First off: Spoilers ahead. Big dirty spoilers. Steaming great ones.

Over the past few months, I and several of my friends have been keenly following the hit US superhero series Heroes. It's good. Like, really good. Really really good. I mean absolutely brilliant. Download it, watch it, buy the DVDs when the come out, send cash to the cast and crew. It's great.

Mostly.

Heroes is a highly complex series with an intricate, layered plot, involving a bewildering number of characters, and an enormous number of interconnecting stories.

It starts off following the relatively ordinary lives of a few of the "heroes" of the title: ordinary people who discover they have incredible powers, and then discover that these powers go on to make their lives much, much more complicated. As the series develops, though, it builds layers upon layers, there are conspiracies, sinister corporations, a seemingly omnipresent mobster by the name of "Linderman," a hero-slaying serial killer called Sylar, and a bomb that's going to blow up New York City. The name of the bomb seems likely to be "Ted" - the hero whose power is the ability to create radioactivity and nuclear explosions.

The characters we start off with are comparatively few: we have Peter and Nathan Petrelli, Nathan can fly, Peters power is unclear at first, but it turns out that he can channel the powers of other people. Then there's single mother Niki, who has a superpowered alternative personality which kills people. Isaac Mendez can paint the future, but only when he's high. Sixteen year old Claire regenerates any injury.

The interesting thing about these early characters is that their superpowers all say something about them as people. Nathan is ambitious, a career politician, a "high flier." Peter, on the other hand, is a nurse, and we learn early on that he lives his life very much through other people. Niki is living a double life, and as a single parent she's trying to "split herself in two" as she looks after her son Micah (who's a machine empath, but we'll get to him in a bit). A bit later on we meet a telepathic policeman Matt Parkman, whose ability to read minds highlights the lack of communication in his relationship with his wife. Even popular favourite Hiro Nakamura fits the pattern: he's essentially a nobody, but he has a heart big enough for the whole world, and a power to match.

And that, in my never particularly humble opinion, is what made Heroes work. It was about basically ordinary people and their lives. Of course we knew it was going to get bigger than that, but at the start it was about people first, powers second. (A fan theory on the Heroes Wiki " which I am currently browsing " notices this phenomenon but completely misses the point, identifying it as some kind of IC facet of the way the Powers work, rather than the literary device it is).

Then we got the second strain of characters cropping up: Ted Sprague was the first of the new wave. Ted's power was nothing to do with his personality, Ted Sprague was a vehicle for his power. The plot required that there be a "bomb" so they introduced one. In a way, Ted Sprague is the beginning of the end for me, because he marks the end of the story and the beginning of the plot.

After Ted, the new Heroes crop up thick and fast. We get D. L. (I'd assumed he was called "Dalziel" or "Diel" but no, apparently it's initials) with his kitty pride power " I'll let this one slide, because he was there to be "Niki's ex-lover and Micah's father" first and "Walks Through Walls Guy" second. Then there's "the Haitian" - the power-suppressing dude " there's Candice (pretending to be other people chick), Sanjog (comatose plot dump kid), and a bunch of other heroes who are powers first, people second.

All of this is forgiveable though. The supporting cast are always going to be, well, supporting. That's sort of their deal. Some people are always going to be there to drive the plot forward. I think, though, that I'd be happier if I actually gave a crap about the plot at this stage.

Maybe I'm bitter, maybe I'm just too damned English, too used to six-episode series instead of twenty-four episode "seasons." Or perhaps it's the opposite, maybe I'm too used to all-action Hollywood firefights to appreciate a slow build. Either way I'm bored of the plot now. Like, really bored of it. We found out everything we needed to know about Sylar in " like " episode ten. Used to be a watchmaker, wants to be "special," brain eating psychopath. Fine. Then they catch him, make a complete pig's arse of actually keeping him locked up, let him escape, chow down on a few more brains, capture him again, let him escape again. I wouldn't mind but he isn't an interesting villain. I mean seriously, he just kills people. That's all there is to it. As an antagonist he's about as compelling as botulism.

Of course every An- needs his Pro- and in Sylar's case his heroic nemesis is everybody's favourite man-nurse Peter Petrelli. You may recall I said earlier that Peter's power is the ability to channel the powers of others, which dovetailed nicely with his tendency to "live his life through other people". Later in the series, however, it turns out that his power isn't so much to draw strength from others as it is to reproduce the powers of anybody he has ever met. This of course mirrors Sylar's power to reproduce the power of anybody whose brain he has eaten. The difference is that Sylar's power ("knowing how things work") is rooted in reason, while Peter's power ("empathy") is rooted in emotion.

The problem with this "dark reflection" schtick is that it just doesn't say anything meaningful about either character. Peter and Sylar both "wanted to be special" and in that sense they're both two sides of the same coin, but it's a sucky coin. A lame coin. A coin not worth the tossing. What makes it all the worse is that we are somehow expected to admire Peter's desire to be special, because it leads him to help people, but not Sylar's, because it leads him to eat people. I can get behind heroes with essentially pathetic motivations. I can totally get behind villains with essentially pathetic motivations. What I can't get behind is a hero and a villain, both of whom have the same pathetic motivation, who I am expected to compare and contrast.

Professor X and Magneto make a cool pairing. The reason they make a cool paring is because they both essentially have the same motivation: they both want what's best for the mutants. It works because they both have different, legitimate interpretations of what that means. They are both striving towards a noble goal, but Magneto chooses extreme and evil means to achieve that goal. Sylar and Peter don't have anything like the same chemistry. Firstly, their "goal" is crappy gen-X whiny toss. Secondly, at no point do either of them make a meaningful choice about their path.. It's not like Peter gets the option to eat somebody's brain and refuses it, it's not like Sylar could have acquired his powers by any other method. Both Sylar and Peter do exactly what they have to do in pursuit of their vapid, pointless desire to be "special" and they're both exactly as annoying as each other.

There are four episodes of Heroes left. I'm enjoying it, I really am, but they could have wrapped the whole thing up weeks ago. The past few episodes have been cool, but they've been empty cool: exciting events and superpower battles without any of the character emphasis that made the early episodes really work. I won't be watching the next series. Once I've seen how it all pans out I'll be cutting my losses.