So, did you hear the one . . .

about the power going out for a week and then a new job right on the heels of it turning a life temporarily upside down?

During my 5+ days without power as the result of the ice storms in Oklahoma, my television viewing got reduced (literally) to a three inch screen with rabbit ears. But after a few days with no television, I have to agree with the assertion that size really doesn't matter, because three black and white inches looked really good when we were able to reconnect to the outside world.

To occupy my time, I picked up a few of the books in James Patterson's Women's Murder Club series and found them markedly different from the characters in the series. The strongest similarity is obviously the lead character, Lindsay Boxer and her obsessive, workaholic ways.

In tonight's episode of Women's Murder Club, sadly the last to be finished before the strike took its toll, Lindsay's endearing dysfunctions were in full effect. As with many of the books, the plot focuses mainly on Lindsay's search for a serial killer. In the case of the series, the killer is one who has managed to elude Lindsay and her cohorts for several years.

Named Kiss Me Not, by Claire we learned tonight, the killer is given to stylized poses and sewing the lips of his victims shut. He has now seemingly set his sights on Lindsay herself, sending the FBI a photograph of her attached to one of Cindy's articles with Lindsay's lips symbolically sewn shut. The resulting surge of concern and emotions eventually lead Lindsay to showing an FBI agent her own obsession, an attic where every flat surface is filled with photos, notes, clues and anything related to the cases.

Lindsay acknowledges that her search for this killer has cost her a marriage, a personal life and now might even cost her very life. But in a striking admission, Lindsay tells the agent its okay with her if she is destroyed, so long as she is able to return the favor with her nemesis. A quiet moment, it was brimming with everything that is wrong with Lindsay Boxer, but also everything that is right. She is too obsessive, but her job is solving the ultimate crimes, and to her mind giving anything less than everything is unthinkable. Just as killers take everything from their victims, she feels honor bound to give her all to balance the scales.

Most of the cases in the series don't match up with the horror of the crimes described in the books, which seem at times to strive to mine the depths of human depravity and disregard for life. The Kiss Me Not killer is the one who would be the most at home in the pages of a Patterson book, which is a thought easily as disturbing as it is intriguing. But as with the nature of thrillers, once you get a good grasp on the crime, you're along for the ride to find its conclusion.

And the most heinous the killer, hopefully the more satisfying the capture of him will be. To be certain, now that he has all but challenged Lindsay, there will likely be no escape for her from the orbit of the crimes, now carrying each new death as though the blood is on her own hands for not stopping him.

I think some part of Lindsay would be strangely comforted by the idea that it would be her and no one else he would come after, because if that were the case, then some part of the power would be back in her hands to stop him. But as with the books, the onus will not fall on Lindsay alone, because besides her own strength, she is able to multiply it by the considerable strength of each of her friends.

We learned also, tonight, that Claire and Jill seemed to abandon Lindsay and her search for the Kiss Me Not killer, not ready to give as much of themselves as she was to bring in the killer. But there's a new member of the club now, and Cindy is the final piece of the puzzle. It's easy to think that her introduction and involvement with the club up to this point as been setting the stage for her to play some instrumental part in the search for the Kiss Me Not killer.

During the outage, just when we had given up hoping that rescue was coming, we looked out to find some amazing guys from Texas who showed up to bring us back into the 21st century. I hope that the potential television blackout doesn't seem to last as long as our power outage did. But, here's hoping the WGA gets their fair deal and gets back to work telling great stories. And also, here's hoping that shows like Women's Murder Club survive their long lay offs and pick up with the same momentum they have left off with.

BSG:Stardoe

With the recent possible revelation about the nature of her destiny within Razor, it’s interesting to sit back and take a good look at the character Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace and her place on Battlestar Galactica.

Even though Starbuck is not the only male character from the original Battlestar series to find himself reinvented as a woman, it is arguably the most widely recognized and talked about of such transitions. Perhaps because the original Dirk Benedict version of the character was so much of a ladies’ man, or perhaps because the actor himself famously criticized the new series as a whole as being too “female driven”, by comparison to the weaker and more uncertain males in an article titled Lost in Castration.

