Heroes: A Test of Patience

Until the episode’s cliffhanger, there was a whole lot of craziness.  And when I say crazy, I mean huge crazy leaps, big crazy flips, gigantic crazy deaths.  My brain should have exploded.  It’s like the writers injected all the characters with adrenaline or they injected me.  Either way, no more time is devoted to this awful arc, and they packed all the crazy it would take to wrap things up into one episode.

We begin where we left off.  Arthur’s dead.  At least, he looks really dead.  I’m not sure if he’ll reanimate 20 episodes from now out of nowhere. (That wasn’t really a showdown though!) Now that he’s out of the way, Nathan assumes the role of diabolical mastermind and decides to continue on with Papa’s plan.  Peter wants to get rid of the formula, ergo the battle begins.  Nathan tries to woo Peter over to his side (which I guess is now the dark side.  The build up to this turn needs to be a lot more gradual and evident to make me believe it,) but Peter knocks him out instead.  With Flint and Knox in tow, Peter goes on to trash Mohinder’s lab.

Knox takes a little mid-trashing stroll and finds that the newly, suped-up soldier has revived Nathan who continues to inactively convince others to join his side.  Knox snaps the soldier’s neck, but Tracy comes in to save Nathan and Knox is frozen and then shattered.  This time Tracy does the persuading, wanting Nathan to back off of Pinehearst.  She must not be good at this either because Nathan quickly fires her.

Back in the lab, Mohinder is doused by the formula when it’s spilled all over the floor.  Since labs usually have highly flammable chemicals, I’m not sure it was such a good idea to bring Flint, the Maniac Pyromachine.  Nathan and Peter fight some more, and Flint puts Pinehearst up in smoke.  Before he’s about to torch Nathan, Peter injects himself with the formula, grabs Nathan and flies away.

Knox and Flint played a much larger role than I expected.  I’m not sure if I hold this against the writers or not.  To have started a season about Villains, introduce these new villains, put them on a team and then proceed to forget about them would have probably been a horrible idea.  But it’s as if they gave them more to do just to make the impact of their unimportant deaths grander.

Elsewhere Ando, Daphne and Matt realize the one chance they have may be Ando’s ability to acquire a new power.  Hopefully, he’ll get the power of time travel and be able to save Hiro.  All they need is the formula.  Daphne uses her super speed to whisk it away from Pinehearst, and Ando takes the shot.  He passes out and when he awakens, he finds out that he can’t control time but he does act like a superpower charger.  They soon discover that if he revs Daphne up, she can travel so fast that, in essence, she travels back in time.

In another time, Hiro has saved himself from the ledge and figured out that his one opportunity to help may be to steal the formula from the past.  His father catches him in the act, but just as he attempts to tear the formula to shreds, Daphne and Ando grab him and bring him back to now time.  A little sad that once again his plans have been foiled, Hiro and Daphne decide to go back to Pinehearst to destroy the formula once and for all.  They snatch it, just in time, from Tracy (who Hiro also punches square in the face for calling him Pikachu!).

And on a rampage and out for blood, Sylar channels his inner SAW and traps the rest of the Primatech heroes inside The Company walls.  Claire, Angela, Noah, Meredith and some Level Five baddies are told they have options, kill or be killed. (I’m not liking those odds.) At first, Meredith is protected by the Puppet Master, but he’s killed by Sylar.  He then injects adrenaline into her (wink, wink) and locks her up with Noah.  Claire is then tempted to save her father by shooting Angela. (Which she’ll never do, of course!) She does save her father for a second time by getting him out of the cell.  Meredith weakly stays behind, something about not being able to control the fire spewing out of her hands. (This season has been the first time our heroes’ powers have gone so sideways.  First Elle and now Meredith.  It’s interesting to see.)

All this torture, however, was just foreplay for the big game.  Sylar confronts Angela about her maternity and why she found him.  She tells him that she’s not his mother, and to make matters worse, she used him because she knew he was a monster, not because she thought he could be a hero.  This throws Sylar over the edge, but she saves one final blow.  She tells him if she dies, she can’t divulge who his parents really were.  He doesn’t care and just as he’s about to take her power, Claire stabs him right in the back of the head where it hurt.  Claire rushes back to Meredith who can barely control the flames and is obviously in pain, but she begs to be left behind.  And so it was that Pinehearst and Primatech were burned to the ground.

Later we see the darkest side of Nathan when he asks Peter why he took the injection, the one thing he was on a mission to destroy.  When Peter says it’s because he loved him and wanted to save him, Nathan tells Peter he would have left him to burn.

Heroes ended with quite a bang.  It wasn’t a big bang exactly as much as it was more than one fiery explosion.  The fact that there were two explosions is extremely ironic, but I see the explosions as more symbolic of this arc.  Nothing could squelch the memory of such a wildly erratic, inconsistent season.  I’m a diehard sci-fi fan which I’m sure I’ve said before.  I’ll hang in there until the story is complete or the show dies a slow, horrible death.  But any normal viewer will just turn the channel, and I don’t blame them!  This show has tested my patience, therefore, a fiery end is exactly what I would have given them as well.  Burn it to ashes and let’s try to act like this never happened.

On the up side, the midseason cliffhanger has left us with a more interesting plot, the possibility of our heroes teaming up and something I can actually wrap my head around. (Be gone formulas that are never really explained!) Nathan is now the villain, and he, with the government’s help, wants to bring in “dangerous” people with powers.  Doesn’t hurt that he has a full dossier on heroes from A to Z, including his brother, mother and daughter.  Intriguing…

And the future’s end has been averted.  But why and how, I’m not so sure.  I know the formula has been destroyed, but Nathan the reason why Heroes were hunted in the first place?  And Ando never kills Hiro because what we saw is that he was just supercharging him?  Are Matt and Daphne now together forever with baby?!  Does Claire still become tough as nails?  Is Sylar really dead?  How did Mohinder escape that explosion and why is he hanging out with Tracy?  So they kill off the coolest characters and all the villains in an arc called “Villains”?  Huh!  A lot still confuses me, obviously.  I suppose as Mohinder says in his voiceover, “Bearing witness to the duality of life that each one of us is capable of both the dark and the light, good and evil, of either of all and destiny, while marching ever in our direction, can be rerouted by the choices we make, by the love we hold onto and the promises we keep.”  Seems like Heroes found a shiny bow to wrap this arc up with for the holidays, but if that reasoning was my present, I’d pray it came with a gift receipt.

Season 3, Episode 13: Dual (originally aired December 15, 2008)

For another take on this episode, check out Lockdown by Paul Secrest.

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Photographs courtesy of NBC