Heroes: Origin Stories

I'm constantly impressed by how much information is crammed into an hour of Heroes. Unlike Lost, which restricts itself to focusing on developing one or two characters per night, Heroes goes all out.

Sure, there are episodes where we only get a glimpse of certain heroes (it's usually Matt who gets the shaft thankfully) and there have definitely been episodes that feel stretched, but this one, titled "Six Months Ago," was pretty dense. We saw a bit of everyone except Isaac, but most important, we got a backstory on Sylar, who looks remarkably like Clark Kent. Our supervillain, the man who Mohinder once said was his father's "patient zero," turns out to have been Gabriel Gray, a simple man frustrated with his predictable life and looking to be something more. "I wanted to be different. Special. I wanted to change. A new name, a new life."

Who can't understand that sense of entrapment, of living out a life that already seems sketched out for you in advance? So when Chandra Suresh mistakenly pegged Gabriel as having powers and then dismissed him as normal, the man flipped out, took his new name from a watch face, and started to eat people's brains. It was thrilling to see the moment when he turned. The Gabriel-Chandra subplot was my favorite part of the night because it crystallized something that's been in the back of my mind for a while about Heroes — this odd push-pull between science and God, evolution and the idea of a creator.

Of course, it's all about evolution, with these powers being activated in a certain part of the brain. And one feature that species have evolved to ensure their survival is the fight-or-flight response — an instinct that takes hold most explicitly in the stories of Nathan and Niki. I'm still not entirely clear what Niki's power is. Does she absorb other's life force or something, like Rogue from X-Men? Or is it simply that she has super strength and suffers from multiple personlities? When Niki's formerly abusive father showed up, the persona of her dead sister, Jessica, kicked in, allowing Niki to kick paternal ass.

It's a little easier now to see why Nathan is so dismissive of his flying abilities, for on account of them he abandoned his wife seconds before their car was rammed by Linderman's people into a highway divider — again, fight or flight. Well, he definitely flew, and his wife is paralyzed because of it. I wonder if she remembers seeing his empty seat right before the accident. Does she have any idea what her husband can do?

Finally, let's talk about Hiro, our poor, tragic Hiro, who couldn't save his Charlie. Not that he didn't try, not that he didn't go back six months in time, take a job as a busboy in some small Texas town, win her over with a beautiful origami crane display, and then give her a ticket to Japan. That was all for naught, because she would have died anyway from a brain aneurysm. Or as Hiro put it, "I teleported. Forward. Backward. But I couldn't save her....This power...it's bigger than me. I can't change the past." For all the assumptions one makes about how powerful these abilities — and specifically Hiro's — would make your average Joe, they still have limitations.

For proof of that, we need only look to Mohinder's closing narration: "These people, their future is written on their DNA. Just, as the past, it seems, is written in stone. Was the die cast from the very beginning? Or is it in our own hands to alter the course of destiny? Of all our abilities, it is free will that truly makes us unique. With it, we have a tiny but potent chance to deny fate. And only with it can we find our way back to being human."

I leave this episode wondering who is in control of all of this, if anyone. Sylar couldn't escape capture, Hiro couldn't save his gal, and Peter and Claire couldn't deviate from their destined-to-cross paths. Does their free will matter at all?
What do you think? Were H.R.G. and Chandra working in different ways toward the same end? Could anyone get powers by eating certain parts of the brain or doing whatever it is Sylar does?

Next week's previews make it look like someone dies next week, but I heard that the death does not occur until episode 13 which won't air until February. Besides I doubt they will all meet up in one episode in New York. I think next week will just sort of wrap-up the fallout from last week and set up the stories for the second half of the season.