DL, Niki/Jessica and Micah
Jessica buys a sniper’s rifle, and tells the seller that she’s going after the man who took her son. After completing the purchase, she catches sight of her reflection in the wing mirror of the seller’s van, and the image is that of Niki. So it seems that the seeing the other personality thing works both ways.
Meanwhile, DL and Micah continue their journey away from Las Vegas. Micah continues his attempts to get DL to turn back, but DL is having none of it.
DL stops at a store to buy something, but when he returns to the car, Micah is gone. Eventually he finds Micah, and Micah explains that Jessica has been appearing for a while now.
DL agrees with Micah that they need to help Niki, and they return to the car in order to go back to Vegas. As they’re getting in, Micah tells DL that Niki knows where they are as a result of him phoning her.
They’ve travelled on since that phone call, so unless he’s made more of them, I’m not sure if Jessica can be sure where DL and Micah now are. However, she has managed to track them down as she’s watching DL throw the rifle sight, and she pulls the trigger.
Mohinder
Mohinder searches Chennai together with his colleague Nirand for Iyer Sanoj, the boy who appeared in his dreams. The two come across Iyer playing soccer.
I don’t know just how popular soccer is in India, but I was under the impression that cricket is the biggest sport there, so wouldn’t children be more likely to be playing that? Still, as this is an American show, I guess they would pick a sport that an American audience could recognise.
Iyer tells Mohinder that people come to him in his dreams if they have questions that need answers. Mohinder asks Iyer which of two paths in front of him he should take, and Iyer tells him that he already has his answer.
Later on, Mohinder has another dream. This time he sees Chandra and Nirand who are also looking for Iyer. Nirand warns Chandra that he risks being stripped of his tenure if he continues his current line of research.
The dream changes, and Mohinder sees himself and Chandra. Mohinder is enthusiastic, having just read Chandra’s book, but Chandra chastises him and says that he doesn’t want Mohinder to be a part of this. Iyer then appears and tells Mohinder that he has his answer.
Mohinder wakes up at his father’s desk, where he’s been sleeping. He opens the program on his father’s computer and finds that it’s password protected.
Like so many other password systems in TV and movies, but not like any in real life, the password entry screen shows what you have typed. After trying Darwin and Sylar with no success, Mohinder gets in with Shanti, the name of his dead sister.
IA list of names and locations appears on the screen, including those of some people we’ve seen already (DL, Niki, Isaac, Nathan, Matt, and Hiro). Some names are in red and the word deceased is written next to them.
Mohinder tells his mother that he’s going back to America to find all these people and warn them about the danger they face. She asks who will protect him.
Everyone else
Nathan and Simone open the crate containing the painting from Linderman. They look at the painting and discuss Peter’s belief that the painting will help him save the cheerleader and thus the world.
Nathan says that Peter gets delusions of grandeur and needs to be prevented from hurting himself. He takes some black paint and throws it over the painting, blotting out whatever was there before.
However, Simone still believes Peter. She calls him, and explains what Nathan did to the painting. She gives him a photograph of the painting that came with it.
The image shows someone who looks a lot like Peter lying on the ground, possibly dead, beneath a banner saying “Union Wells High Homecoming” and a clock reading twelve minutes past eight.
Simone has already found out where the school is, and Peter heads off to the airport. He tries phoning Hiro, but Ando answers.
Peter explains to Ando that he’s found out where the cheerleader is, and by a massive stroke of luck, it’s close to where Ando actually is (and Hiro actually was). Ando tells Peter that he’s currently in the diner, and Peter arranges to meet him there.
While waiting for Peter, Ando notices a photo of Hiro and Charlie pinned to the wall and asks another waitress when the photo was taken. Apparently, it was six months earlier and Hiro and Charlie had been tight, but he had popped out of her life a few weeks ago.
While this means that it looks as though Hiro’s attempt to save Charlie didn’t work, I’m happy because this means that the timeline is fixed. Therefore there are no time paradoxes, and no chance for my head to explode. Although if time hasn’t been altered, it doesn’t explain why Charlie didn’t recognise Hiro earlier.
