Hi Five, Turtle!

(SPOILER ALERT:Go forth at your own risk...)

Previously on Heroes...the writers decided to kill Adam after bringing him back for two scenes, Peter continued to be a whiny douche and Parkman became BFFs with a turtle.

NBC's Heroes has been back for a couple of weeks now with a very uneven season so far. In a review I read on an earlier episode, the author compared Heroes to a soap opera and it gave me pause.

Let's think about this for a minute. What are typical elements of a soap opera? We have a family central to the show's hierarchy that have a large number of statistically impossible beautiful people. There's a long lost daughter, a wayward black sheep who is the real heart of the family. There is a central matriarch whose calculated machinations have effectively done more damage to her grand plans than helped and a tyrannical patriarch back from the grave.

For our supporting cast we have a trailer trash baby mama, a silent ethnic employee willing to do the dirty work to cover up the families mistakes...you know I'm just going to stop right here.

Yes, Heroes is very much a soap opera. Catty, melodramatic and serialized to the point of incoherency.

But is being a soap a bad thing?

While I am not one to extol the virtues of soap opera quality, I have on occasion been caught up in a truly compelling storyline. (I am only slightly ashamed that I was completely caught up in whether the lesbian would ever get her rape baby back from her best friend who stole it because she thought her own baby was dead.).

And while on paper stealing your ex's embryos to impregnate yourself with them to ransom his kid back for your son sounds a little silly on paper, my college roommate would beg to differ with you.

So if we disregard our elitist tendencies to societies definition of "quality television" and acknowledge a show for its "watchability", where does that leave Peter, Claire, Gabriel (aka Sylar for the less informed) and the rest of the Petrelli Family?

As long as they keep us wanting to watch, I'll go with...we'll see.

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