It’s Heroes Reborn, but without any crappy Liefeld art and with a lot of sarcasm.
I think that all our worries that Heroes was going the way of Lost have been, at the very least, allayed somewhat. We had a LOT of stuff go down in two hours, and hopefully I’ll be able to capture everything that happened.
Let’s start off with the minor plot of Matt Parkman because there’s not that much to say, really. As usual, he doesn’t get a lot of screentime, but most significantly he gets sent to Africa and is pretty much out of the picture until the writers need him as some sort of deus ex. OK. time to be honest. 30-something episodes in and they still haven’t come up with anything useful for Parkman? They’ve killed off people for less, right? Seriously, even the WWE would’ve future endeavoured him by this point.
Next up is Suresh and everyone’s favourite Hispanic chick, Maya. Maya has started wearing skimpy clothing. It was nice of Mohinder to supply her with the bare minimum of covering, and really, it helps fans forget that she was pretty useless last season by showing off her boobs more.
Speaking of boobs, did you see the “biggest Heroes fans” in the one hour pregame show? Not one person with a Comic Book Guy look about them. What are the odds of the biggest fans all looking more on the side of photogenic than the side of having a face fit for radio?
OK, back on topic, Maya is looking for a cure, but Suresh manages to isolate how powers are generated and gets all excited about creating powers for everyone. Which Maya (correctly) figures is the exact opposite of “Cure me”. In the tradition of well-meaning but completely devoid of common sense comic book scientists like Reed Richards, Curt Connors and Hank McCoy, he decides to take matters in his own hands and use his “hero serum” on himself. And thus Suresh is now a metahuman, but of what variety? Increased strength, agility, sticks to walls, pheromones, peeling skin… seems like he’s some sort of insect to me. I’m assuming that there’s more to this than an homage to The Fly.
Next biggest plot concerns Hiro, Ando, and some blonde chick who looks like she came straight from the pages of the Waid/Ramos run on DC’s Impulse, what with the super-speed and wacky hair and all. Hiro, because he’s an idiot, directly disobeys his father and gets half of a laminated super-secret formula stolen from him by a chick who clearly knew that there was a laminated super-secret formula in the safe in Hiro’s office. Hiro goes to the future, sees himself get shot by Ando and then acts a bit distant from his friend for a while, but don’t worry – Joey and Chandler are friends again by the end of the hour, so none of the sexual tension is really lost.
Finally, we have the meat and potatoes of the season premiere, which is all the craziness that surrounds the Petrelli clan. We find out that Mama Petrelli is the one with the Dream Girl powers, which makes sense considering that this was the first power Peter duplicated. She becomes head of the Company (wait, is that Heroes or Prison Break?) by the end of the show thanks to Sylar, who killed Bob and took his Midas Touch because he could, I suppose. By virtue of being cute (and creating an EMP), Kristen Bell’s Elle survives in a scene that seemed to be lifted from Claremont and Lee’s Uncanny X-Men run. She also gets fired instead of the usual “now we will kill you” spiel because, again, Kristen Bell is cute. Hey, they didn’t have a problem shooting Dr. Who in season one, did they? But regardless, Sylar is captured, and if you’ve seen the promos, you know that won’t be for very long.
Going backwards a bit, we see that Future Peter #2 has somehow inserted Present Day Peter into the body of one of the Level 5 guys, and has taken his place for the time being. And basically, we learn that – as in X-Men – his altering the past has eliminated his future and sent things into a new direction, which doesn’t look to be a good thing. But at least it makes more sense than pounding a wall and creating “ripples” in continuity. The end result of this is that Future Peter #2 shot Nathan, Nathan found God and is now a New York Senator. And Nathan sees Linderman in what I can only imagine is a plug for Medium. So it looks like the future vision that had Nathan becoming President is still a possibility, but just not in the way we originally saw in season one.
And how about that Tracy Strauss? I gotta say, this new character fits Ali Larter much better than Niki/Jessica did. And the freezing power is a nice twist. Is Niki an MPD with multiple powers? Or is this simply a coincidence? I guess time will tell, but I like this new character much better.
And now we get to Sylar and Claire. We now see that Sylar is able to find the parts of the brain that generate the various powers, and I suppose that by studying them, he is able to “turn on” that portion of his brain to replicate the powers. Which seems to contradict what Suresh has found, no? But anyways, where Sylar normally leaves his victims dead, Claire simply feels dead inside. Sylar, meanwhile, now has her powers, and in the end we learn that he, too, is a part of the Petrelli clan, which apparently is the Summers family of the Heroes-verse. He seems to be undergoing something of a redemption arc, but it would seem to be difficult to redeem a character who is, you know, a serial killer. But hey, logic has no place here.
So the quest now, is to stop the escaped Level 5 guys and free Peter from inside the guy he’s trapped in.
That’s all for this week.
Kevin Wong writes for Prime Time Pulse, Reality Dish, Inside Fights and DVD Lounge. He has an 11-month old daughter, and is currently in four different fantasy football leagues.
