Heroes: The Second Coming

By TrinityVixen

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the gene pool, Heroes returns. Pop Quiz: “Volume Three: ‘Villains’” refers to a) Sylar, b) the Level Five crowd, c) show creator Tim Kring, d) all of the above. If you answered “D,” you’re already smarter than the writers who churn out Mohinder’s dialogue. Please submit your resumes to NBC ASAP.

Volume Three, “Villains”
Episode One – “The Second Coming”

(Hubris? What’s that? Can we work that into Mohinder’s voice over?)

Manhattan, New York, four years in the future: the scarred version of Peter Petrelli (who can teleport and stop time) runs for his life. Behind him, a goth-ified Claire cocks a gun and points it at him. Peter turns, sadness falling into his expression as he tries to reason with her. (Why anyone with his repertoire of abilities wastes time reasoning with someone is beyond me.) She launches, unbidden, into a femme fatale monologue not even Hayden Panettiere understands, and she’s had a longer time to study her lines than I have. Peter begs her to let him jump back in time and fix things, end the death camps and the experiments on the supers. He could stop it all if he could just get back to the watershed moment when everything went to pot.

(Somewhere in another world/time, Future!Hiro is smacking his head against a wall and concluding that this just can’t be done.)

Because Peter wouldn’t be able to be desperate if he had an ally, the show contrives a nonsense reason why he can’t convince her to his side. She squeezes the trigger, saying “I always loved you.” (Not even five minutes into the new season and already an uncomfortably intimate declaration of love between Petrellis.) Peter just stops time, takes her gun, and heads for his pivot in time.

Press conference in Odessa, Texas, today (last season’s finale). Nathan, flanked by Matt Parkman and his brother, is set to tell the world about supers. Future!Peter grabs a disguise that season one Sylar left behind (a black hat and flak jacket) and heads out into the hall where Nathan is speaking to the cameras assembled. Texas must not have received a blessed dime of that 9/11 anti-terrorism money because Future!Peter pulls a handgun out and shoots Nathan twice without anyone seeing or stopping him. Nathan falls, as we saw last year, and the reporters stampede to catch every last dribble of blood as Nathan passes out in his brother’s arms.

(Adrian Pasdar is either one hell of an actor or something went wrong with the re-filming of this sequence. He looks genuinely startled and pained when the squibs on his chest explode. From this angle, Nathan’s death is suitably traumatic.)

Present!Peter leaps over Nathan’s dying body to chase down the gunman, whom only he seems to have noticed. Future!Peter stashes his gun in a storage closet and starts to shuck his disguise on the run. It’s a bad joke: Two Peters go into a bathroom; only one comes out when Matt Parkman catches up. He looks like Present!Peter, but he scowls ugly like Future!Peter. (Milo Ventimiglia spent too much time with Sly Stallone during the season break.) Peter holds out the jacket and the baseball cap the killer had been wearing. He’s gone.

In California, Claire watches the press conference and calls Peter while he’s en route to the hospital. The show would have you keep guessing, but at this point the jig is up. Indefinite!Peter is Future!Peter. Present!Peter is too hopeful, too in love with superpowers and heroism to let his brother be driven to the hospital. He also wouldn’t refuse to let Claire come down to Texas (nor pretend he couldn’t just teleport to her and back) and offer up more of her magic blood to her bio-dad. Future!Peter wants Nathan dead, so there will be no speedy trips to the hospital, no magic blood revivals this time.

Nathan dies on the table. Except there’s a hitch. Future!Peter goes to pay his last respects to his late brother, who’s looking a little more tardy than a fresh corpse ought. Nathan’s chest is left open and bloody (very professional doctors they have in Texas), but his face is ghastly pale, almost decomposing before our eyes. Suddenly, Nathan jolts awake. Given his decaying complexion, I assumed zombification and leapt behind the couch. Future!Peter seems no less surprised.

Across the world, Hiro is one bored CEO. Ando, entirely too good a friend, reminds Hiro that his job has loads of perks—money, jets, power—more than enough to make up for the fact that Hiro is now quest-less. He whines about destiny, how his can’t be to sit in an office for the rest of his life. Saving the world wasn’t destiny enough? Maybe it’s supposed to stay saved; that’s usually how it works.

