Heroes and Humanism

Did you watch the Heroes finale? A fantastically entertaining piece of comic book TV except for one small thing...it's preachy. I have a major pet peeve when it comes to storytelling that I can give full credit to Madeleine L'Engle:

"...story is the revelation of truth."

One of the character, Mohinder Soresh, has voice overs consistently throughout the series. Many of them push the ideas of story instead of letting the story speak for itself. Regardless if I agree or not with the philosophy Tim Kring, the creator of the show, espouses throughout (I do not for many reasons), he oversteps a basic rule of writing...let your story do the talking.

The voice overs may provide us, the audience, with context for the direction of the story but to try and convince us of a world view overtly...come on. Here's a sample of the dialogue:

"So much struggle for meaning. But in the end, we find it only in each other: our shared experience of the fantastic and the mundane. The simple human need to find a kindred. And to know in our hearts that we are not alone."

How many times do Christians get hassled for similar dialogue if it points toward a Christian world view? What if the dialogue would have read this instead:

So much struggle for meaning. But in the end, we find it only in the divine: our shared experience of what God has created as the fantastic and the mundane. The simple human need to find a kindred. And to know in our hearts that we are not alone...there is a God.

The few words changed would have been decried as proselytizing. A preposterous attempt to evangelize. The voice over seems desperate to convince us that this world is all we have...the search for the divine is nothing more than an illusion. This human experience is it...the meaning and purpose of it all. Instead of the hope I think he intended...I find it anti-climatic and depressing.

I also found it to take away from the conclusion of one of the better stories on TV. I would have been fine with such a diatribe if it hadn't attempted to reach from the fictitious universe it created into the everyday world in which we live with such "piety".