Peter arrives at the diner and meets Ando. Peter explains that he doesn’t really have any power, but he still has to go and try to save the cheerleader even though he might die. Ando decides to wait for Hiro, and Peter leaves.
When Peter leaves Ando, there’s less than an hour for him to get to the school, and he makes it with plenty of time to spare. This does lead me to wonder if there’s more “creative geography” going on.
I guess it’s plausible for Peter to get to the diner in Midland in the time it was supposed to have taken, but is it possible for him to get from Midland to Odessa in less than an hour? From the maps I’ve seen, they look too far away, although I have to admit that I didn’t actually look at the scale of the maps, so I don’t know for certain.
While Peter is making his way from New York, HRG is trying to make sense of Isaac’s painting. I didn’t get a good look at it, so I’m not sure what it was, but HRG claims that it doesn’t help.
He tells Eden to give Isaac more drugs, but she says that that’s not going to help. He agrees and tells her go to the school and to neutralise Sylar. In the meantime, he’ll make sure that Claire stays at home.
Ordinarily this would cause conflict with Claire, but even more so considering that she’s been elected. I have to admit that despite the numerous mentions of Homecoming I’ve seen in TV and movies, I’ve never really understood exactly what it’s all about.
That’s not important though. What is is that the Homecoming Queen is elected by the pupils. Claire thought that she had had no chance of winning as fellow cheerleader Jackie (who took the credit for the fiery rescue actually done by Claire) had done her best to make Claire an outcast at school.
But what this did was to give all the actual “outcasts” (i.e. everyone who’s not in with the jocks and the cheerleaders) a candidate who appealed to them. So because Union Wells High is made up of more of them than anyone else, Claire got the most votes.
Later on Zach reveals that he was behind the campaign to elect Claire, and he also gives her a copy of Chandra’s book. Jackie comes up to them, and insults Zach, implying that he’s gay, and Claire’s reaction is to punch Jackie.
This could have been part of reason that HRG uses to ground Claire, although it’s never stated why he forbids her to go the Homecoming game. After storming out on HRG, she retreats to her room and starts reading Chandra’s book. Chandra must be a pretty good writer if he can write something that high school students without a background in genetics can understand.
Zach appears at Claire’s window, having procured a ladder from somewhere, and sneaks her out of the house. HRG finds out that Claire’s missing, and goes off looking for her.
On her way to the game, Claire runs into Peter who is looking at a display case in the school which has a clipping from a newspaper about Jackie being honoured for her the rescue she claimed to have made. Claire tells Peter that Jackie is a cheerleader, giving Peter the impression that Jackie is the one he’s meant to save.
The two of them part company and Peter finds the banner and clock from the painting and stands there waiting. Meanwhile, Sylar turns up and also sees the display case and newspaper article.
It’s half-time, and Claire arrives in the locker room to change into her cheerleading outfit. She and Jackie have an argument, and Claire tells Jackie that she was actually the one who made the rescue and that she has it on tape.
The lights go out, which is a clear sign that something bad is going to happen. Sylar appears, but how he knew that Jackie was still in the locker rooms is probably one of those things that will remain unexplained.
He lifts Jackie up by the neck, and when Claire tries to grab him, he pushes her aside. Jackie screams, which is heard by both Pete and HRG, who has also arrived at the school by this time.
Sylar puts his hand over Jackie’s mouth and then begins to perform his patented head-slicing procedure. While he’s doing this, Claire gets up and her injuries start to heal.
Sylar notices this and drops Jackie, presumably realising that she isn’t the one he was after. He takes off after Claire, who has had the good sense not to stick around.
She runs into Peter, and he tells her to carry on running. Peter ends up fighting with Sylar, and the two of them fall off the top of the school’s amphitheatre, ending up lying on the ground in front of the banner.
Of course, since Peter can copy other people’s powers, he should be all right as he’d recently encountered Claire. This is indeed the case.
