Heroes Season Finale: How To Stop An Exploding Man

Where can they go from here? The last episode of the first season of Heroes - How To Stop An Exploding Man - has just aired on the Sci-Fi Channel in the UK. The series begins on terrestrial TV next Wednesday on BBC2 at 9pm.

I hope the BBC2 audience - who weren't compelled by advanced publicity to go out and invest in a satellite dish or cable to see this show "in advance" - can stick with the series with the slow, scene-setting early episodes. I'll confess that when it began 23 weeks ago, it was only the Internet buzz of enthusiastic fans that kept me watching every episode as I just didn't get the "wow" factor everyone was talking about.

It wasn't until about the fifth episode, the start of the second story arc (Save the Cheerleader, Save the World) that I really began to get into the Heroes' frame of mind, and from then on the show went from strength-to-strength; fast becoming 'must see TV' in the Knight household and one of the modern generation of programmes (along with Lost and Battlestar Galactica) that other shows are measured against (and, invariably, found wanting).

This first season (Volume 1) has woven a wonderfully involved storyline, threaded through with a web of sub-plots - many leading to this potential explosive climax (the title kinda gives that away ... so no spoilers), but except for Hiro's incredible appearance in the Volume 2 tease and Molly's mention of the "one person she can't find" (he's worse than Sylar and can 'see' her when she tries to track him) there's no real clues as to what direction the show will take in the new season. Who's still alive? Who's dead?

There may be no spandex, but this is the best interpretation of comic book superhero tropes on the small screen that we're likely to see for a long time and I have learned to have faith in Tim Kring and his writers. I can only imagine that whatever they have planned will be totally unexpected and brain-bogglingly enthralling.