Or not. A lawyer brings him a video recorded by his father before his death. Kaito Nakamura discharges his last earthly duty to his son. There is a safe in his—Hiro’s—office. The mission is this: don’t open it. Don’t open the safe. The safe that’s right there. The shiny safe. That you happen to have thumbprint access to. Hilariously, when Hiro immediately opens it (over Ando’s protests), there’s another video message of Daddy yelling at him for opening it. In the safe is half of a chemical formula that Hiro can’t decipher but which he is to protect at all costs. If it falls into the wrong hands, Hiro needs to find the only hope, a chosen one who carries a purity of the blood, purity = “the light” to fight the darkness.

As before, when given explicit instructions not to do a thing, Hiro does it. A whirlwind whips through the office and makes off with the paper. Hiro stops time. A bubble stream trails in the direction the whirlwind took off, and he follows it to a petite blonde. She is fast enough not to be frozen in time (ergo Hiro must not really stop time but only slow it such that it seems as though he does), and she asks what his deal is. When he tells her his power wouldn’t allow him to keep up with her if she ran off in real time, she punches him in the face. His concentration broken, she makes her escape.

Ando suggests Hiro go to the past and ask his father about the formula that was stolen. Hiro assumes there will be less of a problem if he seeks the same information in the future. (This is a sop to the audience after last season, but it does make sense. The future you do want to change, the past not so much.) Hiro arrives to witness his own murder at the hands of Future!Ando. Future!Ando swears he never betrayed Hiro, but he barbecues him with a here-to-fore unknown red energy blast and takes the formula off the corpse. Teleporting back, Hiro is majorly wigged by his best friend. He keeps Ando close out of fear instead of love as they continue to search for the blonde who stole the formula.

Back in California, Claire is ready to hit the road. Future Uncle can go hang; she’s coming for bio-dad. She runs into six feet of road block: Sylar’s right outside her door. He starts monologuing, catching her up on how he spent his summer vacation since he last tried to kill her. He will do this for the entire episode. Claire, like me, is tired of his attempts to be scary through words rather than decapitations, and brains him with one of her cheerleading trophies. Sylar hits floor harder than a freight train. So much for the  all-powerful big-bad.

The show mucks around with his competency in this stalk-and-kill for the express purpose of dragging out the hour. Claire manages to knock him down, but he can still telekinetically shut all the doors and bar the windows so she can’t leave. Claire arms herself with a knife as Sylar pointlessly toys with her fear some more. There is a villain whom we haven’t met with a good reason to do this currently residing on Level Five. But Sylar hasn’t taken his power yet, so there’s no reason for him to behave like this. It’s inefficient, which is unlike him. Maya must have been a bad influence.

Speaking of inefficient and ineffective, when Claire whirls around to slash at Sylar creeping up behind her, he literally falls over in his attempt not to get cut. Claire locks herself in a closet, using chains to keep the doors closed together. Telekinesis can fling bodies and tables, but chains! Ack! Achilles heel. Claire whimpers in the dark as Sylar rattles the door knob. Sylar hasn’t been a badass in so long, he’s forgotten he’s not a low-rent copy of a serial killer. He’s an extremely powerful, super-psychotic serial killer. Who is rattling doorknobs, for f***’s sake.

Is it the secret knob shake he shared with Mohinder? Because he is jiggling the knob to his own door, thus freaking out Maya (and making this the one time where a spooked Maya hasn’t resulted in a black ooze party). She nearly brains Mohinder with a cricket bat. (Show? We get it. Mohinder’s Indian. Enough already.) We catch up on what he’s been doing in the hours since Sylar vamoosed with his cure. Molly’s off to wherever, where she’ll be safe because she won’t be in the story any more.

Nathan’s still in the hospital, so it can’t have been more than twenty-four hours since the events of the season finale. Yet Mohinder is packing it in for the fifth time since he got to America, claiming that he can’t cure Maya. He’s had all of a day to examine the problem and give up, which must be a record for him. Maya cries black death, only cutting back as Mohinder starts to choke. As if this has never happened before, he explodes with epiphany. How does she make her powers work? Well, if by “work,” you mean “gets so upset she can’t help calling down destruction on everyone in her immediate area,” sure. (This would include the forty-fifty odd people living above and below her in the building. This is New York City, after all.) Mohinder assumes all extreme emotions surge or ebb on adrenaline. He’s got it! He can do it!

