Days of Future Past
What if?
Last night Heroes, in one of the best episodes of an already stellar season, engaged in a classic trope of the comic-book medium:
The dystopian alternative future.
It was a move already foreshadowed in the pilot when Hiro namechecked Kitty Pride as a precedent for time-traveling heroes everywhere.
And last night was a clear homage to Days of Future Past -- a hugely popular story featuring Wolverine and Kitty Pride as the sole surviving X-men in a future of concentration camps and genocidal sentinels.
[One of my personal favorite comic arcs of all time is The Age of Apocalypse, a Marvel Universe spanning arc that imagines an alternative timeline in which Legion goes back in time to assassinate Magneto only to accidently kill Professor X instead. His father. As you can imagine, things didn't turn out so well.]
There is something intensely satisfying about these alternate visions of the future.
For one, they add tremendous gravity to pressing dramatic crises. The audience is given an explicit image of what is at stake if our protagonists fail in their endeavor. If Hiro fails to kill Sylar, half of New York City is going to be wiped out and everybody is going to be sporting edgier, albeit sexier, personas.
It also grants the writers a gratifying liberty: the ability to epically kill a whole slew of major characters. Even though I knew it wasn't for keeps, I still gasped when Claire and Mr. Bennett bit the dust.
Perhaps more so, they expose how capricious we are as individuals. That slight changes in fate could have massive repercussions on our character. Presumably Parkman will not be a villain in the Hiro corrected time-stream -- his lapses in moral judgement were just the result of living in a post-exploding man world.
In history, these what-if exercises are called counter-factuals.
Most professional historians hate them -- ostensibly because they are unscientific, but I think part of the reason is they reveal just how contingent history truly is.
That we human beings are the vector sums of contingent pressures.
Richard Rorty presents this argument in his counter-factual essay On Heidegger's Nazism. What if Heidegger had married a Jewish woman? He probably would have joined Thomas Mann in preaching resistance to Hitler. And Rorty's conclusion is that a person's moral character is shaped by chance events in his or her life.
Perhaps you will find the analogy crass, but is this not the esssential philosophical premise posed by countless 'What if' comic one offs? [Avoiding, of course, the obscurantistic spelunking of such titles as #34 What if the Silver Surfer possessed the Infinity Gauntlet?]
To bring up a pertinent comic book example: the entire foundation of Spiderman's moral framework stems from the guilt of his uncle's death.
So, what if Uncle Ben never died?
Indeed, what if?
Last night Heroes, in one of the best episodes of an already stellar season, engaged in a classic trope of the comic-book medium:
The dystopian alternative future.
It was a move already foreshadowed in the pilot when Hiro namechecked Kitty Pride as a precedent for time-traveling heroes everywhere.
And last night was a clear homage to Days of Future Past -- a hugely popular story featuring Wolverine and Kitty Pride as the sole surviving X-men in a future of concentration camps and genocidal sentinels.
[One of my personal favorite comic arcs of all time is The Age of Apocalypse, a Marvel Universe spanning arc that imagines an alternative timeline in which Legion goes back in time to assassinate Magneto only to accidently kill Professor X instead. His father. As you can imagine, things didn't turn out so well.]
There is something intensely satisfying about these alternate visions of the future.
For one, they add tremendous gravity to pressing dramatic crises. The audience is given an explicit image of what is at stake if our protagonists fail in their endeavor. If Hiro fails to kill Sylar, half of New York City is going to be wiped out and everybody is going to be sporting edgier, albeit sexier, personas.
It also grants the writers a gratifying liberty: the ability to epically kill a whole slew of major characters. Even though I knew it wasn't for keeps, I still gasped when Claire and Mr. Bennett bit the dust.
Perhaps more so, they expose how capricious we are as individuals. That slight changes in fate could have massive repercussions on our character. Presumably Parkman will not be a villain in the Hiro corrected time-stream -- his lapses in moral judgement were just the result of living in a post-exploding man world.
In history, these what-if exercises are called counter-factuals.
Most professional historians hate them -- ostensibly because they are unscientific, but I think part of the reason is they reveal just how contingent history truly is.
That we human beings are the vector sums of contingent pressures.
Richard Rorty presents this argument in his counter-factual essay On Heidegger's Nazism. What if Heidegger had married a Jewish woman? He probably would have joined Thomas Mann in preaching resistance to Hitler. And Rorty's conclusion is that a person's moral character is shaped by chance events in his or her life.
Perhaps you will find the analogy crass, but is this not the esssential philosophical premise posed by countless 'What if' comic one offs? [Avoiding, of course, the obscurantistic spelunking of such titles as #34 What if the Silver Surfer possessed the Infinity Gauntlet?]
To bring up a pertinent comic book example: the entire foundation of Spiderman's moral framework stems from the guilt of his uncle's death.
So, what if Uncle Ben never died?
Indeed, what if?
posted by d l wright at 5/02/2007 12:27:00 AM
4 Comments:
I thought that this episode also showed Heroes unique ability to pull together mundane and cliche stories and make them seem new.
The bad-ass Usagi Yojimbo/Jedi Knight Hiro? Makes perfect sense, he's a nerd.
The Neo-style Peter Petrelli. Why not. He has as much control over his universe.
And still they manage to pull together a giant gotcha moment when "Nathan" flies to Midtown only to reveal that he's actually Syler in full-on illusionist "drag."
Then the show pulling a classic "there's an Apocalyptic battle going on between the two most powerful men on Earth behind that door... but that's not what we're talking about tonight."
Absolutely brilliant.
Right as always Mark.
You can ask Ben: I could barely contain my excitment.
It is obvious they thought out Season 1 through to the end (taking notes Lost?). I am curious how Season 2 is going to shape up.
It sounds, from this Entertainment Weekly article, like Season Two (and Three!) are shaping up well.
oooh... the Generations plot arc sounds rad.
man Heroes is so cool. thanks for the link.
and for what it's worth, Lost has really been picking up steam.
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