Hiro In Love

Oh yeah, it looks like Hiro's got himself a special lady friend, a cute Texas waitress named Charlie who has super memory, works at the Burnt Toast Diner, and likes the way Hiro's cheeks wobble when he concentrates (I happen to think he looks constipated but that's just me). They crush on each other for a bit, flirt in Japanese, and then she gets the top of her head sawed off by Sylar, our baseball-cap-wearing, shadowy-faced bad guy. Why would he go after someone with a not-so-super power rather than time-bending Hiro, or does he not know about Hiro yet?

So, we have our characters with super superpowers, and then we've got some with slightly above average abilities. We know every person is not going to be powerful enough to stop a deadly supervillain. I suppose that's where Charlie fits in. Super memory may be very cool but she probably wouldn't be very useful in saving the world. Same with Eden, who has the power of suggestion, à la the very famous Jedi mind trick. Probably useful for pacifying jerky New York City bouncers. Pacifying jerky New York City nuclear explosions, however? Not so much. Speaking of nuclear explosions, why do Matt and that nuclear power guy have those marks on their necks?

So poor Charlie got her skull cut open, just when she and Hiro were getting to know each other, with our favorite manipulator of space-time looking as bashful as a red panda. Having stood by while Niki/Jessica slaughtered a bunch of shady Vegas card players last time around, Hiro wasn't going to make the same mistake twice. ''If I'm too scared to use my powers,'' he said, ''then I don't deserve them.'' Plus, she's cute. So he constipated himself back in time to save her life. He made it there, because we saw a picture of the two of them celebrating her birthday, but the present time doesn't seem to have changed much. Ando is still walking around in a diner filled with stunned cops and waitresses. Did his friend succeed?

This episode — the eighth, titled ''Seven Minutes to Midnight'' — gave us more Mohinder. It opened on him scattering his father's ashes into the ocean and, along the way, we got glimpses into his contentious relationship with his father, met a former love interest, and learned that his sister, who died when he was very young, was somehow ''special.'' We also saw him experience a series of revelatory dreams about the past that may have been induced by Iyer Sanjog, a young Indian child whose file was hidden behind his father's university office drawer. In one dream, Mohinder witnessed his father's death at the hands of what looked to be Sylar sporting a watch stuck at seven minutes to midnight. I thought it a bit odd to focus so intensely on Mohinder and leave out Peter Petrelli, who is currently much more important to the storyline than Mohinder. Where'd he go? Couldn't we have saved Mohinder and the dream child for some future episode?

We also got to learn a lot about Horn-Rimmed Glasses. He works in a paper factory, albeit a paper factory with keycard-activated doors. We learned that he's been hunting down superheroes for at least 14 years. It's how he found Claire, whom he adopted when her birth mother died following a shady incident. H.R.G. seeems to know quite a lot. He knows about Sylar, knows that Sylar is going to try to kill his daughter and that he has killed other people with abilities. He appears to be on the side of good and he wants to save his daughter, even if he has to make Isaac a junkie again.

So next week looks awesome! We finally get to see the resolution to the "Save The Cheerleader, Save The World" storyline as it is Claire's Homecoming Dance and some of the heroes come together to save her and hopefully the world.