HEROES REBORN -- "Brave New World / Odessa" Episode 101 -- Pictured: Kiki Sukezane as Miko Otomo -- (Photo by: Christos Kalohoridis/NBC)
HEROES REBORN -- "Brave New World / Odessa" Episode 101 -- Pictured: Kiki Sukezane as Miko Otomo -- (Photo by: Christos Kalohoridis/NBC)

Review: Heroes Reborn Premiere – Have They Evolved?

By: Robert Prentice
Heroes Reborn nbc

Many will argue which seasons were the best and where they got horrible out of the original 4 season series. Personally the first two were good and it trailed off from there for me. Heroes Reborn comes with a lot of baggage and a lot of expectations given its history. The 2 hour premiere starts us off with a little bit of flash forwarding through several years starting with a summit where humans and evos alike are gathers to stand united.

Things don’t end well as we might all expect when an explosion rips through the summit and only Noah Bennet survives it, which seems like a rather interesting coincidence. Fast forward a year and now evos are hunted down all over the world and looked at terrorists. And that helps to set up our new group of heroes as we start to learn more about the world they now live in.

HEROES REBORN -- "Game Over" Episode 106 -- Pictured: Jack Coleman as HRG -- (Photo by: Christos Kalohoridis/NBC)

HEROES REBORN — “Game Over” Episode 106 — Pictured: Jack Coleman as HRG — (Photo by: Christos Kalohoridis/NBC)

The first character we meet include Tommy (Robbie Kay), Luke (Zachary Levi, “Chuck”) and Joanne (Judith Shekoni, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2”). Tommy is a young teen with the ability to make things disappear and he comes to a secret meeting for evos to try to learn what to do. He has been running with his mom for years from town to town in fear of being discovered. I was very interested to see Levi play a true villain in the series and he didn’t disappoint. Luke and Joanne came to the group under the guise of being evos too but in fact they were there to kill all of them, in retaliation for the loss of their child 1 year ago in Odessa. Tommy manages to slip away before they kill everyone after being warned by a stranger on his phone.

We also get to meet Miko, who is seeking out her father who turns out is stuck in a virtual world that she was featured in. A young man shows up after having solved a level of the game that revealed her address. She is obviously to this meaning but in turn after looking at the game finds her father’s sword. That sword leads her into the world of the game Evernow, where she fights to save her father. Carlos a former soldier finds he has to take up the mantel of a hero behind a mask when an ambush kills a member of his family that he learns was the masked vigilante.

Overall the 2 hour premiere did a good job of setting up a decent but not overwhelming number of new main characters for the series. The down side to the premiere is that it depends heavily on having watched the previous four seasons of the show in order to understand what’s going on and how it all connects. For those that love mysteries that span over many seasons, the premier was a lot of fun as you connected the dots with Primatech and all the other little story lines that were woven into the first episode of the new series.

We give the premiere a 3/5. It spends a lot of time focusing on the past 4 seasons as it tries to tie together everything happening in Heroes Reborn which ruins the experience for anyone who hasn’t watch the original series (and if you haven’t yet you really should go watch it). It also does a lot of bouncing around to different locations within each episode which is very distracting and something the original series started doing more and more in the later seasons. We also find out that the series starts with Claire dead, according to several statements by the show runner and writers. Remember the first series was all about “Save the cheerleader, save the world”. How they go about explaining what happen and the shift remains to be seen.

HEROES REBORN -- "Brave New World / Odessa" Episode 101 -- Pictured: (l-r) Judith Shekoni as Joanne, Robbie Kay as Tommy, Zachary Levi as Luke Collins -- (Photo by: Christos Kalohoridis/NBC)

HEROES REBORN — “Brave New World / Odessa” Episode 101 — Pictured: (l-r) Judith Shekoni as Joanne, Robbie Kay as Tommy, Zachary Levi as Luke Collins — (Photo by: Christos Kalohoridis/NBC)

Where it shines is in a few of its main characters including returning character Noah Bennet, Tommy and Levi’s character Luke. Noah continues to be the great mystery and sometimes evil man you love to hate but in heroes reborn you simply want to love him. Tommy (Robbie Kay) is a believable high school teen who is struggling with how to handle his powers and his love interest. Luke is the villain that you are hoping turns good at some point. You understand his pain and why he is hunting them down but also hope he doesn’t manage to find and kill Tommy, considering he himself lost a young son. There are a lot more returning and new characters to be revealed in upcoming episodes and even some we didn’t mention from the premiere because they were otherwise forgettable. We will give the show a few more episodes before we decide if we are sold on it or lump it in with the bad seasons of the original series.

So what questions does the premiere leave us with:

  1. What happened in Odessa 1 year ago?
  2. Who is the man following young Tommy and protecting him?
  3. What is Primatech up to and can they be trusted?
  4. What is the connection of the Aurora borealis and the black hole we saw? Is that our new ‘cheerleader’?
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