As for the rest of it...it was kind of a placekeeping episode...just slowly moving things forward.  Not that I’m complaining about that.  Totally necessary.  I do have a complaint though.

Heroes is doing too many deus ex machinas this season, things they never did before.  Like, why can Hiro ride a horse?  AT ALL?  Riding a horse so well as to be able to lean down and scoop a fair maiden up is NOT a skill you pick up during a lifetime of sitting in front of a computer and reading comics.

The other dumb writing move was that the newspaper in Buttfrig, Nowheresville - where Claire and HRG are - showed a photo of Hiro’s father’s dead, bleeding corpse on the front page?  WTF?  That doesn’t happen, like EVER.  They should have found another way for HRG to see that image.  Newspapers don’t print that kind of thing.  It was a deus ex machina designed to make sure he saw it so they could tell us about the paintings.  Lazy writing.  I really hope this doesn’t become a trend.  It can ruin a great show.

They’re also TOTALLY downplaying the way rural Japanese would be freaking out over a white man, and totally unaccepting of a strangely-dress Japanese talking white man talk.  In the Edo period, wearing the wrong clothes or wrong colors could get you shunned, and maybe attacked as disloyal.  There should be a little more difficulty there...in fact a LOT more.  But then I suppose this is a comic book, and the background players in every comic generally just accept crazy shit happening in front of them.

Looks like the Toxic Twins are lost in Mey-hico...bad for the Mexicans.  And Peter’s a full-on superhero now.  I mean, he instinctually turned to help when he could have run away to save himself, and of course he’s frigging near unstoppable by a normal human.  I think that everything that happened lends creedence to the teory that he needs to remember and know how to use each power he takes, like Sylar needs to “see” how it works?  Lost memory meant lost powers until it started to come back.  Hopefully his regular memory will return soon as well.

Big mystery: What the blue hell was attacking Mama Petrelli?  And can Peter fight it/him/them?  And where the hell is Sylar?

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Questions answered.  We know some of who is alive and what’s going on, but a couple new questions pop up; Who killed Kaito Nakamura?  Is Sark...I mean Takezo Kensei really a 1600s Englishman who snuck into feudal Japan?  Will Hiro become Kensei, and under the guise of “working for” White Guy Kensei, do all the great and heroic deeds that Takezo was supposed to do?

The new people: What the frig is her power?  Is she sick, or are they just confusing her power with a sickness?  Whatever it is, she can’t control it.

HRG is still a dangerous man.  How Copydick didn’t get that is beyond me.  Anyone who pauses for that long before answering you is contemplating either not killing you, or exactly how they are going to kill you.

The Parkman story is fun, and I’m glad to see Matt getting his shit together, but it’s really only about Molly seeing the evil man’s eyes.  Who’s the evil that is worse than Sylar?  Is that who is haunting her dreams, or is it Sylar himself?  I couldn’t tell from the voice.

My working theory on Peter, Nathan and the cargo box: Nathan is obviously hooked up with HRG and Claire, at least in some way.  So having access to The Haitian Mindsucker isn’t out of the realm of possibility.  So, after the big boom, Peter kept Nathan alive.  In fact, I’m saying that Claire’s new boyfriend is proof that more than one person can have a power (obviously) so Peter could have gotten healing from anyone.  He was at the point where proximity alone could give him your ability, and he was keeping them.  SO...he heals Nathan.  Nathan knows that Peter is his own worst enemy when it comes to hiding, so Nathan has The Haitian wipe out his memory.  He dumps hims somewhere...who knows where.  The fact that Nathan had to drive his own family away, coupled with what he did to Peter, plus the fact that his only close family member is now his evil bitch of a mother has driven him to drink.

I’m partial to this theory because I’m sick of “hero has amnesia” stories.

And your theories are?

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Oh my.  Sylar crawls bleeding into a sewer, Mr. Politician Scumbag makes the ultimate sacrifice when the chips are down, HRG is a hell of a dad in the end, we have no idea where Peter is, Hiro is in feudal Japan in the 1600’s...and Micah and Molly look like they might be gettin’ down in a few years.  Imagine the kid they’d have?

