Why are you so stupid, Heroes?

I can't begin to list all they ways in which Heroes has been unbelievably, brain-numbingly stupid thus far this season. But let's hit a few highlights.

Last episode, as Sylar meekly returned to his cell (I'm not even going to touch how ridiculous the "Sylar plays nice" plot thread was), Bennett confided to the Haitian that he was only pretending to accept Sylar as a partner, and that as soon as he found Sylar's weakness, he would kill him.

Hey, Bennett. The Haitian can nullify people's powers. So why don't you HAVE THE HAITIAN TAKE AWAY SYLAR'S POWERS AND THEN SHOOT HIM IN THE FUCKING HEAD??

That might work.

Oh, no, wait, now Sylar supposedly can't ever be killed, because he's got Claire's powers (ignoring for now the fact that the Haitian can take away those powers long enough to burn Sylar into ashes). Except, hold on: we've already seen with Claire and Peter that if the brain is pierced with a foreign object (tree root for Claire, glass shard for Peter), death is permanent until the object is removed. Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul! So again: shoot him in the fucking head. Stupid Bennett. Stupid writers!

Next: take Hiro. Please! (Ha!) His whole stupid, stupid plotline, in which the world is in danger of being destroyed because Hiro was too bored to obey his father and not open a safe, could be resolved if Hiro would just go back in time and prevent his stupid, stupid former self from opening that safe. (How, by the way, to go off on a digressive complaint, how in the world could Daphne -- or, as the AV Club refers to her, Speedy Hot Topic -- know the exact second that Hiro opened that safe and therefore know exactly when to run in and steal the formula? She's fast; she can't see through frickin' walls.)

Anyway: as Hiro told Ando, he would not go back and fix his mistake because going back in time was too dangerous, and he would never do that again. Except, hold on: as we saw earlier in that scene, Hiro was making time skip forward and backward just for fun. Stupid Hiro. Stupid writers!

And then there's Suresh, the stupidest genius in the world. He decided to inject himself with his new superpower serum in a scenario that seemed very familiar to me. Hmmm... maybe that's because the entire thing was stolen directly from Cronenberg's The Fly! Let's break it down: there's the egotistical scientist who makes an amazing breakthrough. There's the girlfriend/soon-to-be-girlfriend warning him about its dangers. The scientist rashly subjects himself to the untested breakthrough. It gives him super strength, makes him euphoric, changes his personality, makes him sexually voracious. And it eventually causes hideous changes in the scientist's body. The whole thing could not have been more blatantly ripped off from Cronenberg. For crying out loud, there was even a scene in which Suresh scaled a wall as though he were a human... fly? Is that the word I'm looking for? Stupid Suresh. Thieving writers!

There are a hundred more similar idiocies which have already cropped up in these first three episodes of the season. Take your pick. I have a high threshold for stupidity in my TV, as you well know. But I don't know how much more of this I can take.

At least they had the sense to kill off Francis Capra in a timely manner. I hate that dude. He's just laughable. As I've noted before, Capra is the tiniest, most unrealistically threatening "hoodlum" since the Fonz.