The basic criticism at the heart of Benedict’s rant/article is in the decision to re-imagine the series at all. He seems to discount even the possibility of the inherent quality of the new series, judging it against his own idealized notion of the original and finding it wanting. It’s perhaps too easy to call his reaction misogynistic, even if one of his biggest gripes is in the prevalence of strong female characters. More to the point, it comes off sounding like a bitter aging quarterback, who doesn’t feel any particular need to pretend he likes his replacement and is certain that his own accomplishments will never be equaled. And certainly not by reinventing his bastion of masculine accomplishment in the form of a woman.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the actor playing a character like Starbuck would have an overly inflated ego. After all, even in her new incarnation, Kara is not one to lack in self confidence.

Starbuck is brash and bold, not only in the cockpit but also in her interactions with many of the crew. However her flaws are just as bold, with a practically pathological fear of commitment and self-destructive bravado that has at times been as likely to get her thrown in the brig as it is to save the day. Her own cocky attitude can be seen as a front for her deeper issues, dating back to a childhood spent being subjected to what could be characterized as mental abuse, as her mother sought to prepare her for what she believed to be her destiny. The result of a childhood spent being trained rather than nurtured lingers with Kara, helping to drive her reckless behavior with the sense of someone who at the same time believes she has nothing to fear in battle, because she has not yet fulfilled her destiny, and yet cannot commit herself completely to anything or anyone because in the end, it is that destiny which must come first in her life.

Adding to that dichotomy, the news that the destiny she has carried around like a badge of honor might be as the harbinger of the destruction of the human race is an the type of fatalistic irony which is perhaps too pervasive in the BSG. And among his other criticisms, Benedicts commented on this as well, talking about how it highlighted weaknesses over strengths, and essentially the worst elements of humanity at times rather than a more idealistic vision put forth by the original.

The struggle between the two warring aspects of humanity, its profound weaknesses played against staunch strength and determination is in itself one of the predominant themes explored by BSG. In the mini-series, Commander Adama talks about the human race, saying he didn’t know why we deserved the right to survive. And since, this has been one of the fundamental questions at the heart of it’s journey. The question of whether or not we deserve that right, and the importance of trying not just to survive, but to be worthy of survival.

And now we have learned that survival is somehow intertwined with the destiny of Kara Thrace. In Starbuck’s quest to be worthy of destiny which has been foretold for her, the question of the ultimate worth of humanity must somehow find an answer as well.

Not bad for a character Benedict, in his Lost in Castration essay, sarcastically dubbed “Stardoe”.

Saving Grace: Touched by Earl

It’s difficult at times to know what to make of Saving Grace. An undeniable star vehicle, the show revolves around Holly Hunter’s Grace Hanadarko, an Oklahoma City police detective who is perhaps a little too fond of booze, drugs and sex and not at all fond of God or any of the trappings of religion.

Now, since I live in Oklahoma City myself, I do get an undeniable thrill from hearing familiar names and places mentioned and just feeling like I’m even vaguely connected to a program in this way, an unusual feeling for a long time Oklahoma resident to be sure. When we make it on to television, it’s usually disaster footage on CNN, as we wait for the current president to come and survey the damage.

As such, I feel a certain sense of protectiveness about the terrible situations which my city and the surrounding area has experienced over the past few years. The Murrah building is often used as a side note, the obligatory disaster reference of choice before the attack on the Twin Towers. And rarely will a tornado movie or story not at least make reference to Oklahoma, unless it’s sending someone to Oz (or the O.Z., of course).

So it’s not surprising that such elements would be instrumental in a program set in this area. In fact, the Murrah bombing is a pivotal part of her character’s sense of anger at God and at herself in general, as she lost a sister in the disaster who had gone to the Social Security office to pick up an ID for her newborn son on the morning of April 19th, a day later than she had planned because Grace herself had been unable to babysit the previous day. Her own anger and guilt only served to amplify the emotional impact of the bombing, as like most police officers in the area would have, she had worked in the half-destroyed building, searching for survivors, finally turning much of her anger upward.

More than bitter, Grace is aggressively promiscuous, sleeping not only with her married partner on the force, but also other friends, acquaintances, random strangers she meets at the bar, and basically anyone who seems to catch her attention without demanding too much of it.

Complicating Grace’s life is one fateful night, when she ran over a stranger in a drunken stupor and in her shock and grief, called out to God for help. Answering the call was Earl, a scruffy, long-haired angel who looks as though he was recruited out of a truck stop. As it turned out, the man she had run over had not truly been hurt, but instead a the vision of another soul, that of a death row convict whom Earl had also taken under his angelic wing.