Claire arrives on the scene, by which time Sylar has disappeared, and she watches Peter’s injuries heal themselves. Peter asks her if by saving her did he save the world, and Claire replies that she’s just a cheerleader.
HRG finds Claire, and she tries to tell him about Peter, saying that he helped her. HRG tells her to let the police deal with him and that she’s lucky to be alive. Claire disagrees, saying that there’s something she needs to tell him.
Sylar tries to make his escape, but he encounters Eden. He reaches out his hand but she tells him that he doesn’t want to hurt her and that he needs to go to sleep. It’s not clear as to whether he does go to sleep right then, but the Haitian grabs hold of Sylar, and he definitely falls unconscious then.
It hasn’t been explicitly stated, but it looks like Eden has the ability to persuade people to do things. This does raise a couple of questions.
Firstly, why wasn’t she able to convince Mohinder to stay in America? My theory behind that is that there are limits to her power, and that Mohinder was so determined to return to India that she was either unable to convince him to stay, or it would have required too much effort.
However, when she encountered Sylar, his wanting to hurt her was more of an instinctive reaction. He wasn’t dead set on killing her, and so she was able to talk him out of it.
The other question is why didn’t she use her power on HRG when she disagreed with him about giving Isaac the drugs in the first place. Is HRG immune to her power, or does he have some sort of hold over her?
But maybe she did use her power on HRG. After seeing Isaac’s painting, HRG wanted her to give Isaac more drugs, but she appeared to talk him out of it.
While the Eden/Sylar encounter is going on, Peter is busy being arrested by the police. I guess you can’t really blame them for that, as he’s an obvious suspect, particularly since he’s covered in blood.
We still don’t know how “Save the cheerleader, save the world” fits into all this. It could be that the act of saving the cheerleader isn’t what saves the world, but that it’s the actions taken in the process of saving the cheerleader (who lets face it doesn’t appear to need that much saving), that does it.
For example, as a result of Peter’s actions in saving Claire, Sylar has now been captured. The capture of Sylar could be the thing that ultimately saves the world.
Another example is that the saving of the cheerleader has resulted in Claire, HRG, Peter, Eden, the Haitian, and soon Hiro and Ando all being in the same place. This could also have an impact.
I don’t know for certain, but my point is that saving the cheerleader is not the action that saves the world. Rather, it sets in motion actions which will ultimately result in the world being saved.
The other issue to come out of Sylar’s attack is that of Isaac’s paintings. Up until this episode I’d assumed that Isaac painted possible futures, which could be altered.
I’d also made the assumption that the dead cheerleader which Peter had painted was Claire. As Peter’s not as good an artist as Isaac, it wasn’t clear who the cheerleader was, but the logical conclusion was that it was Claire.
But the cheerleader who died wasn’t Claire, and so Isaac’s paintings still came true, including the one featuring Peter seemingly dead, although he recovered. So this suggests that there’s no way to prevent what is depicted in the paintings.
If this is the case, then it’s not good news for New York, as this means that the explosion will happen. Unless the painting actually depicts something else, and we’re once again drawing the wrong conclusion.
We’ve also seen Hiro travel to the future. And if the future shown in Isaac’s paintings can’t be changed, then it’s not unreasonable to think that the future Hiro saw can’t be altered either. If so, then bye-bye Isaac…
Speaking of Hiro, this episode was Hiro-free (apart from the photograph of him and Charlie) right until the end. Hiro appears in the Burnt Toast Diner six months earlier.
It’s not shown whether he actually appeared out of nowhere in the diner or whether he appeared somewhere else and walked into the diner. I suspect the later, given that there doesn’t seem to have been any sort of unusual reaction from Charlie, who pours him coffee.
He tells Charlie that he’s come to save her life, and she seems to take this very calmly. She is called over to blow out the candles on her birthday cake, and she invites him to join the group who had gathered. So either she was in too good a mood to react to Hiro’s strange comment, or things like that happen to her all the time.