The days when Heroes was a phenomenon now appear to be gone for good. While it is still NBC's most successful program in the key 18-49 demographic by a sizable margin, the two-hour premiere episode and last week's follow-up had Nielsen numbers significantly lower than their 2007 counterparts, which were in turn lower than the ratings for the debut season.

A long layoff (over nine months between new episodes) hurt the show as it appears to have hurt its lead-in Chuck, but there are still artistic problems with Heroes that serve to explain most of the reason why it has faded. The major issue is the X-Files trap: an inability to move the overarching storyline forward, or at least move it in a way that satisfies the audience. And unlike The X-Files, Heroes does not have stand-alone plots that serve to entertain while the writers are figuring out what to do with the big picture.

It's not the way of American prime time television to say ahead of time that a series will run only X number of episodes. A show debuts and continues as long as its ratings are high enough and its stars don't go the way of David Caruso. But when one looks back at the wonderful first season of Heroes, the way that characters in all corners of the world were gradually drawn together and used their powers to prevent a deadly threat to the future, one wonders if the series would have better off just calling it quits then.

Having ended that first season with the mission of "save the cheerleader, save the world" being achieved, the producers don't seem to know what to do now other than variations on that theme. You can't very well have Nathan Petrelli flying into treetops to remove a stranded cat after he's helped stop an atomic blast in New York City. Heroes has taken the old Buffy the Vampire Slayer catchphrase "She saved the world. A lot" to heart. For three seasons, these people haven't done anything other than prevent a dystopian future.

The repetition of the save-the-future theme has also led to viewer confusion. We found out in the season opener that the future version of Peter shot his brother Nathan to keep him from making the existence of the heroes public, because doing so would have had terrible implications for the future. But people might then wonder if this was the exact same nightmare future that we saw in each of the last two seasons. Who, other than a true fanatic who spent all summer boning up on the DVDs and assorted Heroesextras, can keep it all straight?

Heroes is also having trouble with character development and deployment. Certain players have always seemed more central to the core plot than others, which makes it relatively easy to heighten the stakes by killing off the more disposable. But no one introduced since the first season has really caught on with fans other than Elle, well played by Kristen Bell. She is too busy with films to be tied down to Heroes, though, and the latest collection of villains introduced two weeks ago has yet to distinguish itself.

The series has given its three most problematic long-running characters entirely new arcs this season, but the results so far are at best mixed. Mohinder (Sendhil Ramamurthy), the scientist who has worked to identify the heroes, has sussed out the genetics behind how to give himself super powers. It's a good idea for Heroes to explore the temptation of becoming better than human, but Mohinder is possibly the world's dumbest smart guy, so he's hard to root for. Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg) has been sent to Africa by the future version of Peter, where he's been taken under the wing of the latest Heroes ethnic mystery man. The dual Niki/Jessica character has been jettisoned in exchange for a (?) new character played by Ali Larter, named Tracy Strauss. The producers apparently gave up on tying in Niki/Jessica to the larger plot, but understandably didn't want to give up on Larter the actress. However, the end of the dual personality plot means that we no longer get to see Larter use forehead furrows or a flash of her eyes to reveal that she has switched from one personality to the other, one of the pleasures of the first two seasons.

With public taste appearing to turn against serialized shows with a sci-fi bent (even the best of these shows, Lost, has seen its ratings fall even as it continues to crank out classic episodes), it might behoove Heroes to consider the X-Files approach of throwing in an odd episode that gives some of the characters a problem that can be solved in 40 minutes. Some of the sense of fun that characterized the first season would be welcome as well--a recent scene where Sylar (Zachary Quinto) gave a sly acknowledgement of fan speculation that he acquires his powers by eating brains was one of the few laughs Heroes has given us lately. And please: a moratorium on characters being secretly related, a sci-fi cliche that this series is overdosing on.

If all else fails, NBC and the producers may want to go the Lost route and promise a date certain for the end of the series. That will at least reassure fans that we won't be going back to the future for as long into the future as we can see.

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