Heroes creator Tim Kring took time out to discuss the recent abrupt ending to The Sopranos and in the process betrayed a fact about Heroes that is considered the Achilles heel for serialized television shows, a club to which Heroes undoubtedly belongs.  Heroes has no planned ending.  Is this something Heroes fans should rejoice over or worry about?  It all depends on how you look at it.

When the New York Times asked Kring about what he thought about the controversial end to The Sopranos, which was essentially a quick cut to black in the middle of a conversation, Kring immediately waxed on the dilemma of not having an ending for his show. “I have to admit that as soon as it ended, I immediately went there. I don’t have an ending for the series yet. I put myself years in the future thinking about what you do when you have viewers with these sorts of expectations. And I think you just have to be true to what you were originally trying to say.”

For LOST's fans, as well as the creators, the constant assertion that they were ‘making it up as they went along’ was considered a valid criticism, but it wasn’t always that way.   When the series began, the unexpected plot shifts were a boon for the series that would have merely been a scripted version of Survivor without them. 

In fact, shows that openly ‘made it up as they went along,’ like 24 for example, were getting heaps of praise for their dynamic approach to story telling.  Rather than moving toward a preordained, and therefore palpable, destiny, cutting edge shows like LOST and 24 were engaged in the state of the art of whip crack creativity; bobbing and weaving around the 'expected' to provide viewers with an exhilarating, ever changing story landscape.

The problem for LOST was that after three seasons, critics began to wonder if the show was stalling plot development deliberately to cover the fact that they didn’t have any answers after all.  The recent announcement of an end date for the series silenced that debate immediately.

Heroes’ fans have not had to worry about that sort of criticism where their show has been concerned.  The story is set up more to tell smaller arcs and present a rapid response to new mysteries.   Nonetheless, the seasons have been presented in the guise of ‘volumes.’  If you know your comic books, however, you know that even that maneuver does not indicate that an end has been set.

Since Heroes begins with an enigmatic set of circumstances and its plot develops consequently, there is less to be resolved in the long term of the tale.  In the world of comics, where Heroes gets its plotting juice from, a characters appearance does not require closure, the origin story is a self contained bit which opens the door to an infinite landscape of story possibilities.  In the comic world characters routinely die, come back, die again, get cancelled, return, die again and so on without the audience ever saying ‘this story is not complete.’

It could be said that Heroes would benefit from a Sopranos style ending, a non-ending, more than the type of ending that LOST demands.  As long as Kring continues to plot each season as a self-contained arc, he’s safe.  In the case where Heroes has run its course and is facing cancellation, all he would need to do is delete the epilogue/lead in to the next chapter.  After all, much like Sopranos, Heroes is as much about the shifting amorphous reality of the characters lives as it is about a grand over arcing adventure.  The only way to satisfactorily end a story like that is open ended.

- Jon lachonis, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image © 2007 NBC)
(Source The New York Times)