The best damn circus in town

Ordinary people discover they have extraordinary powers. How would that work in real life? For the past few months, those of us who bought into the TV show Heroes have been enjoying one intelligently written, well-acted and -produced thrill ride of an answer to that speculative question.

The show concluded "Volume One" Monday night and gave us an entertaining tease about where "Volume Two" will take us when summer vacation is over. I don't know what else to say without spoilers, so let me simply say that the denouement was well worth the investment of 23 hours over eight months.

And the program rewards repeat viewings - I've already discovered that in a casual re-look at my tape of the pilot episode - so buying the first-season DVD set when it arrives in late August will be worth the investment. (Thanks for the tip, Wally!)

Sure, with the world going to hell in a handbasket, this can be dismissed as just a very well-done sideshow in the realm of bread and circuses, but our myths and stories are an important and healthy part of our lives, so ignore it at peril of missing a very good dose of medicine for what ails us. Heroes shows us what creative minds can accomplish at their best - which just may save the world someday.