OK, the actual way the ending played out, I mean the practical nature of the filming, the direction, even the special effects - I’ll admit it felt a little anti-climactic.  I’m VERY excited about where the story ended up.  The last 10 minutes bored me just a little bit.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain, it’s the first time Heroes has been at all boring all season.

So.  I can see a case being made for Parkman being dead.  If the actor gets a better deal, or they just don’t have anywhere to go with him...let him be dead.  DL and Nikki can take care of Molly.  I can see Peter rocketing back to Earth next season...or worse, literally being stuck in orbit, unable to get escape velocity but unable to die either.

How’d y’all feel about it?  Satisfied with how it went?  It definitely felt like a comic book, I’ll say that much.

My biggest disappointment?  Mohinder is still alive.

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OMG i luv heroes its soooo kul.  i wanna be hiro and have my dad teach me to slice of heds!

This is the top dramatic show on TV right now.  It’s full of great writing, great acting, perfect direction, it has every hook a person my age could want in a sci-fi drama.  Originally I was going to write that it was one of the top shows, but I just sat here asking Donna to help me think of say, five shows on right now that are as good...and we can’t.  Dexter was great.  Jericho was really good.  The last half of the debut season of Dirt was great.  The Shield is awesome, but Heroes makes me a kid again.  I imagine myself as each one of those characters, I try to decide if I would do what the hero does, or what I would do to solve the dilemma they are in, or how I would save myself if I were DL.

It’s literally a living comic book and I love every second of it.  Now; SPOILERS BELOW!

3..2..1..Spoilers!

BTW, if I were DL...first off I think his power has to be molecular, even cellular in nature.  He phases through material thousands of times more dense than he is and rematerializes.  So...I’d simply phase next to where I was sitting and leave the bullet behind...and fix the injury while I was at it.  Maybe he’s not good enough to do that, and like Donna said to me when I said DL should phase, we may be looking at an Iceman situation here...Bobby always had the power, just not the skill to use it.  He sure knew how to kill him some Linderman though.  That was so nice.

Malcolm and Eric off the show together it seems...HRG popped a cap in the Best of the Best’s ass.  Nice one, Dad.

I still maintain it’s better to be Peter, because he can absorb all powers just by proximity, and Sylar can never do that unless he kills Peter and eats his brain or whatever he does.  X + Y will always be greater than Y.  But.

How bad-ass is Sylar?  All emo geek looking and yet he looks like the epitome of evil standing on the building playing with miniature nuclear explosions like that.

We got to learn what Linderman does did, but we still don’t know Poppa Nakamura’s power.  Obviously he has one.  Perhaps it’s the power to still look spry with a sword 40 years later after the first time he did it...Takei is the man.  :)

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• The Sopranos isn't one-third as good as some people are saying these days. I'm sorry. I know that monumental thing happened last night, but other than that brief two-minute sequence, the show was a dedication to the art of navel-gazing for it's own sake.
  
  It seems like everything eventually turns out that way if the creators let it go on past it's planned - or natural - life. When the network pays thirty-five trajillion dollars for two more seasons of something that was originally planned for a three-year run...the writing is always the first thing to go. Eventually it all devolves into the actors standing around trying to figure out why they feel so bad or why mommy doesn't love them. That's always been a part of The Sopranos, but in addition, things used to happen. Now it's all navel gazing with only one "moment" per episode that drives the plot forward.
  
  I'm so glad it's going to be over soon.



• Battlestar Galactica may not end so soon. David Eick says that Olmos has a habit of starting this rumor and if BSG is going anywhere, he and Ron Moore will let us know. You know what I wrote above about The Sopranos? Yeah. Already happening to BSG. Tighten it up, guys. You don't want to be The X-Files at the end, do you?



