They can fly; time travel and some even possess the power to read our minds. Unless you have been swimming the Atlantic for the last year you may not have been able to escape the tracks of the hype train that is ‘Heroes’.
This show is a global phenomenon which is way it may surprise many that I am still rumbling through season one, season two has already started in America and has just begun on BBC 2 last week, but to those of you who have not popped your cherry yet, here are the pieces. The show centralises on groups of people who have special abilities, from a man who can paint the future to a person whose hearing is so acute that it makes Superman’s seem inept. As in most sci-fi drama’s they have chucked in the matter of a potential bomb destroying Manhattan, a super villain (Sila), other mysterious characters (some special, some not) and a web of entwined stories with the pieces of this jigsaw coming together. With a series centred on humans with ‘special abilities’ it is hard to find similarities between real events and one’s that are unfolding onscreen. This all changed though when I watched the latest episode, episode 19, ‘ Less than 0.7%’.
The opening scene of this episode features two of the main characters of the series, a Mr Linderman and Nathan Petrelli, having a conversation about some of the artist’s ‘futuristic’ paintings. It didn’t seem meaningful enough at the time for me to put my brain on alert but then they came to discussing the painting depicting an explosion destroying Manhattan, and it seemed the dialogue had a deeper meaning all of a sudden. Call me paranoid, but isn’t the beauty of this world that we perceive things differently so much so that this could be one of those moments.
The focus of almost the entire scene is this painting, with Lindermann and Nathan discussing the aftermath or how to stop it from ever occurring. You see, to the majority of the characters embroiled in this story it represents death and despair, though Lindermann offers a different perspective on things:
“People need hope but they trust fear. This tragedy will be a catalyst for good, for change. Out of the ashes humanity will find a common goal. A united sense of hope couched in a united sense of fear.”
Does this particular speech have hidden symbolic meaning? It all sounds so familiar. Big explosion, loss of life and Manhattan as the setting of this catastrophe, my ears are being deafened by echoes of 9/11. The similarities are astounding throughout the dialogue as lines are dropped like bombs themselves as Lindermann explains further that, “Less than 0.7% of the world population is an acceptable loss by anyone’s count…. ”, All this is apparently for a brighter future. It’s chilling to read, even more so to hear and see someone saying it. The conspiracies of the attacks of 9/11 have always been there, maybe, just to give us a different perspective on things but who’s to really know for sure. Maybe its because of the lack of trust we have in our government, because without fear and the promise to end fear imbedded into us, the government might not be as powerful as it seems to be today. The ‘common goal’ as it is put to us is the war on terror, which only gathered steam after the tragic events of 9/11. It is true that without films such as Loose Change, which brought about the conspiracy idea, I would not have such a strong opinion or maybe this heightened sense of paranoia. In such a precarious world you would have to look at these possibilities.
Didn’t we as a race used to question the information we received? Did we not have our doubts? It seems that we now simply believe what information we our now granted for hope of hiding our scepticism, so for now the light is staying on upstairs.