…do what, exactly, I’m not sure anyone knows. Imagine feeding a pharmaceutical textbook to your dog and piecing together medical jargon from the strips in his feces. Add in a few science-y sounding verbs, and voila! You have Mohinder’s dialogue. There is a formula for his exposition already established on the show: name-drop a few pop-science concepts, throw in a pipette or two, and you have SCIENCE! This…this is something totally different and completely divorced from English. It’s like the writers knew the audience was savvy to the bad layperson science and decided to compensate for their ignorance with vocabulary instead of research.

Mohinder intimates that some combination of Maya’s humours is what gives her super powers. Her genes determine how the powers manifest, but some compounds in her system have to trigger the genes in the first place. And because adrenaline sets it off for her, that’s how it must work for every super. (Even the ones like Micah who are totally calm when they use their powers.) What I just wrote there is hand-waving magic. It’s still more scientific than Mohinder’s explanation. By his “reasoning” I’m developing superpowers right now as my blood pressure skyrockets because of the bad “science.”

Mohinder comes at Maya to collect some more samples. “All I have to do is make you mad again,” and he’ll get the compounds and adrenaline to boot. Coming at her with a needle is probably a good way to do it, but provoking her is definitely one of those Very Bad Ideas. How has he already forgotten this? She almost killed him all of two minutes ago! He gets his samples, does his voodoo, and goes to purify the compound in her blood. To the centrifuge, Dr. Watson!

Mohinder’s centrifuge gives him the enzyme. What enzyme? Oh, you know, an enzyme he made out of a corticosteroid hormone and a single amino acid. What the *bleep* is going on here? His centrifuge has given him a super power cocktail. This is like how the IR Spectrometer on CSI can do DNA genotyping. (The IR Spec that’s actually an autoclave.) Just…no.  But we shouldn’t doubt his credentials. He’s got colored liquids in jars and tubes! (At this point, my roommate said, “THAT’S CHEMISTRY.” I promised I’d credit her.)

Maya apologizes for some offense she caused. Mohinder, notably, does not apologize for being an evil Mr. Wizard. She reminds him that he’s not supposed to making super power juice. (Maya is the voice of reason here. BE AFRAID.) He’s supposed to be helping her get rid of her powers. Does his wonder juice do that? No. Then it’s evil and must be destroyed. It must be so easy to live in Maya’s world. Such certainty. Mohinder  thinks that, with powers, he might have stopped Sylar long ago. Maya is all, “Okay, Dr. Jekyll, step away from the test tube.” More powers equals more Sylars (bad people with powers); more Mayas (people with harmful, hard-to-impossible to control powers); more Peter Petrellis (meddling, overpowered idiots destroying the world while trying to save it). He pretends to consider her point.

Back at the crime scene, Future!Peter goes looking for his gun. Matt Parkman has it. He’s wise to Peter being shady. Future!Peter drops the ruse and banishes Parkman to the African savannah before he can mess things up. Yes, because it’s Parkman, not the time-traveling meddler, who’s going to ruin everything. Parkman wakes with a scorpion on his face. Ooh, I saw this happen with spiders in Urban Legends: Bloody Mary, and all I can say is that Parkman better watch out for any unusual boils on his face. Future!Peter? Less of a loser than Present!Peter but more of a douche.

Parkman exists in this episode only to delay Future!Peter long enough that he misses Nathan waking up in the hospital. Nathan wanders out of the front door, adorably muddled. The lone camera crew still feeding on the chum from his nationally-covered story follows him as he crosses to a chapel. He pontificates about God to a captive audience of three while Future!Peter lurks, ready for a second assassination attempt. God has a message, says Nathan. God saved him, sent him back.

God. God? GOD!? Are they kidding me with this? We’re supposed to believe the morally ambiguous Nathan is singing honest hosannas in the Holy Name? Like all good prophets, he’s cryptic and conveniently faints just as his audience starts to press him for details on the message he claims he got straight from the Man Upstairs. Future!Peter is moved right out of his jaded pragmatism; he rushes to collect his brother as Nathan collapses. Nathan has God. That’s fabulous. I have never wanted anyone, from past, present, or future to shoot him more.

