New Season Turns Heroes Into Victims

Beginning their third season tonight, the scrappy band of young world-savers of NBC’s Heroes is just in time, Alessandra Stanley writes in the New York Times. The dangers they have to face, from a sinister conglomerate started by their parents to deadly viruses, make a convenient parallel to the complaints of Generation Y, who feel that they've been burned by boomer indulgences and misdeeeds. “Heroes gives its fans cathartic validation,” Stanley writes. “You inherited a screwed-up world, and it’s not your fault.”

As for the show itself, Stanley reports, it appears to have rebounded from the quirky subplots of last season and returned to the fast-paced action of the first. And though the intricate plot is hard to pick up for first-time viewers, the spectacle of youth rebelling against parents while trying to hold them close should escape no one. Maybe they’ll take on the credit crisis next. (More Heroes stories.)