Cast your mind back a year or so, and you’ll remember there was a stonking big writers’ strike in the US. That stopped a whole load of shows from completing their run. Heroes, in particular, had to truncate a whole storyline, in which the Shanti virus would have escaped – rather than be destroyed by Peter in episode 11 – which is originally why Nathan would have keeled over during that press conference, rather than because future-Peter shot him.
The rest of season two would have consisted of two Volumes: Exodus, rather than Villains, and Fugitives, so I’m not sure whether Volume two would have ended at episode 11 or episode 13, as you might have expected. However, they did film some scenes for episode 13, which potentially could have been the first episode of Volume 3. And here’s one of them.
I’m not sure exactly where this would have appeared in the scheme of things. While there are arguments to be made about actor availability, sets, etc, it’s clear that the following scene was important enough to be a priority shoot. It might even have been the lead-in to Volume 3.
Although most of the scene did get used in Volume 3, it’s interesting to see what the footage hints at in terms of the original direction of the Volume. Is that Jessica or Tracy who seems to be the leader of the baddies – was Niki/Jessica going to survive Volume 2 originally and be the Arthur Petrelli of Volume 3 or was Tracy intended to be a baddie originally? What was the storyline planned for Micah and Monica, who presumably might only have been around as long as Niki was?
Whatever, to me it looks like rather than being the creative uplift the writers claimed, the writers strike did in fact set the show moving in a bad direction as the writers tried to top what they’d already worked out. The Volume 3 hinted at here would have been a whole lot better than the one we ended up getting, even if you can see that quite a few elements of it survived and they weren’t that good (eg Sylar/Angela stuff).
Sigh. Still, at least we got back on track with Volume 4, and hopefully, Volume 5 is going to be a cracker now Bryan Fuller’s back behind the scenes as a consultant producer.