The Governor of the State of New York watches the press seize upon Nathan Petrelli’s miracle, on his words about God. This is a redemption play, and the country is eating it up. He calls “Tracy” in to see. The woman who is sometimes Niki, dressed down to her underwear, comes to see for herself. They seem awfully cozy. She can’t really be Niki. Niki was just dying in a fire with no powers yesterday. She also honestly cannot recognize Nathan, Niki’s one-time lover, long-time complication. The governor and Tracy scheme. There’s always room for miracles, provided they fall on the correct side of the political divide.

In California, Sylar is still monologuing. This whole time while people have been finding God or developing the means to create one, he’s been just trying to get Claire out of a closet. Bored, but still talking, he discovers a box in the kitchen that says “Dad’s office.” Shouldn’t that be, you know, in Mr. Bennet’s office? Sylar thumbs through the contents; to describe them as “sensitive” is to master understatement in a single word. One red folder jumps out at Sylar. The tab says “Level Five,” and Sylar opens a menu of super powers he will enjoy when he’s done with Claire. All of which he says aloud for Claire’s benefit.

I’m pretty sure she gives up the security of impenetrable closet and stabs Sylar in the chest just to shut him the hell up. (All that chatter must have drowned out his super-hearing.) With proper life-or-death motivation, Sylar finally returns to what he does best. He flings Claire against a wall and begins to cut. At some point, he moves her to a coffee table, where she twitches and shudders as he reads her brain with his fingers like a blind man tracing lines in Braille. Peter could heal himself against Sylar’s telekinetic cutting but Claire, the originator of Peter’s ability, cannot. “A continuity? Is that some kind of phone Sprint wanted in the shot? Should we have gotten one before we started?”

Whatever the rest of the episode’s failing, this scene is intensely charged. We’re witnessing one of the great mysteries that existed before we even knew what Sylar looked like. We’re seeing what we can’t see with Peter: how the powers are added up. It’s a creepy assault and an intimate moment all in one. Claire jerks her limbs uncontrollably as Sylar manipulates her body. She stares up at him while he pokes her brain. She asks questions, and he answers her in low, reassuring tones. For once, no one is telling her not to ask or assuming for her what things she can or cannot handle knowing about. She is still being victimized, but Sylar is showing her more respect that anyone else ever has.

Claire asks questions so the audience can learn. What does he want? Is he going to eat her brain? She sounds like she wants him to, like that’s the only thing that could possibly make this situation better—if her brain weren’t just so much waste material after he was done. Offended, Sylar tut-tuts, “Eat your brain? Claire, that’s disgusting.” He respects her more than that. He just needs not to die, and she’s helping him. She’s so different, different even among the supers, like him. This is the only thing he prizes, so his praise of her is genuine.

There. He has his answer. Sylar removes his fingers from Claire’s brain and concentrates. When he is sure the changes have taken hold, he pulls out the knife still embedded in his chest. The wound heals immediately. At last, Sylar realizes his dream and Future!Hiro’s nightmare: he is now as invulnerable as the girl lying prostrate before him. No one saved the cheerleader. This will have consequences.

Sylar heads for the door with Mr. Bennet’s Level Five folder but stops. Claire’s scalp and hair are lying there at his feet. Uncharacteristically charitable, he takes it back and replaces it on Claire’s head. She’s intact once more and her healing ability takes care of the rest. Claire surges upward, panting.

“Aren’t you going to kill me?”

Hayden Panettiere is an inch away from real tears, and Claire is almost moaning with disappointment and confusion. They shared something intimate just then, and her body is abuzz with, yes, adrenaline, but also hormones. She’s terrified into a state of arousal, a perversely non-perverse sexuality in her response to him. It’s bizarre in that her reaction is totally understandable and completely messed up at the same time.

Sylar regards her for a long moment. He could do anything to her. How could she fight him? But he won’t kill her because she’s different. She lived through the experience that has killed all the others. Sylar almost sounds like he likes Claire. He fixed her, though she doesn’t know it yet, fixed her to be a little like him, an even exchange that’s never happened before (because no one else ever survived). That’s punishment enough. Besides, he probably can’t kill her anyway. Killing her would only prove his own vulnerability. He’s not going to put it to the test. Let her live. What can she do to him? She can’t stop him. And now no one can.

