An Explosive Heroes

Wow....Now that is a fall finale.

For the first time in a long time, we got to see a bit of each of the show's characters. The Haitian speaks! Eden shoots herelf while inadvertently helping Sylar escape! Hiro faces off against a dinosaur, albeit in a painting by Isaac! Mohinder returns to New York, Matt and Audrey get one step closer to Sylar, Niki and her superfamily briefly reconcile, while Claire and her family begin to break apart. Phew.

And, of course, Peter has that spectacularly eerie waking dream. Isn't it always freaky when people move in slow motion and speak without sound? The dream seems to reveal him as the origin of the bomb that destroys New York City. Yes, sadly, our emo-haired hero is the flaming man of Isaac's Human Torch painting. He sees this, then falls into a coma. Cliff-hanger. The end. See you in January.

Now, this need not be the way the whole thing plays out, but Isaac painted it, and I can't think of a single thing he's painted that hasn't come true, right from the beginning of the show: Claire walking through fire, Peter flying, everything that happened in the homecoming episode. And Hiro's realization in last week's episode that you can't necessarily change the past even if you can control time and space. However, I'm hoping that maybe the future can still be changed. If not, New York really is going to blow up and that Peter might be the one who does it after absorbing Ted the radioactive guy's powers. I mean, he has to be seeing the future, right? He doesn't even know Niki or D.L. or Micah, but there they are, in his dream.

Clearly that would suck because Peter would likely die and he is my favorite chracter on the show but it would also be somewhat brave to kill off a main character and reduce an American city to char and ash. I actually would really like to see season 2 begin in a semi-post-apocalyptic America. Like Jericho but with larger stakes and bigger balls. However, I have a strong feeling that may not happen. I mean, Peter would immediately kill most of the other heroes, right? Can't see how that would work.

Hiro still remains one of the best chracters. Yeah, sometimes he's sort of a clown, and sometimes he's kinda annoying (Yatta!), but every episode he gets one or two laugh-out-loud lines. Like the way he said to Isaac, "I saw you on the floor. You were dead. With...your...head...cut...off." Or, in the same scene, the way he whispered, "How do you stop an exploding man?" Or his "I really need to find that sword" when he was confronted with that awesome painting of him fighting a dinosaur. That in itself is another interesting mystery. Where the hell does a dinosaur fit into all this? Will we soon encounter a shape-shifting hero/villain?


Regardind "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World," the cheerleader was definitely saved. In shock and a heightened emotional state, Claire decided to tell her father about her abilities, to which H.R.G. replied that he'd known about them for years, a secret that he kept only to protect her. From whom? Sylar, of course, but he's only known about the guy for six months or so. I think it's his mysterious employer, with whom we overheard H.R.G. conversing for the first time in regards to Sylar. Is it Linderman? Is this mobster — who is connected to Niki, is blackmailing Nathan, and specifically bought a very important Peter-related painting from Isaac — the one financing H.R.G.'s operation at the Primatech Paper Company?

Whoever his employer is, we began to see a more ruthless side of H.R.G. here. Clearly the man has done some bad things in the past, but he has crossed a line, as the Haitian revealed in his scene with Claire. "I work for your father. He sent me here to make you forget. Like he sent me to your friend and your brother and your mother so many times. He'll be here soon expecting that you don't remember anything. But it's very important that you do." This episode made me doubt H.R.G. again.

Still, H.R.G. is nowhere near as bad as Sylar. We've seen the results of his head-slicing work before, and we got to see his pre-Sylar self in last week's episode, but this time we finally saw the man as a walking, talking badass. He was able to propel Eden through a thick pane of glass only because the Haitian wasn't around squelching his powers. Poor Eden, though. Trying to avenge the death of her friend Suresh, she seems to have got it good. Now Sylar's back on the loose and no one's safe. You knew they weren't going to hold him for long.

So, no more new episodes until next year. A lot of time to think about things. Specifically one question: Are you on the list?