I prefer the notion that there have been people with powers for centuries and that every generation ends up having to figure out how they'll live with these powers and what they'll do with them. The X-Men comics have been playing the superhero soap opera game for years, and that's the path I see Heroes going down. I don't think that the writers not having an 'end game' in mind is necessarily a problem for Heroes, any more than it is for E.R. or Friends or Doctor Who.

As to the title becoming 'ironic', isn't that part of what season 3 is about: some characters (most notably everyone with the surname Petrelli) are determined to save the world, and others are feeling compelled to act in a less than heroic manner to support or oppose this latest grand plan.

I wouldn't disagree that some characters have been acting oddly this season. Would Mohinder really have shifted from not harming a fly to becoming The Fly? Why did Sylar accept that Angela Petrelli was his birth mother so readily? Does Claire ever show up at school? Is Peter really as stupid as he acts? These are all fixable issues, particularly if the recent behind the scenes changes result in new writers trying to address the problems over the second half of the season and in the next.

The point I was trying to make with The X-Files reference was simply that having created a set up and made the show somewhat serialised (though Heroes is more so) they weren't sure what their end game was. They created this rich mythology but weren't sure what to do with it in the end.

It's inherent in Heroes as a serial that it too has a mythology, if not necessarily in terms of individual characters but in terms of the general story and I'd argue that in the first series a far larger tapestry with a goal was implied.

The problem is now that they're back peddling and revealing boat loads of info in order to move onto the next thing, attempting to restructure the thing so that it's more like a soap with a range of different stories rather than something which seems to be going in a single direction like 'Lost'.

Which would be fine if it wasn't being done so hamfistedly, the machinations of the plot getting in the way of logical characterisation, scenes full of convoluted exposition paradoxically making it difficult to keep an eye on what's important.

But above all, the series is called Heroes, but the title is becoming increasingly ironic — people walk around talking about wanting to 'save the world' but 'the world' seems a very abstract concept at this point.