Barbie Becomes a Little More Plastic, Mommy Dearest Becomes Even More Sinister

For the record, I spent four years hating Hayden Panettiere for derailing one of my favorite unlikely heroines, Ally McBeal. Her flat performance in the whiny Disney movie Ice Princess shored up that hatred, as the movie preached to millions of little girls that it was perfectly reasonable to blow off a scholarship to Harvard in order to figure skate competitively, even when you’ve never won a competition. I comforted myself by noting that she wasn’t outgrowing her chipmunk cheeks, which meant that her Hollywood career was likely to follow the trajectory of Amanda Bynes. Surely her Sydney White wasn’t long in coming.

But then she became the cheerleader-in-distress whose rescue was required for world safety. The tagline, “Save the Cheerleader. Save the World.” kept me away from the smash-hit Heroes for an entire season, despite my continued yearning for sci-fi in a post-Buffy TV line-up. But last fall I was lonely in Shanghai and succumbed, downloading the entire first season from iTunes. As I sat in my apartment and watched the series on my laptop, the impossible happened: I started to like round-faced, platinum blonde. In her role as Claire Bennet, the high school cheerleader from Odessa with the superpower of regeneration, Hayden Panettiere convincingly plays a young woman rising above impossible circumstances. The first season of the show, through Claire’s character, directly took on issues of sexual violence, the exorbitant pressure adolescent girls place upon one another, and how the adults in their lives always manage to overlook the bad things that the cool kids do. Claire had become the unlikely heroine: a sometimes mind-bogglingly myopic high school cheerleader with a stunning ability to reconcile high-school pettiness with a realization of a higher purpose. To be fair, that’s something Buffy could never do: in the very first season of the series, her higher purpose means that she has to walk away (see season one, episode three, “Witch”).

Claire’s September 22 run-in with Sylar (Zachary Quinto), a thinly veiled metaphor for rape, in the episode “The Second Coming” leaves her a little less human, without the ability to feel pain.
In the September 29 episode “One of Us, One of Them,” she announces her unwillingness to be a victim and her desire to quit high school and fight the world’s villains. But her mercenary biological mother Meredith (Jessalyn Gilsig) who to date has done nothing for Claire but use her to milk her cash cow biological father, a really unlikable character who has been brought back to the series as “protection” for the Bennet family for reasons still incomprehensible to me, shows unprecedented maternal presence and recognizes that Claire’s change in ambition is coming from a much darker place. In a bizarre confrontation in which Meredith becomes a true “Mommy Dearest” by using her ability to produce flame to suffocate Claire and force her to relive Sylar’s violation, she extracts a confession from Claire as to what her sudden change in ambition is really about: “I want to hurt him.”

The newest obsession from the writers of Heroes appears to be mothers (at least we’ve moved on from the love-lost obsession that spawned the torturous second season of the show). Tolstoy is quoted ad nauseum from Anna Karenina for his revelation that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Apparently Tim Kring is trying to spawn the next five seasons from explorations of the unhappy families of Heroes. We find out that Angela Petrelli (Cristine Rose) is bitterly disappointed in her sons Nathan (Adrian Pasdar) and Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) for reasons that have never really been explained (both have been very successful. Unwilling to commit mass homicide, but otherwise they’re pretty obedient). In a completely ridiculous twist, we have learned that Sylar is her son. Angela, who has always been a luke-warm Mom to Nathan and Peter, now really wants to be a good mommy… to the point that she leaves a woman to be murdered so that Sylar can absorb her ability. Now that she’s in charge of “the company” (we’re back in Odessa, kids), it will be interesting to find out if her new desire to be a super mommy supplements or detracts from her capacity to be a super villain.

NB: Odessa, Texas, has GOT to be the most storied town with nothing to recommend it in history.