Once he had entered her life, Earl stated his intentions for saving Grace. Perhaps most of all, saving her from herself. But rather than being grateful or transformed by Earl’s appearance, Grace instead pointedly refused his efforts at helping her find a different path, fighting his attempts at salvation as though she had a front row seat to see Carrie after she got to Hell and wasn’t about to miss it.

Grace’s all out determination to thwart her own salvation define her character in the best and worst of ways. She is strong, bull-headedly stubborn when it comes to investigating crimes and doing her duties, but she’s also stubborn to the point of absurdity when it comes to her personal angelic companion. It’s like Touched by an Angel on acid, where even in the face of a divine being the rage and pain that drives Grace’s self-destructive behaviors will not be cowed.

Despite her rather blatant shortcomings, Grace is not depicted as a bad person. She is a good friend, a good cop, a good aunt to her sister’s orphaned son. And her slow acceptance of Earl’s presence in her life speaks to a need deep within herself to accept what he is offering.

In the most recent episode, Grace found herself in the obligatory and incredibly unrealistic Oklahoma tornados. Crawling through the ruins of a building she finds a woman unwittingly responsible for a terrible school bus crash. Needless to say, the storytelling is not subtle, or particularly believable, but the ideas raised by Saving Grace are intriguing almost despite itself. Having fought hard, and been willing to risk her own life trying to save the woman, just so she could face charges for her crime, Grace instead helped the woman to confess her sin, to take responsibility for what she had done and in the end, even if her life couldn’t be saved, Earl was there to let Grace know that it was more than the woman’s life Grace had helped to save.

Putting a face on the idea of a divinity is always tricky when it comes to storytelling. It must by necessity be enigmatic and careful to not deviate too far from commonly accepted expectations to seem believable. Earl comes across as the everyman angel, accepting the inherent troubles and weaknesses of those he seeks to help with the patience of knowing that it’s those traits which call for his presence in the first place. Like an angelic officer of the law, he’s doing his duty, constrained by other responsibilities and other regulations as he goes about trying to police the souls he has been entrusted with.

He’s not as effective in this role as the constantly changing faces of God seen in the short-lived Joan of Arcadia, where the form of Joan’s divine visitor was constantly changing, a literal ‘everyman’ who had different facets and goals depending on which form had been taken. The angel sent to people as their last chance at redemption, it’s constantly unclear whether his choice of assignment is because he’s very good at his job, or very bad at it. And the combination of an inept angel and a highly resistant soul make up the underlying dynamic of the series, which manages at times to be insightful enough to be interesting, while frustrating enough to grate a nerve or two.

I don’t think anyone truly believes that Grace won’t be saved in the end. And yet she has been so thoroughly defined by her multitude of sins, it’s tough to see how the show could survive or be driven by her if she were too willing to forsake them. If she does not, however, then the conceit of Earl’s presence in her life would be without purpose.

It’s hard to say how the show will find it’s way while Grace steadfastly refuses to find her own, and yet make the risks being taken by this type of storytelling seem worthwhile in the end. Even so, for those times when it tries too hard, or misses the mark, Grace is without question a unique character, with a story likewise uniquely tailored to fit an unusual location. Perhaps I’m biased, for the city as well as for such staunchly female driven dramas, but I’m strapped in for the ride, happy to see hardships that we’ve endured make their way onto this kind of format as more than a movie of the week or sensationalized plot point.

And as with Grace herself, I can hope for the best while simultaneously bracing myself for the inevitable shortcomings.

Tin Man: In Search of a Rainbow

I find myself torn about how well the story they attempted to tell with Tin Man really worked or not. As I noted earlier my biggest problem with the first installment was the lack of an engaging emotional element to the story. The second installment of the miniseries solved many of the problems I had been having, by giving depth to the character of Askadellia and suggesting that she hadn’t always simply been an evil sorceress out to destroy the sweet and innocent little DG. Instead the two had been close, their magical powers amplified by one another and it was in fact DG who had lead her sister into a dangerous cave and then abandoned her there at the mercy of the true Wicked Witch.

