HEROMAN - Episode 25

The Skrugg are back, Kogorr is alive and well once again, and Washington is looking very much the worse for wear - I think it's fair to say that the world is in a pretty tight spot once again, and it's asking a lot for Joey and Heroman to do anything about it as the series hits its penultimate episode.


Despite having all of those various elements set up last week, there's still more to come from this instalment to really finish setting the scene, not least from Kogorr as we find out what has really driven him to attack the Earth in the first place - he's hungry. Not hungry for wealth, power or Earth women... just plain hungry, in that he wants to eat everything. This appears to include not only his own minions but also those mysterious black spheres, as they return to melt into his giant saucepan like some kind of ominous alien pancake for Kogorr to digest and use to grow.

On the other side of the fence Heroman also has some new tricks up his sleeve, revealing his newest power this episode (although I'm not really sure what it actually did...) while Professor Denton explains his intriguing concept for keeping Heroman powered using lightning. To add to the good guy's arsenal, Joey also manages to find a rescue Will, who of course is as cold towards his rescuer as ever despite joining in this final battle against Kogorr.

Once all of this is in place, we finally get to the serious business of five minutes or so of slick, intense and generally pretty awesomely animated action, as our intrepid trio race to reach what they believe to be Kogorr's weak spot. Just as though it looks as though the job has been done however, of course Kogorr has the last laugh, leaving us with an even more heightened sense of peril and impending doom as we enter next week's series finale.

Although I was really hoping for an entire episode of full-on action this week, HEROMAN still wasn't quite ready for my demands here, but to be honest those desires were fulfilled just as well by the relatively brief period where the action did kick in to top gear, which gave us a satisfying run of the good guys doing their bit in impressive fashion before being thwarted (for now at least). This somewhat makes up for some of the other clumsier elements of plot progression (particularly surrounding those spheres - why send them around the world during the first invasion when they were snacks for Kogorr?) and a first half to this instalment that wasn't paced as well as it might have been, but the end of this episode leaves everything deliciously poised in typical superhero story style for what should be a fantastic send-off for this series. "Should be" are the operative words here of course; let's hope that finale delivers on its promise to send the show out with a bang.