Can ‘Heroes’ defeat sophomore slump?

In Monday night’s season finale, the superpowered denizens of “Heroes” defeated an enemy with seemingly limitless destructive power. No, not Sylar, though they dispatched him well enough (but for how long?). Their foe was something far slipperier and far more difficult to capture: a satisfying first season.

This year’s television landscape was littered with the sliced-open heads of other high-profile shows: “Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip,” “Kidnapped” and “Jericho,” to name three. (In the latter’s case, perhaps the lesson is to end, not begin, the season with a nuclear explosion, because where do you go from there?) But “Heroes” not only built an early buzz, it continued to justify it throughout the season.

But just because one villain has been vanquished doesn’t mean that there’s not another, more insidious one lurking around the corner. It’s the Sophomore Slump (insert menacing music sting), and it has attacked recent buzzworthy shows such as “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives” and “Veronica Mars.” What can be done to defeat such a foe?

Streamline the roster
One of the driving forces of the entire first season was the desperate quest to prevent supers from being killed off. The thing is, maybe Sylar had the right idea. Sure, the whole telekinetically-sawing-people’s-heads-open-and-picking-out-their-brains thing was a little untidy, but the show added characters so steadily that the roster was bursting at the seams by the end. It was starting to look as though rogue trenchcoat Bennet was the only power-free person in the world of “Heroes.”

That leaves the question of which characters to drop. Anyone living in Las Vegas would be a good start. Despite the show’s subtheme of family, the Hawkins-Sanderses never quite gelled. No surprise there, since it’s hard to become a functional unit when Mom can’t decide if she’s an honest Internet stripper or a vicious mercenary. And despite a violently split personality, it was never entirely clear what Niki/Jessica’s power actually was. With the shot at the end of the finale where D.L., Niki, Micah and the newly adopted Molly became a warped Sears portrait, their story seemed complete, and therefore over.

Have a plan …
“Lost” fans (and anyone who sat through the slow, confusing burnout of “The X-Files”) know the fear that the show’s creators are flying by the seat of their pants. But one of the strengths of “Heroes” was in how it moved not just forward but towards something specific. In fact, the show gave itself countless ways of keeping its eyes on the road ahead: Peter’s prophetic dreams, Hiro’s time travel, Isaac’s ability to paint the future.

Those signposts left the writers little option but to stick to the grand design, lest they wreck continuity completely. When Sylar tasted Hiro’s sword and Peter started going irreversibly radioactive, it was the satisfying culmination of a plan that had been set in motion well ahead of time. With “Heroes” a hit out of the starting gate and a second season more or less a given for months now, there’s no excuse for the writers not to have mapped out season two by now.

… but be open to improvisation
Still, “Heroes” shouldn’t get so beholden to the overall plan that it misses opportunities that pop up along the way. Look at Bennet. When the season began, he was simply a cryptic man in bad glasses who stood around looking menacing. Heck, he didn’t even have a first name until the finale, when he got the portentous name of “Noah.”

But he quickly became the show’s most compelling character, torn between his mission of tracking and monitoring the supers and his devotion to indestructible adopted daughter Claire. Actor Jack Coleman eventually moved from the guest stars section of the credits to the cast list and anchored the season’s best episode, the answer-heavy “Company Man.” None of it would have happened if the show hadn’t adapted what seemed to be its original blueprint to accommodate discoveries made along the way.

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