The result is to create an added level of emotion between the two sisters, by showing the closeness they had once shared to give the audience some sense not only of what was lost, but also the hope that there was a way for DG to reach her sister once again. If anything, that answer was perhaps telegraphed too much, nothing surprising or enthralling when DG came to her lost sister at the last moment, wanting to take her by the hand and renew the connection she had been responsible for severing so long ago.

And though I wish we had more of a denouement, with a chance to get a sense of Askadellia after she had been saved, to better appreciate what the struggle had been about rather than just cutting right to the tearful family reunion to wrap things up. Since the bond which would save the day was between the two sisters, a chance to see them reconnect on an emotional level instead of a CGI laden climax would have really helped add to the emotions driving the entire story.

Perhaps the greatest squandered opportunity however, was in the direct connection the story tried to draw to Dorothy, herself. As with the eventual climax of the story, by the end of the second installment of Tin Man, I had begun to guess at the actual familial connection to the original Dorothy. But instead of the truth that she was simply the progenitor of the line leading down to DG and her sister, I had guessed that she would perhaps turn out to be their mother, or more fittingly, their grandmother.

By having the connection between Dorothy and DG so far removed by time and emotions, it undercut the emotional impact that connection could produce. Instead of giving us as viewers the pleasure of seeing really come to life before us once again, letting the affection we feel for her be transformed into a greater connection with someone she so obviously loved, instead we got a brief throwback scene with an emotionless Dorothy handing off the reigns to DG without so much as a hug or anything else which would have made us feel we were seeing Dorothy, our Dorothy, again for at least a few moments before she vanished into her black and white world, waiting for the next time we watched The Wizard of Oz to come back to life before our eyes again. I’m not saying she needed to bust into a chorus of Over the Rainbow, but some kind of talk or anything at all which would have forged a deeper connection between Dorothy and her namesake would have added a priceless element to the story.

And while it was great to see DG constantly put in the Dorothy-like situations of peril and finding ways to use her wits and her burgeoning power to save herself rather than waiting for her band of misfit friends to come and get her, that fact also made me wonder why the series itself was called Tin Man in the first place. In a way, this was symptomatic of the problems I had with the story as a whole, because it was so focused on highlighting the cleverness of the reinvented characters and scenarios, hearkening back to the original story with hastily developed themes rather than necessarily concentrating on the story they were telling themselves, the emotions and journey of the characters. It was great to see the ‘Tin Man’ find his son, grown heartless as leader of the resistance and try to help him reconnect with his emotions. And yet, for all the wit used in reinventing the story in such a way, it was somehow still not as charming as a man made out of tin, dancing around and singing about his longing for a heart, or a young farm girl desperately trying to save her dog and longing for a mystical land from her dreams with all the starry-eyed wonder of childhood shining off her face.

Tin Man was the most frustrating to me because all the elements of a much better story were there, waiting to be tapped in to - waiting to spring it on us that everything we had hoped and wished for had been there the entire time. But it seemed to always find a way to miss the mark, or not hit it well enough to really resonate. The O.Z. really isn’t Oz as we know it. You don’t get there by drifting over the rainbow, or get to find a mystical Emerald City (whether or not you need a good pair of colored glasses to see it as green). As with the entire conceit of naming the main character DG, giving her a tenuous connection to her name sake without ever truly having an identity all her own, the miniseries was more interested in drawing a connection to the original movie than it was in connecting with audience in its own right.

I do believe I’ll be more likely to catch the next airing of The Wizard of Oz when it hopefully airs over the holiday season. Tin Man, not so much.

Next of Kin

In last night’s two-hour episode of The Closer, we saw Deputy Chief Johnson forced, though a tangled and twisted mesh of farcical devices, into a decision with the most grave of consequences.

Beginning with the obligatory nod to holiday spirit and family, as Brenda and Fritz try to decorate their house for the holidays as a means of giving it the appearance of familial bliss which would attract potential buyers. Brenda, for her part, was unhappy with being forced into being “festive”, and as it would continue to do throughout the episode, the questions being raised had to do with lies. And specifically, lies in connection to family.

Our mystery begins with a armored car hold up gone wrong, with two dead guards and a third who had only been injured who quickly disappeared from the hospital and went on the run. In searching for their suspect, Brenda and her team instead find in his apartment, instead find his younger brother, hiding and frightened. Using her southern charm to connect with the boy’s southern roots, Brenda gets the information out of him that his brother has headed back down to Georgia. And so, with Fritz in tow, Brenda heads down for a holiday with her family which is really nothing more than a trip to pick up her suspect.