• NBC announced their lineup for the fall. The following shows are renewed: Friday Night Lights, Law & Order, Law & Order: CI, Law & Order: SVU, Deal or No Deal, 30 Rock, The Office, Heroes, Scrubs, ER, The Biggest Loser, Las Vegas, My Name Is Earl, 1 vs. 100, Dateline, Football Night In America, and Medium, Saturday Night Live. So, NBC will be paying Zach that monster salary for Scrubs after all.
  
  The new shows will be The Bionic Woman, The IT Crowd, Chuck, Journeyman, Life, Lipstick Jungle, The Singing Bee, World Moves, and Heroes: Origins, Lipshitz Saves The World. I'm curious to see what they do with The IT Crowd, which was a Britcom about geeks that run the network in a large corporation. If you watched it, Moss is in the U.S. version but the rest is all new casting. Hey, The Office U.S. doesn't suck, so maybe...Also, Heroes; Origins will be six special episodes running during the normal hiatus period mid-season. So we get non-stop Heroes and 30 full episodes in one year. Dear Jesus: Please make sure that the Heroes team maintains the current level of quality. If you do, I'll send your daddy my firstborn, assuming there ever is one. Thanks.
  
  Canceled: Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, Crossing Jordan, The Black Donnellys, Kidnapped, Andy Barker, P.I., The Apprentice, Identity, Raines, 20 Good Years, Grease: You're The One That I Want, The Real Wedding Crashers, Thank God You're Here. The Black Donnellys was pretty good, but failed to live up to the initial promise of the pilot. Same for Andy Barker. I never watched Raines, and it looks like I can delete that free pilot episode I downloaded from iTunes...

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Damn!  Hiro couldn’t do it.  He couldn’t kill Sylar.  Partly because he hesitated, but partly because Sylar is just that damned powerful.  I also love that Sylar’s mom is the one who planted the idea about being president.  And that he painted the boom in his mother’s blood after he killed her.

For a brief second, Sylar was sympathetic.  We almost felt like he gave a crap, and then he flipped that sympathy off like a switch just because Mohinder was dialing 911 on the other line.  Then there’s the matricide.

I was a little bit bored with the Claire/Peter/Nathan storyline, but I didn’t think that Mama Petrelli was part of the Linderman plot. That was a surprise.  Also, I think Nathan is a “shades of grey” character, but more dark grey than light grey.  His appetite for the office seems to be overwhelming his conscience.

My favorite moment was Hiro standing on the parapet yelling “New York!  We will save you!”

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Wow, that was so awesome.  I really didn’t see a lot of that coming.  We spent a lot of tonight’s episode 5 years in the future.  NYC was all blowed up.  Nathan was president.  The heroes were scattered to the four winds, hiding from a government roundup.  Nathan was quite a bad guy...his decision to make a pact with Linderman and allow the explosion sparked what looked like an ever-increasing slide into moral decay dressed up as “protection” for the normals.

Of course this particular scenario was very “Extinction Agenda,” but...everything about Heroes supposes that comics are our shared mythology, so there will be similarities to dozens if not hundreds of storylines.

Anyway...Peter is in what seems to be a long-term relationship with Nikki, FutureHiro is a badass with no joy in his face at all, and Ando and PastHiro are stuck in the future with him trying to figure out how to go back in time and stop Sylar, who is tagged as the exploding man.

Only…

Again...SPOILER!!!

Sylar is the President!  He met that shape-shifting chick and took her power and has been playing Nathan ever since the explosion!  Holy crap!  Claire just got killed by Sylar, Peter is a Neo-like badass, the Haitian gets killed by Mohinder in order to free PastHiro- which against my will endears Mohinder to me - Matt is working for who he thinks is the president doing what he thinks is the right thing - getting dangerous “heroes” off the streets while helping Horn-Rimmed Glasses Guy to hide non-dangerous heroes…

I could go on and on.  So much happened in this episode it felt like seventeen episodes of a show like Lost or (this season anyway) Battlestar Galactica.

It.  Was.  Awesome.  And those in the know say the last three of this season only get better.  Another thing I loved: the politics on display took no sides and didn’t preach to me one way or the other.  They just were.  Things were discussed, the right and wrong of prosecuting an attack on the heroes based solely on their genetic makeup.  Not once did I feel a red state/blue state moment.  I feared it, but the writers handled everything deftly in my opinion, and it was truly refreshing.

