Did you hear that noise? That was my jaw breaking the sound barrier as it dropped during the final few minutes of the second episode of Heroes. Those who watched have already watched it promised us a good ending, and it certainly delivered.
But that’s the ending – let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When you read you begin with A-B-C. When you recap Heroes you begin with something that doesn’t fit into the metre of the song.
When we left Heroes we had just seen Peter jump, Nathan fly up and catch him, and then lose his grip. This episode we find out that Peter’s OK. Not that that’s a huge surprise as we all knew that he was going to survive anyway. Heroes might turn out to be one of those shows that kills off its main characters, but they’re not going to start doing it in the second episode.
They tried to play with us a bit, suggesting the possibility that Nathan didn’t actually fly, but eventually the truth came out. What also came out was the fact that Peter flew as well.
This of course raises the question as to what Peter’s ability is. The way that the show has been set up, it doesn’t appear that two people share the same power. Therefore Peter’s can’t be the ability to fly, even though he actually did.
My guess is that he has the ability to mimic someone else’s power. It certainly fits what we’ve seen so far, as he also drew a picture of himself flying before it happened, which is Isaac’s ability.
It hasn’t been stated explicitly yet, nor has Niki’s ability. She seems to have some sort of split personality going on but given the show’s premise, I would say it has to be a little more complicated than that.
I don’t have any theories at the moment, but one thing does puzzle me. Why couldn’t the alternate Niki have buried the bodies? Is there some sort of time limit regarding how long she can be in control, or did she not bury them as a means of interacting with the regular Niki. My guess is the latter.
We’ve also come across the bad guy of the series – Sylar. Although we haven’t actually seen him, we’ve seen his handiwork and he’s clearly not the sort of person you’d invite over for dinner (unless your intention was for you to be the main course). We do know that Papa Suresh thought that he was Patient Zero (the first person to display abilities), and my feeling is that there’s a good chance he was involved in Papa Suresh’s death.
Heroes looks like it’s a show that’s going to be full of misdirection by making you think one thing is the case/is going to happen, but then revealing that it’s not what you expected. This would be the case with the show’s villain.
The first episode led you to believe that the Horn-Rimmed Glasses character would be the villain of the show, in the same vein as Cigarette Smoking Man. Sylar’s appearance has turned that on its head, and maybe HRG is on the side of the Heroes after all. Although considering that he had obtained Claire’s video, it’s not clear just whose side he’ll be on, or even if he’ll be on the same side as anyone else.
Sylar also makes a nice segue into Hiro’s story. At least kind of, because we don’t know for sure that Sylar killed Isaac, although it was the MO as the other murder that Sylar is suspected of.
But alas, it was poor Hiro who got accused of killing Isaac. Of course, picking up the gun sealed his fate – was there anyone watching who didn’t know that the police were going to come in once Hiro had the gun in his hands?
But while that may have been a standard storytelling element, what wasn’t was what followed next. We learnt that Hiro had not only travelled through space, he’d also travelled through time, arriving in New York five weeks in the future, just in time to see the nuclear explosion which Isaac had painted, before returning to Japan at the time where he left it.
So obviously, stopping the explosion is going to be a major part of the storyline. But can the explosion be stopped? Are Isaac’s paintings things that will happen or things that could happen?
This could have ramifications for Nathan, as the newspaper that Hiro saw said that Nathan had won the election, but if the future can be changed then it’s no longer certain that we will win.
Just in these two episodes, Heroes has shown that it’s not just the simple idea of “ordinary people develop extraordinary powers” into a very elaborate tale. If the quality of these two episodes can be maintained (and according to all reports it can), then we’re in for one hell of an impressive show.
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