Finding him, however, turns out to be the easy part. Having to contend with local police as unhelpful as the Los Angeles cops were upon her initial arrival from the south, Brenda takes the suspect into a more personal custody, having to house him in her parents’ overly decorated house even as he does everything he can imagine to make keeping hold of him difficult.

But playing against the mystery is Brenda’s own dysfunctional connection with her family. As the antithesis of her own, only decorated because she had been forced to do so, home, the home of Brenda’s parents is busting at the seams with the trappings of holiday cheer. Excited when they believe their prodigal child wanted to spend Christmas with them, they had cancelled plans to celebrate with their other children and their families only to find that Brenda had lied about the reason for her visit. Feeling guilty for her deception, Brenda attempts to extradite her suspect another way, only to have Lts Flynn and Provenza prevented from flying him back by his continued resistance (yelling “I have a bomb!” in an airport is a good way to get out of flying anywhere) and eventually the un-merry band wind up road-tripping across the country in the Johnson’s RV, with the continual trouble of the suspect plaguing them until Brenda makes a pivotal decision. Having previously kept the suspect from being able to speak with his brother as a means of trying to lure him into talking to her, Brenda changes tactics, instead telling the man that his brother had been killed by the men responsible for the original robbery. She describes a horrible death, using it to break his will to escape and milk his emotions and guilt in order to obtain his cooperation with trying to find them.

To complete the deception, she goes so far as to have a crime scene faked, looking the suspect in the eye and feigning sympathy even as she is manipulating him through the one piece of leverage she possesses, his love for his brother.

The questions raised by Brenda’s decision aren’t as simple as right and wrong. Aside from his emotions, she was trying to keep the suspect and his brother safe, catching the men who would have threatened them and whether or not the ends justify the means can be mitigated by the man’s extremely contentious behavior during his captivity. And yet, the question of truth and deception as it pertains to family is the much more complicated issue.

In an episode filled with lies, all types and degrees, the ultimate truth is that sometimes lies are necessary. As cold and brutal as Brenda’s twisting the knife in her suspect’s heart to obtain his cooperation by telling him of his brother’s death, in the end, after the suspect has realized the truth, still seeking vengeance against his former co-conspirators in order to keep Brenda’s lie from becoming prophetic, and getting himself killed in the process, it is the antithetical lie that must be told which truly defines this episode. Having lied about one brother’s death, Brenda in the end must face lying about the other brother’s life. At the request of her father, who had made the journey not knowing of the original deception, Brenda must come full circle from lying in order to hurt and cow the elder brother, to lying in order to spare the younger from the pain of finding out the truth. Instead, it allowed him to hold on to a more basic truth, that in the end his brother had been willing to sacrifice everything in order to save him, deserving to be remembered as the hero his younger brother would believe him to be.

Both of them are about artifice, just as the simple decorations in Brenda’s house were a reflection of sorts, contrasted with rigid expectation of merriment crammed into every corner and flat surface of her parent’s house. Is a pragmatic reason for telling a lie less valid than an emotional one? Perhaps the emotional lie is simply more palatable, dressed up with pretty decorations and more secure in its good intentions. The pragmatic lie is Brenda’s world, where to do her job she must delve into the minds and hearts of the criminals. In order to be the Closer, she must be so very good at lying it gives her an unfailing knack for getting people to tell the truth.

However, the much deeper question is what toll those lies take on Brenda. Lying to her parents about the reason for her trip was instinctual for her, as her knack for deception in order to get what she wants out of people can so easily be blurred into deception in order to try and give people what she believes they want. Her parent’s ability to accept the deeper truth about Brenda, herself. That no matter her methods, at her heart she does have good intentions. And the twisted roads she’s become so familiar with are a burden she accepts in order to use the talents she posses.

If It Only Had a Heart

Like Alice falling through her looking glass, most truly enduring fantasy stories which feature a female as the central character involve falling/traveling to an alternate and highly stylized and exaggerated version of reality. And arguably a reality which exists as a dream-like vision with symbols and motifs taking the heroine on an internal journey for the purpose of ultimately learning something significant about herself.

