Saving the World: Redux
The Haitian repaid his debt by saving Peter. Jimmy Jean-Louis by Chris Haston/NBC
Episode Recap: "Four Months Ago"
Bonsoir mes amis! Leah Friedman (
Friday Night Lights, among other blogs) in for Casey tonight, and I figured I'd stick with the Montréal theme. I'm thrilled to be filling in for her for the second in what will hopefully become a series of great
Heroes episodes. We all know about the griping (and yes, I've done my own fair share of it this fall) about how the season started out, but between last week and this week, I'm hoping we can all agree that the show is back on track. It was certainly a subtle episode by
Heroes standards; more along the lines of last season's "Company Man" than anything else, and as a character study of the Petrellis, Elle and the Sanders family, it worked well - most of the time.
First off, thank you Tim Kring for finally revealing just how in the hell Peter ended up in Ireland. We already knew that Nathan saved New York from Peter, but in dueling bouts of self-sacrifice, Peter rescued a falling, burning Nathan and delivered him to the hospital, only to be caught by crazy-ass Elle and "Bob" (
Stephen Tobolowsky). After convincing him that they had a cure, The Company locked him up, made him take some dubious pills and allowed Elle to use him as her scratching post. I'd start listening to Adam (aka Kensei) too, if my choice were between him and Elle, the all-but-self-described sociopath, who apparently threatened to kill her psychiatrists. A real catch, that one.
Nathan wasn't much better off than his brother. Severely burned and now considered schizophrenic by his wife (at the suggestion of his mother), it's pretty obvious now why he fell into the deep depression we've seen this season. Yes, Peter and Adam broke out of The Company's prison and saved Nathan with Adam's blood, but Nathan doesn't seem to have much of a will to go on, at least not in this past timeline. (As an aside, when did Peter get close enough to DL to get the "passing through walls" power? Surely their limited interaction at Kirby Plaza wasn't enough.)
But yet again, what does Peter get for rescuing his brother? More trouble that starts with a battle in the streets and ends with the Haitian wiping Peter's mind and leaving him locked in a warehouse module bound for Ireland. Memo to Peter: Sometimes you have to take care of yourself first.
Poor DL. Finally a respectable man, a true civic hero by virtue of his firefighting, he ends up getting killed by a man that his wife - under the guise of another personality - hooked up with at a sleazy bar in L.A. Let's just take a minute now to reread that sentence. Enough with Niki/Jessica/Gina. None of these girls is any good
for anyone and they're all ridiculously depressing.
In fact, I'd rather have had less of the three faces of Niki, and more of the back-story of the wonder twins. We've learned so little about them over the last month and a half, but at least now we know why they're wanted for murder. If only Alejandro's new wife hadn't wanted to get busy with her ex-boyfriend at the wedding reception, maybe none of this would have ever happened. I know I'm in the minority, but I quite like the twins. Maya is more convincing as an extremely dangerous and beyond panicked "hero" than last year's radioactive man, and while he was going to take out New York, I'm wondering if she's going to take out the world (could it be that she's a carrier of the Shanti virus that kills 98% of the population?).
And so our intrepid crew have an objective again. OK, so it's the same objective as last year: they have to save the world, but it's not so simple as stopping an exploding man any more. As Adam pointed out, "They've been days away from perfecting [the cure] for 30 years now." But whose side is Adam on, anyway? I'm not sure, but I'm more than willing to spend some time at 121 rue St-Jacques to find out.
Check out clips, previews and tonight's episode at our
Online Video Guide.
