Heroes: Four Months Later

By TrinityVixen

Flight? Regeneration? Time-travel? These so-called “super” powers can’t hold a candle to the mighty mutated testosterone that Adrian Pasdar must piss out like water to have grown that monstrous soup-catcher he’s sporting. Ah yes, Heroes is back!

Unfortunately, so are Mohinder’s voice-over introductions. Please, please, please, folks: love the show, do not listen to the voice-overs. Mohinder knows as much about science as your average visitor to the Creation Museum. Don’t watch the show for the science, don’t listen to Mohinder, and you just might make it out of here alive. Shouldn’t be too hard this season; in order to combat the utterly drool-inducing inaccuracy of Mohinder’s dialogue, they have encouraged Sendhil Ramamurthy to live in a spa all summer. Boy looks too cool for school—which is a very good thing when you’re spouting aphorisms at empty lectures on parapsychological genetics.

Not to worry! In addition to his smooth good looks, Mohinder’s gone ahead and got himself a (not-brain-eating-psychotic) boyfriend—Matt Parkman, the mind-reader, who is so gosh-darn cute in the role of house-husband, you sort of have to forgive his dumping of his pregnant wife. May better feminists strike me dead, but I would completely forgive any man who dumped his wife for Sendhil Ramamurthy after his full-body exfoliation. Damn.

And hey, not only are Mohinder and Matt playing My Two Dads with little Molly “I Spy” Walker, they’re also in league with Mr. Bennet, aka the best secret agent dad ever, on a mission to take down “the Company.” I don’t really know how that should be too hard. Their best agents who weren’t Mr. B were betrayed right the hell out of the organization. Usually with bullets. These are also the people who wanted to keep Sylar (the aforementioned aficionado of the tasty gray matter between people’s ears) alive. Methinks their days of shadowy effectiveness were long over before they pissed off Mr. B by threatening his Claire-bear.

[nms:nbc heroes,4,0]

I just wish Claire Bennet were really worthy of the man, but Heroes has never really pushed itself to justify the wildly romantic and completely implausible declarations of love from its well-developed, emotionally-rounded male characters unto its shallow, one-note, always-the-victim female characters, so why start now? Nah, that’s not true. Mr. B and Claire make a hell of a team. Makes you wish she were in on his and Mohinder’s plans to lure the remaining members of the Company out. Still, she’s going to have enough trouble dealing with the Mean Girls cheerleader rejects encouraging her to off herself just to show up their snobbery and a suspiciously gravity-optional boy-toy. Life is, like, so hard for Claire. No wonder she’s got to call Sousy McDad Nathan for a girlfriend-to-drunk bonding session.

And hey, what about those Petrellis? With the exception of Peter, who, annoyingly, is still stupidly cute even shuddering and dirty and amnesiac, what the hell happened to Heroes’ first family? Nathan didn’t blow up, but as he’s slowly being eaten alive by the furry carpet on his chin, he might wish he had. (He’s drunkenly hallucinating himself as Codename V without the mask and sans beard, which I cite as my evidence. Yes.) Mother Petrelli’s not looking much better, and though she’d like people to think it’s over her younger, favorite son (that’s how you know she’s no good: she preferences her children over each other!), we all know the death mark out on her own head is what’s really adding to those frown lines. Hell, it might also explain her ridiculously oversize growth of hair. (A petit bouffant hairdo on that woman? Surely you jest. I’d thought she had too much taste for that.) I wonder if there’s a first cousin once removed named Rapunzel Petrelli. If you could bottle whatever it is they’re stewing in, you’d put Rogaine out of business.

But about that death mark thing: we must say goodbye to Kaito Nakamura. There’s a rule somewhere that Heroes can only sustain the one former Trek star at a time. (And I did not mean to do that, I swear.) It’s George Takei’s time to bow out just in time for Nichelle Nicols’ run. That’ll come later. In the here and now, Ando alone grieves over Hiro’s daddy’s passing and the mysterious hooded figure that caused it…remains mysterious and hooded. They probably haven’t cast him yet, as is par with the show (again: see “Sylar, aka Gabriel Gray”).

I wonder if Hiro has inadvertently caused his own father’s death as a ripple effect consequence of his landing in seventeenth century Japan. Trying to whittle his idol, Takeo Kensei, out of the urine-stained remains of an outhouse wall is probably going to poison something somewhere down the line. Of course, it’s just as likely that Hiro himself will turn out to be the Kensei of legend, relegating the pale-faced Englishman of history to the position of irrelevant avatar. The wherefores of time travel are, of course, impossible to riddle out and anyway are less annoyingly inscrutable as the unsolved mystery of why Hiro is able to look at the sun and not go blind. If this is his latent ability, I give up.

Some other stuff happened—a sister makes people bleed out their orifices (ew) when her brother is not around; a nerd working for the Company co-opts the mission statement of the X-Men (but it’s totally different! Really!) and has the power of…alchemy (!); and Peter Petrelli has suffered some memory (but not power) loss brought on by his handcuffs-and-cargo-container fetish. If he’s lucky, he’ll have an amnesiac relapse to erase the memories of being abused with the poor Irish accents he’s being threatened with in the previews for next week.

All in all, not a bad catch-up to the story-so-far. It’s all totally ridiculous and impossible, even in a world where people can fly and zap one another and the outcasts in high schools are prettier than models. It wouldn’t be Heroes if the inconvenient “facts” and “reality” weren’t entirely ignored for the sake of the story. Which means that, yes, Nathan Petrelli can win a landslide electoral victory and then fall off the face of the Earth; that someone can be back at work after taking four bullets to the chest in less time than it takes to get a dividend check; and that Mohinder still has a job in academics. The Sanders clan remains unseen for the time being, provoking perfectly rational feelings of relief and euphoria. Sylar’s absence grates, and the longer I spend waiting on a glimpse of Zachary Quinto’s magnificent eyebrows, the less satisfaction I’ll derive from the lack of Niki-Jessica-D.L.-Micah drama.

Watch out for Molly’s boogeyman. See you next week.

About TrinityVixen: There’s an asterisk on TrinityVixen’s college transcript that assures anyone who reads it that, though there is no specific major, degree, or certificate for it, she did, in fact, complete some kind of creative writing program as an undergrad. Armed with that symbol of irrelevant experience, she has polluted the internet with her opinions and horrible fanworks ever since (and for quite a long while before). Living poor in New York until she finds a means to become independently wealthy, she must subsist on the juicy meat of fandom. Fandom and noodles. And instant soup.

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