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SDCC 2015: Heroes Rebirth: The Hall H Panel

Published Mon, 13 Jul 2015 09:15:27 -0500

Hey Gang!

It's time for Heroes Reborn, my final Hall H panel coverage of SDCC 2015. It's been the most exhausing kind of fun and a great test of stamina, but all good things must come to an end. I've covered six Hall H panels this con and I'm still on my feet. Here's lucky number seven.

As with all Hall H panels, the audience was sternly warned against filming or livestreaming any footage, that the footage was special just for us, and that the studios might not come back if we leak the footage. Now, most everything we saw in Hall H is now up on the internet, courtesy of those same studios. I thought we were special.

Before the panel began, there was a slide advertising a company called Renautus whose slogan is "Doing good is good business." For a company big enough to sponsor a Hall H panel, they have almost no web presence. I smell viral marketing. I suspect that this company will serve a similar function as Primatech Paper served in the original series.

This new series picks up five years after the original ended. This timeline will largely be filled in by two video games and a digital series available through the Heroes app. This series, called Dark Matters follows one of the main characters of the original series over the five year gap. His sister begins to develop superpowers and he documents her emerging abilities. In the series, this character is a conspiracy theorist that tracks down Noah Bennet to learn about his Primatech past.

If you remember/bothered to watch after the first season, Claire Bennet revealed her powers in one of her "My name is Claire Bennet and this is my X attempt" videos, broadcast to the world, revealing the presence of super powered individuals, referred to as "evos" in the show. This spurs other evos to come out of the woodwork and make similar videos. The widespread, public emergence causes a backlash, which leads to the registration, marginalization, and eventual wide scale persecution of superpowered individuals. If the first season of Heroes borrowed heavily from Watchmen, Heroes Reborn seems to heavily parallel Days of Future Past.

Creator and Show Runner Tim Kring says that the new series diverges from the previous in how the characters perceive the emergence of their powers. In the first series, it was a wondrous, uncertain experience. In this new series, it means certain persecution.

Returning from the first series are Jack Coleman as HRG/Noah Bennet, Greg Grunberg as Matt Parkman, Christine Rose as Angela Petrelli, Jimmy Jean Louis as The Haitian, Sendahil Ramamurthy as Mohinder Suresh, and Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura.

There's only one piece of footage that, as of press time, has not been leaked. In this clip, we see Mohinder Suresh, attached to some sort of power disrupting device, which includes a tube up his nose and some sort of belt attachment. He is being dragged into custody by some sort of dark ops agent. Coming to the rescue, we see Hiro Nakamura, twin katanas in hand as he dispatches the agent, only to reveal three duplicates of that same agent. This version of Hiro is closer to the future-Hiro of the first series than the happy-go-lucky daydreamer version.

I really hope that Heroes Reborn works. The first season of the original series had promise. If they can get their stuff together and avoid a writers strike, this horse might run! Follow me @notacomplainer.

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