Remember when “Heroes” was a big deal? Back in 2006 it was the great hope for a mainstream superhero show on network television. As most of us get ready to go to Comic-Con this week (and “Heroes” is set to make a comic book comeback at Dynamite), I thought I’d devote this week’s Best Episode Ever to “Heroes.” It was also really easy, because there weren’t ultimately very many good episodes of the show after all.
Season one, episode and chapter 17, “Company Man,” is the Best Episode Ever of “Heroes,” mainly because of the ending. They could have put that ending on any episode of “Heroes” and it would have been the Best Episode Ever, although they do blow up a house and Claire (Hayden Panettiere) is seen healing from explosion burns so that’s pretty cool too. “Company Man” is perhaps a bittersweet Best Episode Ever because it represents everything “Heroes” could have been, but would never be. Of course, Bryan Fuller wrote it.
Remember, by this point we’ve had the whole “Save the cheerleader, save the world” thing. “Company Man” is the episode where we learn that Claire’s father, H.R.G. (Jack Coleman), is really a good guy. He’s always been the creepy guy tracking down people with powers, plus Claire is a teenager so she’d rebel against her dad. There’s some business about an apocalyptic blast in New York and Nathan Petrelli’s (Adrian Pasdar) political campaign and Hiro’s (Masi Oka) time traveling in play by the time of “Company Man.” But that’s not what “Company Man” deals with. “Company Man” is all about Claire, H.R.G. and their family, with special guest stars Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg), nuclear Ted (Matthew John Armstrong) and The Haitian (Jimmy Jean-Louis).
Let me get right to the gut punch that makes you tear up and think this is going to be the greatest series ever. After spending a whole episode explaining that H.R.G. has been protecting Claire all along, that he’s been a good father and that we actually really like the guy, he makes the ultimate sacrifice. Not his life, but his memory. After the events of this episode, the only way to keep Claire safe from the agency H.R.G. works for is to remove H.R.G.’s memory of Claire. That’s not just the details of his plan to sneak Claire off with the Haitian, his knowledge of her powers and other basic stuff. It means all the resolution and love and trust gained over the course of this episode has to go too. Claire will always know the truth about her father, and she will have to live with the old H.R.G., restored for her protection.
This is what “Heroes” should have been. What are the emotional consequences of super powers? It’s not just “it’s a pain to teleport” or “it sucks to read minds and have no secrets.” No, use the powers within the story to manipulate the emotional lives of the characters. Make it an allegory. Parents have to be the bad guy to protect their children. Boom, he’s literally being reverted to bad guy mode. Parents don’t understand their kids. Boom, he did understand, but he had to have his memory literally removed. Also, parents will give up anything for their children. Yes, even the literal memories of what makes them love each other.
Working backwards here, “Company Man” also has a flashback where H.R.G. tells Claire she was adopted. This is just a masterpiece of emotional drama. Like Spider-Man learning that having super powers doesn’t make him cool or get the girl, immortal Claire has emotional vulnerabilities just like everyone else. How relevant this scene must have been for real families watching “Heroes” together! What a beautiful way to show that you can tell a child she’s adopted and explain it in an artful way that covers biological parents versus “real” parents. H.R.G. tells Claire that she grew in her mother’s body, but also in the hearts of himself and Sandra (Ashley Crow), her adopted parents. Wow.
The rest of the episode is pretty damn good too. It’s basically a home invasion thriller with superheroes. Again, this is what “Heroes” should have been. Take familiar situations and explore them with the new element of super powers, or at least send super heroes through mundane real world situations. “Heroes” would become so plotty with super prisoners breaking loose and trapping Syler’s (Zachary Quinto) mind in Nathan’s body it just became like a live-action cartoons without recognizable costumes. Sorry, I’m going on a tangent. This is Best Episode Ever, not Worst Series Ever.
“Company Man” begins with Parkman and Ted breaking into H.R.G.’s house to find evidence against him. They come home early and Ted takes the family hostage. It’s like The Desperate Hours but with one character who can’t die, one who can read minds and one with a deadly super power that could kill them all (except Claire). All the usual mechanics of a hostage drama play out in new configurations because of these wild card factors. H.R.G. needs to keep Ted calm so he doesn’t go nuclear, and he can communicate to Parkman telepathically. He actually tells Parkman to shoot Claire in front of her mother, because it’ll satisfy Ted’s bloodlust and no one will actually get hurt (he’ll even fix Sandra’s emotional scarring later by having The Haitian wipe her memory of seeing Claire shot). There’s some interesting philosophical dialogue when Sandra does see Claire come back, and not knowing about the world of super powers believes it to be a miracle.
There’s a large expositional component to “Company Man” as well. The black and white flashbacks are meant to not only reveal H.R.G.’s good intentions in working for the agency but to explain what the agency does, what they hope to accomplish by capturing people with special abilities, how they team normals with specials and how H.R.G. adopted Claire in the first place. We even see how H.R. G. picked out his horn-rimmed glasses. That was all major information by episode 17 of “Heroes.” Now, it still works as a parallel story in the middle of this profound emotional piece and the black and white parts are cool.
“Heroes” could have done a “Company Man” for every major character in its exponentially growing ensemble, and even supporting characters. It didn’t have to get stuck in 13-episode cycles of plot that left no room to breathe. Or maybe they should have just gotten Bryan Fuller to write more episodes.