The story of the Wizard of Oz, specifically the adaptation onto the big screen staring the fabulous Judy Garland as Dorothy, has endured as possible the most famous and iconic example of this formula. It’s possible to suggest the film has even transcending it’s literary origins to become the most accepted and appreciated version of the story. And if Oz represents a trip through the imagination, the myriad of adaptations it has engendered are a testament to the scope of that imagination. From the original film, to The Wiz, the book and extremely popular musical Wicked, to the newly re-imagined version to be found in the Sci Fi channel’s miniseries Tin Man.

Unlike Wicked, which shuffles Dorothy off to the side to focus on the main character Elphaba (a take on the initials of L. Frank Baum), a peculiar and strong minded girl who grows up to be the Wicked Witch of the West, Tin Man instead re-invents Dorothy, into DG, a daydreaming and motorcycle riding waitress. Unknowingly, D.G. has her origins in ‘The O.Z.’ – short for Outer Zone, but which unfortunately does little but make me constantly wonder whether Marissa is going to show up – as a princess who was sent away as a child for her own safety.

Her well known companions have had similarly sweeping makeovers, with the titular Tin Man cleverly characterized as a former cop who was incased in a tin prison and forced to watch a projecting of his family’s suffering for years, burning away all but the quest for revenge in his heart.

The idea of D.G. as not only the princess, but also the sister of the Wicked Witch, here named Azkadellia – though it’s fair to assume that DG isn’t in danger of being crushed by any houses. Initially she comes across as a hybrid of sorts which is less based on Dorothy as it is Ozma, the princess and ruler of Oz in L. Frank Baum’s series of books. Using familial ties to bind the three central women together within the story, their mother becomes a Glinda of sorts, as the original bearer of knowledge and power who gives DG a mystical gift and helps set her upon her quest of self-discovery.

In the first installment of the mini-series, DG is a terrifically gung-ho protagonist, ready to jump into danger to help strangers and find her own way out of precarious situations. Armed with a mystical mark on her palm, and a lifetime of stories meant to prepare her for her journey, she embarks on it as the driving force rather than the timid child helped along her way by her adopted band of protectors.

And though this new version of Dorothy isn’t necessarily as intriguing or engaging as Elphaba, in the truly original lens Gregory McGuire used to transport us back into Oz, she is strong and bold, growing in confidence and ability as she finds her way through her homeland.

Perhaps it’s because Elphaba (and if you haven’t already, Wicked is well worth reading) helped paint the techni-colored land of Oz with a few more shades of grey than black and white, but the most disappointed aspect of the new miniseries so far is the two-dimensional nature of Azkadellia, herself. So far, she seems driven by nothing more than pure greed and ambition, which helps drives the story along, but doesn’t do much to add any depth or emotion to it.

And this is perhaps the biggest weakness of the story in general. It’s long on clever throwbacks to familiar situations and characters from The Wizard of Oz, but short on heart and truly engaging emotions. DG, herself, has motivations which are understandable, if not tremendously emotionally engaging.

If the original Dorothy was an example that you can take the girl out of Kansas, but you can’t take the Kansas out of the girl, what they’ve done in Tin Man, essentially, is to take the Kansas out of Dorothy. Since it was that origin which connected her fundamentally to the audience, the tangible loss of it, though subtle, is still there.

By making her quest for re-discovering Oz as her home, it is a journey which leads her emotionally further away from the audience rather than trying to make her way back to our more familiar sense of home. Somehow it means less to not be in Kansas anymore, if you weren’t ever really home there to begin with. And if the story is taking that sense of pathos out of the equation, to be as effective and endearing it should be there has to be some element which takes its place.

Or perhaps if it had the cleverly veiled, scathing political allegories which were at the heart of the original book, there would be something solid and tangible enough to ground the story despite it's fantastic elements. Fantasy for it's own sake is rarely the recipe for a good story, no matter the form it might take.

While we haven’t seen it yet, I’m hoping that the story will find its way, and it's heart, as DG does, but I'm afraid nothing in the Wizard's bag of goodies is going to solve all of its problems.

Holding Out for a Hero

Of all the interesting roles for women created by science fiction on television these days, there are still those shows which have tremendous potential and yet seem to fall short of the mark. One such example is Heroes.

