It’s obvious that Maverick isn’t going to get away with his crimes. But what will happen to Hero TV when he’s been exposed? The system is corrupt, but there are a lot of innocent people with their livelihood depending on Hero TV in some way.

If the truth about Hero TV gets exposed

We don’t know the details that were involved in the creation of Hero TV, but you can’t deny that it really did help NEXTs and made the society accept them. However, that was achieved with treachery. Like Maverick tells Barnaby in episode 19, the ratings were floundering until he teamed up with that “a certain organization” and arranged crimes to make the arrests more exciting – and that eventually led to the murder of Barnaby’s parents. It’s actually quite amazing how Maverick has managed to keep up the charade of Hero TV for over 20 years. When all of that gets exposed to the public the first ones to suffer will be the heroes, even though they have been tricked just as much or even more than the viewers and citizens of Sternbild.

The sponsors

It’s hard to tell how much the sponsoring companies know about what goes on behind the scenes. Since Nathan is both a hero and the owner of Helios Energy, the guess would be “not a lot” – unless the company CEOs are in on it and just not informing the owners. Mr. Legend didn’t seem to have sponsor logos on his hero suit in the archive footage and flashbacks, so we don’t know when and how sponsoring on the current scale started. If the criminal connections and staged crimes behind Hero TV get exposed, the blow won’t be just on OBC channel and Apollon Media. The seven big companies essentially run the city with each providing some important part required – imagine for example if Poseidon Lines goes bankrupt and all the transportation breaks down. Something like that will affect not just the people working for the companies but the entire population of Sternbild.

What about Ouroboros then?

We’re currently working all the speculah on the basis that “a certain organization” is not Ouroboros, since Maverick wouldn’t bring his goons into spotlight like that. (Personally, I doubt the whole existence of Ouroboros, but for this we’ll assume it does exist.) It’s possible that Ouroboros might have originally been a part of this “a certain organization”. If Maverick’s original intention was to achieve better lives for NEXTs, people like Jake Martinez might well have agreed with it. But Maverick got greedy for ratings and when things started going the wrong direction, Jake and other people left the organization and formed Ouroboros. This would be somewhat consistent also with Jake’s seemingly immense dislike of Mr. Legend (he calls Legend a pig during the Ouroboros arc) for getting NEXTs to side with normal humans.

Best course of action

The blow against the whole city is going to be immense if no one’s there to do damage control, and letting Hero TV fall with Maverick would actually be a very bad choice. A good way to deal with the situation would be to appoint a new CEO and administrative staff for OBC and to cut the ties with the “a certain organization” with the aim to bring Hero TV back on right track. Some recent spoilers mentioned Nathan showing his executive side, so something in those lines might happen – or maybe Helios Energy will overtake Apollon Media to contain the situation.

Well, we’re done worrying about the greater scheme of things at least until the NEXT haha pun intended episode. More than anything, we just want to see that bastard Maverick crash and burn. (╬ ಠ益ಠ)