There has been a lot of debating the merits of HEROES. I never was a big fan of the show. Being a comic book person, I saw too many similarities to other productions, far superior productions. Somewhere at the beginning of this season, I gave HEROES another chance and I started liking it for all of five episodes. Yes, it took me five episodes to go from kind of liking the show to thinking it was a pale imitator of better material.

Genre shows always have a difficult time on television, especially network television. I read where HEROES costs about 4 million an episode and considering the old Battlestar: Galactica, with spaceships, makeup, sets and costumes cost 1 million I don't see exactly where the money is spent. But of course, it has to do with the huge cast they have but seeing where the money is spent it's hard to justify the budget. That's why HEROES is in the spot they're in.

The creator of the show, if you believe recent press comments, has no idea where to take the show and this is directly because the show got away from him. When the show became a media darling, the network came in and was thinking all sorts of cross pollination it could do with the show. The show was on a small pedestal to begin with, and instead of sticking with the small plan they had, the producers and the networks saw dollar signs.

Comic book fans of a certain age will remember the same thing happened to The X-Men in the late 80s and early 90s. The book as on a stride and Marvel comics decided to have the X-Men everywhere. It got ridiculous because the team, which had been anywhere from 5-7 characters, grew to about 12, spun off into 3-4 book which writers tried to link together and every character who has a super ability became a mutant, just to cash in on 'the mutant craze.' Even the venerable Spider-man was considered to be a mutant, kind of, because the radioactive spider bite could only react to someone with the x-gene in them.

That, my friends, is what's happened to HEROES. There are too many characters in a plot that is convoluted. Let's see, the first season they had to try to save the world. Season 2 they had to save the world. Now, in season three, they are trying to save the world. Lots of people have talked about how to save the show, how to revamp it but the show was never that good to begin with. Doing the heroes in the real word was a good idea, but going to the nuclear blast/ saving the world well not once but three times is too much, even for geeks.

Is there a way to save the show? Probably yes but it won't be done. You have to get rid of a lot of dead weight, stop with the serial villains and definitely get rid of the wandering the scripts have done in trying to make sense of a plot they have no idea how to get out of. In the first season it was a noble experiment but the time has come to pull the plug on the show.