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Here are my reviews of the two premieres I watched last night.

Chuck

Last night’s first episode of Chuck (NBC) was a pleasant surprise. From various reviews, I had the impression that the whole “guy downloads government secrets into his brain” would be too far fetched for my liking. But alas, the characters on the show make up for some of that.

What I really appreciated was the stuff that went unsaid. The story is that Chuck’s roommate from college becomes a rogue spy in the CIA and, as he lays dying, sends bucket loads of data (encrypted in images) to Chuck’s email account. The data is from a joint CIA/NSA database that was put together after 9-11. But what’s left unsaid is what the computer system was doing with the data. Once Chuck sees the email, the images are in his head. Now that they are just like memories, he’s able to put connections together that went previously unnoticed. Its likely that the system was some sort of threat analysis program based on loose correlations in the data. Modern computers aren’t very good at doing that sort of thing but the human brain is.

I loved the fact that Chuck (Zachary Levi) works at Buy More, which was next door to Large Mart.

Chuck is being compared to Reaper (CW) which airs tonight so I’ll write more later after I’ve seen both.

Heroes

The show that we’ve all been waiting for finally aired last night. Although it didn’t live up the hype that was set mid-last season, it certainly picked up from the mediocre finale from season one.

The Bennets have moved to California and are trying to keep a low profile so as not to draw attention from the company. Noah instructs Claire not to raise her hand in class or try out for cheerleading at her new school, but he can’t keep his own ego under wraps with his new manager at Copy Kingdom. Kind of out of character if you ask me. He’s the one that’s been trying to protect Claire and family no matter the costs.

Matt Parkman is finally a detective but in New York city where he’s taking care of Molly, the little girl that can find people with special powers. Except that, there’s one person she doesn’t want to find and it looks like she’s having nightmares about him. Matt and Molly are staying in Suresh’s apartment while he’s off in India looking for money from donors to help find people with special powers. It becomes clear that he’s really trying to lure the company into hiring him.

Mom and Nathan Petrelli have assumed that Peter is dead. Nathan is taking it pretty hard.

There’s a new hero, Maya, who has the ability to turn the guts of everyone around her to black goo when she gets mad. Look out Claire. Can you recover from that?

The best part of this episode (and the best character in the whole series) is Hiro Nakamura, who’s teleported himself back to Japan 1671. He finally meets his hero, Takezo Kensei, but finds that he’s not what Hiro expected. In fact, he’s British and only hires other people to stand in battle for him.

At the end, we see a group of men opening a large shipping crate in a port of Belfast, Ireland. What’s inside isn’t what they expected, its a chained-up Peter Petrelli with no memory of how he got there and only a necklace with the Kensei symbol on it. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say (sarcastically) that those guys have something to do with the British Takezo Kensei.

We’ve got the good beginnings of a great season.