Heroes Episode Review: "Shadowboxing"

How people can write a show about people with fucking SUPERPOWERS and make it so inane and boring is absolutely astonishing to me. This week, on Lifestyles of the Superpowered and Fa..oring? Boreous? Boring. It's boring.


Anyway. This week we follow three stories almost as lacking in excitement as one another:

• We pick up where we last saw Claire, hanging out in a suuuuper spooooooooky meat factory for "sorority (more like bore-ority) initiation"
  
• Matt/Sylar/Sylar/Matt is leaving wherever and heading to New York City to bully some answers out of Peter Petrelli
  
• Peter and Mildly-Offensive-Deaf-Hospital-Office-Administrator-Lady(MODHOAL) essentially do nothing

After Invisible Sorority Girl tries to skewer Gretchen in the meat factory and summarily makes an impromptu Claire-kabob for the other rushes to see, Claire and Gretchen have no hard time convincing the other two girls that they are all on "drugs" - a clear indicator that none of these girls have ever, in fact, used "drugs". The bore-gasm is then continued when the completely expected and in no way surprising event of Gretchen not-being-able-to-deal-with-all-this-superpowery-stuff occurs and she decides to go home, thus shattering the wet dreams of at least hundreds of sad nerds across the globe, and ending one of the most poorly contrived attempts to win back viewership I have ever witnessed. Some more completely unnecessary events happen. Seriously, if they cut all the filler and just presented the plot points that remotely affect the god damn awful storyline, this season would have about a 20 minute total run time so far.

I can't fight this feeling anymore...
that the show is going down the drain faster than a coat hanger abortion, I mean.

Cut to Peter, who saves some nameless extras with his new life-giving ability after a train crash. MODHOAL pouts and generally looks dejected. This repeats for all of their scenes in this episode.

I really cherish this time we spend together being uninteresting filler content.

Sylar, in control of Matt Parkman's unfortunate blubbering physique, waddles through a metal detector in the airport - only to find that Parkman stashed a gun in his bag! Completely unpredictable hijinks such as this continue, with Parkman even tripping Sylar (who is in control of Matt's body, so, that's stupid) like a third rate Loony Toons character. Sylar unsurprisingly responds by bashing in a Good Samaritan's head with a tire iron. Sylar and Matt then sit in the diner Charlie worked at, idly threatening each other until Sylar convinces Matt to spill the beans on where his body is. They (he? whatever) leave the diner, at which point we see that while Sylar was absently doodling while in the restaurant, Matt had written "I HAVE A GUN AND I AM GOING TO KILL EVERYONE IN HERE" on the paper, and the waitress called in the 5-0. Outside the pair is met by a completely absurd amount of cops skidding into the parking lot and popping out of their cars in the usual fashion that they do in fictionalized versions of such a scenario. Matt, having finally had enough of this awful script, manages to take back enough control of his body to make like he's moving to pull a gun out of his jacket, at which point he is just fucking riddled with bullets (like so many bullets, seriously, you don't even know).

So many.

Oh, I almost forgot. there is a brief scene near the beginning where Sylar's Body wakes up at The Carnival, turns into Nathan, looks confused, then flies away. The episode ends with Nathan arriving at Peter's apartment, with a truly brotherly "Gosh Petey, I think I'm in big trouble!". Really, this whole episode existed just to show those two 15 second scenes. Fucking embarrassing.


I'm sure you're asking yourself why I continue to watch a show I obviously do not like. Trust me, I ask myself the same question.