Two final things - First, if you haven’t watched this show, beg borrow or steal copies from the first episode and watch it!  It will restore your faith in the one-hour serial drama.  Secondly, I can’t believe they don’t sell a reproduction of Hiro’s sword yet!  And if they do, where the hell can I get it?

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Seung-Hui Cho, the Virgina Tech murderer: This is despicable and misguided, this is exactly what I want to hear from a conservative candidate, and yeah, I suppose it would be just horrible to have this guy in your family.

NASA shooter: Sad, but also a little pathetic.  Too bad he just didn’t walk in and make a big scene while only shooting himself.

Wolfowitz and the “scandal” surrounding his girlfriend: Much ado about nothing.  Wolfowitz has a past three miles long, among which there must be hundreds of things over which to attack him.  Trying to drum up a fake scandal is just...well, to use the word again, pathetic.

Speaking truth to “power”: Ed Koch called Al Sharpton out right to his face, and Sharpton said nothing, like the racist lying coward that he is.

Alec Baldwin screaming at his child via voicemail: Lame.  Bad parenting.  Not really surprising given Baldwin’s massive ego.  Was he pushed to it?  All I know is, his first statement after the “story” broke called his daughter “the child” but referrerd to “Alec,” “him” and “his.” I found that telling.  You know he dictated that to his publicist, his ego wouldn’t allow him to allow someone to re-phrase his brilliance.

TV: 24 is boring, The Shield is awesome, Heroes is coming back and Drive is gonna get canceled even though it’s cool.

Beautiful women (some NSFW): This is Diora Baird topless in FHM (the UK version, obviously the U.S. can’t handle this simply kind of nudity without getting weird), this seems to mean that Manson did in fact trade Dita for Evan Rachel Wood (he traded down, in my opinion), and finally one of my new faves, Aussie superbabe Emily Scott in Zoo Weekly.  They’re from January, but who cares?

Gaming: I made the move to a console.  My gamercard.  Would you like to be my friend?  We could toast marshmallows together.  Also, Need For Speed Carbon on the Xbox 360...nice.  I’m looking forward to trying Command & Conquer 3 on a console.

There.  That about does it.

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The title of this episode should have been “Screw you, Lost.” From the flashbacks to the fact that a ton of things happened and a pile of questions were answered, Heroes is proving week after week that you can do serial stories that keep the viewr guessing and interested - and you don’t have to piss them off.

You know I wouldn’t say this lightly given that I worship the ‘Star, but Heroes is making Lost and Battlestar look like According To Jim.

So HRG is a good guy after all.  He was clearly affected by raising Claire, and he became her father in more than name.  He branched out and protected more than just her, and that was beyond “the call of duty” so to speak.  The marks seem not to be a tracking mechanism, but rather a way to hide certain heroes.  I think he’s the utilmate good guy, in fact.  He’s trying to assemble a team to take out Hiro’s father...who is the ultimate bad guy, methinks.

Watching Radiationman controlling what seemed to be miniature nuclear reactions was pretty awesome.  :) As was the plan to shoot Claire to calm him down.

InvisibleBrit used to be HRG’s partner, eh?  I almost expected him to materialize on the bridge.  And speaking of...that was genuinely heartbreaking to know that HRG not only took a bullet for his daughter, but then had the Haitian Mind Sucker pull out every memory connected to her so he can’t be used to track her.  Hell of a sacrifice.  That’s a lot of memories.

So...what Hiro, Claire, Peter, Nick, InvisibleBrit and NagasakiMan, Nikki, her son, DL and everyone else finally get together with Peter and Nathan and whoever else to battle Syler...will he just be the warmup before they have to band together to take down the Namikura Corporation (or whatever it’s called)?  I think Syler is just the boss at the end of the level.  There’s worse out there, stronger and more dangerous, and Hiro’s father controls them.

So.

Hiro versus his own sister before the end of the season or next year?

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