Peter and Isaac
When we left Peter in the last episode he was about to give Hiro and Ando the message from future Hiro. He does so, and they too were mystified by “Save the cheerleader.”
However, Peter also tells them something more helpful, and that's to get to New York. He doesn't actually say where in New York, but Hiro and Ando are obviously intimately acquainted with the city, so they’ll have no trouble when they get there.
The conversation with Hiro and Ando brought up the point that nobody knew anything about the cheerleader, beyond the fact that they had to save her. Peter looks at all the pictures Isaac had painted and realised that there was one missing from the sequence, although how he knew in how they should be arranged isn’t clear.
Isaac tells him that it was one he had painted earlier, but Simone had it now. So obviously the next step is get it from her.
I guess the old Petrelli charm will have its work cut out, as it’s going to be very difficult to come up with a rational explanation as to why he needs. However, I suppose he just needs to see it, not actually have possession of it.
Hiro and Ando
After speaking to Peter, Hiro and Ando prepare to leave for New York. They don’t even make it out of the parking lot though, as they’re stopped by the guy they cheated at poker a couple of episodes ago.
He offers them a chance to pay him back, and so Ando finds himself involved in a poker game, with Hiro doing the stopping of time and swapping cards trick. This time he was a bit smarter and changed the cards before the other players had had a chance to see them.
Their participation in the game comes to an end when Ando notices that one of the players has a gun pointed at him, and so retreats to the bathroom with Hiro in order to try and get out of the situation. While they're in there something unpleasant happens in the main room, ending up with the bathroom door being cracked and blood seeping through it.
Showing good sense, the two of them don’t stay to see what happened and escape through the bathroom window. Later however, Hiro is disappointed about not being able to save them, questioning his role as a hero.
Ando comforts him by telling him that as he has the ability to travel through time, then maybe he’ll be able to go back and save them. I really hope that doesn’t happen as I’m not a big fan of time travel stories that involve changing the past. It leads to a lot of complications, and I’ve watched and read so many stories where it was poorly done, that I’d rather they didn’t go down that route.
Niki and DL
An example of the complications would be the fact that Niki and DL’s are linked to the scene at the poker game. Alter that, and it changes their storyline and the effects that their actions have on other people (and we know that they’re storyline is going to intersect with the others because that’s the way that the show works).
Their storyline in this episode began with DL surprising Niki in her house, having managed to sneak past the police watching outside. She’s initially not very happy to see him, but he tells her that he’s innocent and that it was actually a woman who stole the money and killed his crew. Considering that Niki found the body of one of his crew members buried in spot where EMI (Evil Mirror Image) directed her to, it’s pretty obvious that EMI was the woman DL’s referring to.
She believes him, and initially tells him to sleep on the couch, but later has a change of heart and they end up spending the night together. In the morning DL tells her that she got up in the middle of the night. Niki is a little disturbed by this, realising that that EMI was up to something (and it’s not looking for new artists to sign – that’s a different EMI).
Later that day, the two of them go to visit someone who may know who the woman is. It turns out that it’s someone who was at the poker game that Hiro and Ando escaped from, but who wasn’t as fortunate as them.
Niki is a bit disturbed by this, as the same thing was done to the bodies as was to the men in her garage that she later buried. She tries to tell DL that she might be responsible, but he doesn’t believe her.
He soon has reason to though. Niki ends up having a conversation with EMI who tells her what we knew already, that she killed DL’s crew and the men at the poker game. EMI tells Niki to take the money and Micah and get out of there, but the plan is foiled when DL catches Niki with the money.
Niki turns into EMI and knocks DL across the room. She’s momentarily distracted by Micah, and when she looks back he’s gone.
We find out where when he suddenly appears from the wall. This explains how he was able to escape from prison – his power is the ability to move through solid objects.
There’s a side issue here. If both Niki and DL have powers, then does that mean that Micah also does? He appears to have an affinity for gadgets, so could there be something there?
The fight ends by DL sticking his hand through EMI’s body in order to grab her throat and choke her. She passes out, and he leaves with Micah.
Claire
Fortunately for Claire, she’s not having as bad a time with her parents as Micah is. Instead, HRG has managed to track down her biological parents who want to meet her.
She agrees as she wants to find out if they’re also indestructible. Of course, it’s not the kind of thing you can ask directly, and all she learns is that the mother has diabetes and her father’s family has a history of heart disease and cancer.
She does learn something later though. Her adopted mother reveals that when she was a baby they thought there was something wrong with her chromosomes and they had looked for her biological parents then. Claire naturally wants to know more, but her mother tells her it was just a cough.
This took place while HRG (that’s eight letters used up already – if they introduce too many more characters we may start running out) was walking Claire’s real parents to their car. Their conversation reveals that they’re not her real parents after all, but that HRG had asked them to pretend to be, something which didn’t come as much of surprise to me.
HRG and Eden
What did come as a surprise was that someone else is also working with HRG, namely Eden. Some people weren’t surprised by the fact that she was up to something, but I don’t know how many expected it to be that.
Eden’s phonecall to HRG came after Mohinder had left, to take his father’s ashes back to India. Mohinder said that he was done there and wouldn’t be coming back. However we know differently because he’s one of the main characters.
In order to ensure that he would come back, Eden kissed Mohinder right before he left. Since she’s really working with HRG, there’s no guarantee that her feelings are genuine and Mohinder could be very disappointed when he returns to New York, especially considering that everyone else seems to be getting some action.
Eden tells HRG that she hadn’t seen Peter fly, but that he claimed to have received a message from a time traveller, “Save the cheerleader.” This startles HRG as he obviously realises that the cheerleader is in all likelihood Claire.
He tells Eden to bring in the precog, and the episode ends (not quite, as we see a final shot of Niki just lying there) with her arriving at Isaac’s apartment, claiming to be an admirer of his work.