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The Heroes season finale is this Monday and it can't come soon enough. The show has struggled in both ratings and quality, vacillating between interesting episodes and dull storytelling. However, it's not too late, and the underlying nugget of an idea for the series -- ordinary people with extraordinary abilities -- can still flourish.

First, the show's writers and producers will have to spend the summer evaluating what works and what doesn't, formulating a solid game plan so the show doesn't fall into the same ruts it has every year. Either that, or they can just read this article to find seven easy ways to improve the show.

1. Create a Central Base of Operations

It seems as though the Petrelli family has finally come to the conclusion that restarting the Company is a good idea. It's just what Heroes needs -- a main base where all the heroes can gather and train, much like the Hall of Justice or Professor X's mansion. One main set piece would not only make it easier to follow, but the show could theoretically save money if it films most of its scenes in one place.

2. Keep the Heroes Together

Every season Hiro and Ando go off on their own adventures to Texas, feudal Japan, Africa, India, or Baby Matt Parkman's house. Mohinder travels back and forth from India to New York to the desert, Claire goes from D.C. to Costa Verde to Mexico, and all the other characters go in a million different directions. Instead, how about keeping them together and only going out on single episode, self-contained missions.

3. No More Time Traveling

Thankfully Peter and Hiro don't have the ability to travel through time any more, but that's not all I'm talking about. Every single season features either a flashback episode ("Company Man," "Four Months Ago," "1961") or a flash forward episode ("Five Years Gone," "Out of Time," "I Am Become Death"). More often than not, these are extraneous adventures that provide backstory on non-vital information or futures which will never exist.

4. Introduce a New Villain

Heroes is in desperate need of a real villain, a scary person who can destroy others. Sylar is played out, and past attempts like Arthur Petrelli never panned out because all he did was kill his fellow villains. Every season, Buffy the Vampire Slayer introduced a Big Bad, one primarily villain who Buffy and her gang would spend the whole season trying to defeat. Heroes needs a Big Bad.

5. Kill Sylar

I love Zachary Quinto, but the writers might as well finish the job they started a long time ago. Ever since season 2, the writers have been systematically committing character assassination with Sylar. He was once a powerful villain, unstoppable and frightening. Now he has severe abandonment issues from his mommy and daddy and he let Danko, a regular human, get a knife in the back of his head. Even though her came back, allowing for the possibility of Sylar being put down so easily is offensive to the terror the character first instilled in his victims.

6. Replace Tim Kring with Bryan Fuller as Showrunner

From day one I've had issues with Tim Kring being the creator and showrunner for Heroes. This is supposed to be a comic book series, so why is the man whose most notable TV venture was a medical examiner procedural (Crossing Jordan) in charge? Bryan Fuller has run fantastic fantasy shows like Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies. He has visual style and an intriguing way of storytelling.

7. Focus on the Comic Book Aspect

In the past year, Heroes fired Jeph Loeb and Jesse Alexander, two producers with backgrounds in comics and sci-fi. The network was right to notice there was a problem behind the scenes, but wrong to assume it had anything to do with too much comic book or sci-fi influence. Heroes should be a great comic book, with costumed heroes saving the day from evil people trying to destroy the world. If Heroes wants to be a gritty graphic novel with antiheroes and complex emotions and relationships, that's fine, but Tim Kring certainly isn't the man to make that show either.

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