Not so Heroic (spoilers below)

I watched the season finale of Heroes last night. I was disappointed. Very disappointed. The show managed to regress back to the writing levels of the pilot (which was also awful) after grudingly improving throughout the season.

Why can't Peter fly himself to the stratosphere? Why doesn't the gigantic nuclear/EMP pulse knock out all of the lights in the city? Won't the radioactive fallout kill millions on its own? Why will no one ever make sure that Sylar is dead! We've been waiting for a climactic battle all year, and what we got was Flying Petrelli Brother No. 2 punching Sylar repeatedly in the head. Use your powers buddy! What, did they blow their budget on the "five years ahead" episode?

The only saving grace for the episode was little Miss MacGuffin's exclamation that there is a "far worse" mutant than Sylar out in the ether. Good to hear. I'm convinced that half of the writing/plotting problems with this show stem from the creation of characters who are simply too powerful. Sylar is at the borderline of acceptably strong characters: Peter, Hiro, the Haitian, and "suggestion girl" all have powers that are difficult to coherently plot because they offer easy shortcuts to any problem.

Apparently Mr. Sprague (aka, Radioactive Man) is not the Geico Caveman. He was quite clear about this during a recent interview. This makes the choice of hair and beard for his character even more strange, considering that his caveman-esque appearance has become a running joke across the internet. Even more startling, Radioactive Man is married (in real life) to Mr. Noah Bennett's wife on heroes. She was born in 1960. He was born in 1973.