“Run!”
Matt Parkman is the most stupidly oversensitive police officer in the world! Meredith, or the writers, can’t decide whether she’s caring or venal! Missi Pyle manages to appear in something without having to resort to her crazy eyes! Sylar has some nerve! The Haitian really, really sucks at his job!
It’s an improvement, but it ain’t great and its name doesn’t make any sense.
Spoilers!
Episode rundown:
I’ll cover the patent ridiculousness of the Sylar Mohinder storyline here:
Basically Mohinder calls around the people on his list and most of them hang up on him. One of them, Zane, asks to meet him, but Sylar gets there first. In the most hilarious Heroes development ever, Zane asks Sylar “Are you Dr. Suresh?” and Sylar just says “yes.”
Call me crazy, but Sylar doesn’t look particularly Indian to me.
So Sylar kills Zane, and then pretends to be him in front of Mohinder … then gets the whacked out idea to join Mohinder in his fact-finding mission! Hey, Mohinder, what you going to do when all of the people you interview turn up dead?
Given Sylar’s magical ability to fake a Texan accent in a city where people don’t have particularly strong accents last week, I’m just really disappointed that Sylar never put on a British Indian accent this time around.
So Heroes is getting warmer again, and it is aided in this pursuit by failing to offer an arbitrary cliffhanger. It’s really annoying to watch all of these shows that offer voiceovers at the start and finish. Scrubs can get it right, as can Heroes. Arrested Development, relying as it does (or did) on narration, is an exceptional case.
I realised that what these last few episodes had been lacking was the cultivated tones of Mohinder’s voice, caressing the audience with comforting platitudes that tangentially make sense to the episode itself.
Sylar is great because he’s not even subtle with his M.O. anymore, and still he gets away with it.
“I’ll just go swab some DNA from the corpse in the next room, okay?”
Great stuff right there.
I can’t really remember much about Mohinder right now except that he’s been written entirely inconsistently across the series, swerving from belief to skepticism like a drunk driver (who is also agnostic, I suppose). This is probably the first time he’s seen anyone do anything, beyond Senor Dreamwalker. Perhaps this means he can take over the world with his tracking abilities … or perhaps it means that he’s Sylar’s stooge. It’s going to be interesting to see how long Sylar can pretend to be “Zane” before he snaps. It’s strange to think that a character who was so adamant about his identity in previous episodes is willing to suddenly adopt ridiculous disguises.
Elsewhere, Hiro continued his snoozefest with the discussion of what it is to be a Japanese speaking friend in a country of wild gambling Americans while falling in love with showgirl dressed as a princess. I think that the authorities should get to Hiro and threaten him with deportation if he doesn’t start being interesting and doing stuff. Impotent hero storylines have the potential to be interesting, but they’re not even giving Hiro a chance.
Plus, Missi Pyle called him “Sulu”. Sure, it’s funny to me, but would an extortionate Vegas showgirl princess really be able to make the reference? Almost everyone who watches Heroes had no idea what I was talking about when I was explaining the humour of George Takei’s inclusion in the show.
On the note of Meredith, mother of Claire, I got the sense that no one had any idea of what they were aiming for in writing her character. One second she seems venal, more interested in money than in Claire, and the next she seems to care only for Claire’s welfare. I don’t think that anyone could have missed that she readjusted the $100,000 figure offered by Nathan to $50,000. How generous of her to give half of that to Claire, eh?
I don’t really think that Nathan has all of that money to toss around, unless Linderman’s four million dollar funding included a sort of slush fund for paying off ex-lovers with scandalous secrets. If your heart really isn’t into blackmail, you shouldn’t do it.
So with Zach gay and Peter as her uncle, who’s going to be Claire’s love interest? If Sylar at any point poses as a team heartthrob, I’m getting the eff out of here.
Now! Haitian watch! Mrs. Bennet remembers not Mr. Muggles, nor Claire herself. I would suspect not really that the Haitian sucks at his job but that he can only perform it so many times to one person without great damage being caused. With the destruction of her mother, with whom she has always had an honest relationship, Claire has definitive reason to hate her adoptive father. Storm Primatech, Claire, and give him what for! (here the writers will reveal Claire’s weakness: a cross hatching of paper cuts on her body will render her unable to regenerate, and the thousands of tiny wounds will incapacitate her)
Matt and Jessica tie in this episode, which makes Jessica not a total loss for once. It makes exactly no sense why she’s dropped the Niki defence mechanism, but who am I to judge from my internet pedestal?*. That said, it was great to see Malsky die. I hated that bastard. I just can’t quite follow why Matt’s justified poor self-esteem would make him steal diamonds. Can’t he just accept that he’s got diamonds on the inside? Theft is fun, I guess, but there are difficulties involved.
The cliffhanger was good because it was obvious, although why Linderman wants to have Nathan assassinated just before the election is beyond me. I just imagine this syndicate leader sitting up in his penthouse, speaking bad Japanese and reading comic books. It’s not like he’s got anything else to do while waiting for screen time.