After he’s gone, she’ll crumple. She asked about death because she wanted it, and he gave her nothing but endless tomorrows. Sylar is crueler for not killing. She doesn’t get to stop being the victim. A few lives ago, a boy tried to rape her, but she got to die and come back and get revenge. Today, a man did something just as bad and her body pretended that maybe it was okay if death would take her away afterwards. But she’s still alive. Sylar leaves, but the tick-tock of the crazy gears stays with Claire.

Another Petrelli having a crisis he is ill-prepared to understand, Nathan wakes up in the hospital a second time. Future!Peter reminds him about his God talk. Nathan thought it was a dream. (The audience should be so lucky.) He believes in what he was saying regardless of whether he embarrassed himself on camera or not. Future!Peter, like all Peters, has no time for anyone’s crisis but his own. Is Nathan going to squeal about supers? Of course not. How can he be an angel of God (shootmeshootmeshootme), if people think his divinity is linked to something as mundane as DNA? (Or was it “enzymes”?) Future!Peter prays this angel forgives him, kisses Nathan, and leaves.

Nathan does know something about angels. He sees one in the shape of a devil—it’s always the person you least suspect. Linderman talks to Nathan alone about the great things God has sent them to do. Nathan wants to know if Linderman healed him. He doesn’t know about the magic blood he got from Adam. Linderman talks only about plans, not about resurrections. That’s how you know he’s an angel and not God.

Some people need reminding. Outside of Nathan’s room, Mrs. Petrelli calls Future!Peter’s bluff. His prophetic dreams were stolen from her way back when. Like all his stolen powers, he’s a blunderer when it comes to this one and the delicate, unpleasant path it lays before the dreamer. She’s known this whole time what he’s been trying to do and how he’s royally screwed the future. Oh yes, your distopia can get worse, Future!Peter. He whines that he was just trying to help save the future.

“The only future I’ve ever seen is the one caused by you,” Mrs. Petrelli snaps at him. Keep moving your rock, Sisyphus. Keep screwing your mother, Oedipus. Except don’t because this Mama screws back. Mama Petrelli is the smartest person on the planet. She gets it: everything is all Peter’s fault. New York exploding (or not). The killer Shanti virus getting loose (and not). She wants her Peter back. A desperate Peter is more dangerous than a shiftless one. Future!Peter promises he’s put Peter some place safe.

“Safe” is Level Five. That’s the myth of Level Five. Put things here and they will be safe and we will be safe. Safe is Present!Peter stashed inside a Level Five inmate’s body. Safe is killing two birds with one cage. Safe is Noah Bennet playing with a tennis ball in his cell on Level Five, the only human dangerous enough to be trapped with the supers. (If they had a Level Six, they might put him there. If you owned Level Six and Hell, you’d rent out Level Six to Noah Bennet and live in Hell. And be safe.)

The only other human we’ve ever met who wasn’t cannon fodder pretends he’s going to destroy his snake oil. Mohinder shoots it up instead, having gone down to the docks just so he could be at his most helpless when the serum knocks him on his ass. Some hoods go to rob him, but he revives and unleashes some pain. Mohinder, the left behind, marches to the future. I hate everything about him right now, but Dear Nathan Petrelli’s God, please let there be a shirtless workout montage to go along with Mohinder’s new powers.

Next episode, maybe. We get the usual voice over montage ending, only worse. Perhaps Mohinder composed his aphorisms while writhing in pain as his genes exploded. I listened to the voice over (for a change) and not a word of it belonged together. It’s like trying to read a sentence out of scrambled pieces of a magnetic poetry kit as someone keeps opening and closing the refrigerator door. Meaning comes in and out of focus; nothing connects to what came before or after it. Metaphors are so mixed, they’re whipped into an insubstantial froth, much like the shots we see and don’t develop upon—Mrs. Bennet discovering her bloodied, violated daughter crying in the dark; Matt Parkman discovering a rock painting of the world shattering along a familiarly s-shaped divide; Sylar power-strutting in the sunshine.

Mohinder finishes reading random words out of the Oxford English Dictionary. The story is, per its usual, to be continued. Except they mean right now, and I’m going to need a separate review to fill with hissing and crossing myself against the inanity. See you all then.

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About TrinityVixen: There’s an asterisk on TrinityVixen’scollege 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.