Even with the major media outlets gleefully listing off the reasons to be less than enthusiastic about a new episode of “Heroes,” it’s hard not to excited about any show which offers up an episode with a cast that features Robert Forster, Malcolm McDowell, and Eric Roberts.
Fortunately, the series did not disappoint.
Oh, sure, when one looks back at this episode in the grand scheme of the season, it will be one that can be easily skipped, since all it really does is fill in a few blanks that didn’t really need to be filled in. But this was an episode for the longtime fans, those folks who have watched the evolution of the characters over the course of the show’s run and have had various little plot details gnawing at them.
Given my past praise of Robert Forster, it will come as no surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed seeing him get the opportunity to dive into the role of Papa Petrelli during all of the key moments from the past that we’d heard about but never seen. He’s clearly having fun playing the villain, as seen during his scenes with McDowell and his declaration that having his own son knocked off would be just another day at the office. Then again, it seemed like Cristine Rose was having a ball herself, particularly during the sequence where we got the skinny on how Papa Petrelli came to be paralyzed in the first place. (It’s not nice to fool Mama Petrelli…)
It was also a lot of fun to see Eric Roberts return to his role as Thompson, watching him smirk as he treated Meredith and Flint – hey, who knew they were siblings? – like his playthings, trying to train Meredith while keeping Flint under lock and key with assurances that he, too, would become a field agent one day. Roberts has been known to have a little too much fun with his roles, but he plays Thompson perfectly, with the moment when he gave Meredith the opportunity to reconnect with Claire a particular highlight of his performance.
There was, however, at least one real bummer to the episode, and that was the storyline where Sylar and Elle became best buds. It felt like someone said, “Hey, the good news is that we’ve got Kristen Bell for another week, but the bad news is that it’s for the week that we’re filming the flashback episode. Heads we shoehorn her into the Sylar story, tails she’s working with Thompson.” The Elle / HRG scenes were fun, but the show died a slow death every time it went back to Sylar and Elle. Maybe it’s because there was no suspense whatsoever, since we knew that every word that came out of Elle’s mouth was a lie and that Sylar was going to snap eventually.
There were some great one-liners scattered throughout the episode, such as Peter’s bemusement that his father couldn’t bring himself to describe his son as a nurse, or Meredith’s comment to Flint that “God didn’t give you a brain, he gave you an older sister.” As far as flashback episodes go, it certainly didn’t live up to the standards of Season 1’s “Company Man,” which delved into HRG’s back history, but it was nonetheless enjoyable to finally have Papa Petrelli’s role in the recent pasts of Nathan and Peter fleshed out. Those guys have an evil, evil father…and if you didn’t feel that way during the course of the flashbacks, then you sure as hell felt that way in the last two minutes of the proceedings.
Yikes.
Already a sensation in its native land of Australia (where the show is the best-selling TV-DVD in the country’s history), it’s probably best to go into “Summer Heights High” knowing as little about its various accolades as possible. After all, “Kath and Kim” was also supposed to be an Australian critical darling, and while that may be true of the original series, the American remake starring Molly Shannon and Selma Blair is so terribly unfunny that we can’t imagine that’s the case. That isn’t to say that “Summer Heights High” isn’t completely deserving of its rave reviews, because even though it isn’t technically produced by HBO, it could very well become the network’s surprise hit of the fall season.
Discussions will no doubt take place over which of Lilley’s characters are their favorites, but the great thing about “Summer Heights High” is that they’re all so unique that it’s virtually impossible to favor just one. It’s actually a little scary at just how good Lilley is (especially as Ja’mie, whose girlish mannerisms are spot-on), and his work here is nothing short of genius. Lilley isn’t the only star of the show, however, and though a majority of the other characters are played by actors, the fact that they’ve been mixed into a real-life environment (the series was shot at an actual Australian school) really helps the validity of the documentary style.
