I might be the only one, but I am having a visceral reaction to Sylar coming back… super villains who are both too powerful and too weak considering their supposed powers are quite annoying. Sylar is both, and his return is annoying. I’m not quite caught up, but just saw the part where he takes his first victim after regaining consciousness, so maybe it gets better.

I’m working at home today and was thinking I could catch up on Heroes on my computer. So, I go over to iTunes and realize that iTunes doesn’t have Season 2 because NBC pulled their content from iTunes. Wonderful.

So, I have to watch it o NBC’s web site, but since I can’t float the video like I can the iTunes window, I’m only able to watch a sliver. A screenshot of that half of my laptop screen is below the fold. I also couldn’t tell you what the TV commercials are for. I’m assuming that’s the revenue NBC wanted, but I’d like Sprint (the ads on the page) and whatever other video advertisers know that I ignored the ads on the NBC Video Rewind Player. It’s too easy.

And, on top of that, NBC/GE shareholders, they just lost $1.99 an episode from me. I missed 4 episodes, to that’s $8. Yes, yes, I can download Heroes episodes from Amazon except that I don’t own a PC. I don’t want to store them permanently on my Tivo. I’d like to take them on my iPhone and iPod. I can’t with Amazon’s inferior product. I’m not saying that you HAVE to go with iTunes, but keeping the most popular portable music player, the fastest selling phone, and a rapidly growing platform in mind would be a good thing, don’t you think?

So, NBC, thanks for screwing me out of a good experience and yourselves out of some cash. I’m sure I’ll miss more episodes of Heroes, and I’ll do the same with your online player. The irony is that my views will count just the same for the player, and NBC will count it as a success even though, quite frankly, the advertiser is getting screwed. Page views and video starts are pretty opaque stats, but that’s all that gets reported to advertisers.
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Tonight’s episode of Heroes focused on a future 5 years after a catastrophic nuclear explosion (in the form of a radioactive hero) in NYC. The world is a dark place, and the “heroes” are about to be subjected to a government sponsored euthanasia/genocide program. We watch a number of the good guys get killed brutally by a government run amok and an evil hero.

However, even in this dark tableau was a moment of optimism. In this future, the government was able to erect a monument to the dead within five years of the tragedy. In our world, run by George Pataki, Michael Bloomberg, and George W Bush, we still don’t have a national memorial to the dead.