By Pentadact

That’s it, Intro Guy. You are now so bad that you entirely counter-act the greatness of the programme that follows your intolerable gloat. I actually regret watching this episode, the intro was that bad.

It’s not just that an intro is unnecessary, it’s this intro in particular. It’s an intro made by people who don’t just look down on their audience, they actually hate them. It’s the kind of intro I’d produce for I’m A Celebrity And The Suffocating Numbness Of My Life Has Driven Me To New Lows Get Me Out Of Here. It’s openly an advert for the very thing it is a part of. It doesn’t stop at explicitly summarising the themes and symbolism of the preceding season, it actually explains in bullet-point form what’s going to happen in the following episode, and shows clips of it. At first you think it’s going to insult your intelligence, but it quickly becomes clear that the disdain, the spite its authors hold for you far exceeds their restraint, and the insult is merely an appetiser for the flurry of gashing, wrenching, deep and bloody wounds they plan to inflict. And the salt in your mutiliations is a voice-over whose patronising sickly smarm is so drippingly viscious you could choke on it.

There’s no mistaking the venemous cynicism behind this – I spend most of my days feeling it – but attached to something as great as Heroes it becomes an even darker spectre. This is disdain for one of the few remaining wonderful things on television, and only the blackest of burnt, drowned, dead, dead souls could feel it with this level of vacant dispassion. I don’t know who writes these, but I can tell you that they have no irises – their obsidian pupils fill the entirety of their lidless and unblinking eyes.