As a devoted fan of Season One of Heroes, NBC's modern comic-book drama, I was among those screaming the loudest at how poor a follow-up Season Two was. So it's interesting to have a look at the Season Two DVD set, just out from Universal Studios Home Entertainment, not for the episodes themselves -- they do not generally improve upon repeat viewings -- but for the sense you can gather, in the subtext of the bonus materials, of a series that became a victim of outside circumstances as well as its own success.

The extras and episodes are spread across four discs, with audio commentaries on all episodes by a variety of cast and crew. They're delightful folks who clearly love their work and can be very funny talking about it -- Greg Grunberg ("Matt Parkman") is particularly and appealingly enthusiastic -- but don't expect the kind of snarking that we might have had. When Masi Oka ("Hiro Nakamura") tells us, in his commentary during the episode "Out of Time," that if we thought the episodes up to this one were a little slow, we should hang on because it's gonna pick up after this, there's a sense of PR-speak about that. No one is listening to the commentaries who hasn't already formed their opinion about how the season wraps up. I would much rather have heard him voice a little bit of dissatisfaction with how ridiculously Hiro's sojourn in medieval Japan was dragged out.

But there's that subtext I was talking about. Oka's reference to any frustration with the show springs from what fans and critics like me were harping on over the course of the season, which producer Tim Kring responded to as the season was still airing ... and, indeed, as it was still in production. It's hard to see that the change in tone that the last third of these 11 episodes saw isn't a reaction to the fans' grumbling, as much as it was also a reaction to the looming writers' strike.

On Disc 4 there's an "alternate ending" for the season that posits that Adam (aka "Takezo Kensei," played by David Anders) in fact dropped the vial of virus. Events play out very differently after that: the near future that Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) visited, in which the human population has been driven almost to extinction, comes to pass. Indeed, it felt at the time like a huge cheat that that future was avoided, and in the about-the-alternate-ending featurette, Kring explains how the potential writers' strike forced the producers to consider whether they wanted to end on a cliffhanger if they might be off the air for an extended period of time. But I wonder how much of it had to do with the impending strike and how much came out of a desire to wrap up a storyline that the producers knew the fans were not enjoying.

Disc 4 also contains a sneak peek at Season Three, which debuts on September 22 and picks up right where the show left off, with Nathan Petrelli's (Adrian Pasdar) apparent assassination. You can freeze-frame on a shot of the script for the season opening and discover who shot Nathan. (I won't spoil it for you.) Jack Coleman ("Noah Bennet"/"Horn Rimmed Guy") appears to have been the designated spokesman for the new season. He says here: "You're gonna see villains that you know and some that you don't know, some people that you think have been good... There's gonna be some time travel; there's gonna be some alliances you'd never expect." But then, he has to say that, doesn't he?

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MaryAnn Johanson (email me)
film reviews and TV blogging at FlickFilosopher.com

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