It’s not as simple as saying there are no complex or interesting roles for women in Heroes lore, however there is a peculiar tendency in the lore created by the show to have the female characters, even those with their own superhuman abilities, most often relegated to either victims in need of protection, or quasi-villains in need of being stopped or set upon a different path.

The most prominent female character in the show is arguably Claire Bennet, the indestructible cheerleader. And if you followed the story of the first season, she was the subject of the show’s first and most famous tagline: Save the Cheerleader, Save the World. Partly due to her young age, and partly to her essentially passive ability, the idea of saving, sheltering or protecting Claire was one of the most universal themes of the season, with most of the characters, even those without super-human abilities, motivated to aid in the cause of saving her from the parasitic villain Sylar, out to acquire her power as he had so many others, by getting very up close and personal with her brain – which would have been slightly difficult to overcome, even for the girl who makes a habit of throwing herself off of tall structures and sticking her hand down garbage disposals.

By the end of the season, despite the infamous declaration which had made her survival key to ‘saving the world’, Claire’s part in averting a nuclear disaster had more to do with inspiring heroics in others than it did accomplishing anything in her own right. As ‘The Cheerleader’ she existed in no small way as the representative of youth and hope, undying innocence to be saved and preserved. As the iconic personification of female adolescence, the all American cheerleader, she was something of a modern day equivalent of a princess in peril, waiting for the brave knights to prove their worth on the quest to save her.

By contrast, we have the other most prominent female character in the form of Niki Sanders. Despite being one of the more compelling emotional stories, Niki’s struggle through the season was largely against the nemesis in her own mind, an alternate personality known as Jessica. The result of abuse she endured as a child, and the death of her sister Jessica, Niki’s mind had splintered into another distinct personality. Like a mutant Sybil, Niki’s ability to use her incredible strength was paralyzed by her alter ego. Jessica was created by Niki’s mind in no small way to give her an detached sense of strength in the face of abuse she faced as a child, a separate persona who could endure the torments her mind didn’t know how to bear and protect her from even the knowledge of them. However, as an adult, her duty of serving as Niki’s emotional strength meant in turn that she was also the recipient of Niki’s physical strength.

Jessica existed in part as the villain in the story of Niki, and the struggles of her family and representing Niki’s inability to accept the burden of her own strength. And yet, in the end, Jessica’s defeat was signified by her giving up control rather than Niki seizing it, and Niki’s embracing her own power came in the face of a shape-shifting villain named Candace who merely impersonated Jessica, paralyzing Niki once again until Jessica appeared to her one last time to inspire her.

Most disappointing about Niki’s story, was that after all of her struggles, the idea of embracing her strength was never shown in more than fleeting glimpses. One blow disabled Candace, and even Niki’s jumping into the final battle against Sylar amounted to a single strike which seemed to exist more to give another character, Peter, the ability to absorb her power and aid in his ability to fight against the season’s biggest villain.

The new season of Heroes has been a mixed bag in terms of it’s female roles. With Claire’s storyline dominated by a new a love interest who along with her adoptive father has already helped to save her, and Niki struggling once again with the idea of her own strength, having developed yet another personality along the way and potentially losing her strength entirely, even as she is infected with a disease which left her in need of a male characters heroics in order to save her.

A much brighter spot has been the introduction of a new character, a cousin to Niki’s son Micah, named Monica Dawson, who possesses the ability to mimic any physical action she witnesses and as such has happily not yet been in need of rescue. However, in addition we have been introduced to Elle, a lightning powered sociopath, and Maya, for whom anxiety brings about a black-eyed plague which kills anyone near her with the exception of her brother, who in true Heroes fashion has the ability to save her and those around her by absorbing the disease and neutralizing it.

During the first season we were teased with glimpses of a character named Hana Gitelman, known as Wireless, who existed mainly in the graphic novel sub-set of the Heroes story and unfortunately seemed to disappear from there as well, was perhaps the most dynamic and outright heroic of all the female characters introduced into the Heroes universe. It’s hard not to hope, in a mythology where such abilities are manifested in such a variety of characters, that by the end of the current season we’ll actually get to see a few of the these female characters not in need of being saved or controlled. And ones who are inspired by the same kind of impulse toward heroism demonstrated by their male counterparts, rather than simply serving as the inspiration.