Well that felt a little rushed. Hindsight is 20/20 and everything, but I wonder whether Tim Kring didn’t miscalculate when he rewrote this episode as an impromptu season finale. Instead of leaving a bunch of threads hanging sort in a sort of enormous cliffhanger, he’s instead capped them off in a really unsatisfying way. In my mind, this actually provides far less incentive to tune in for the next season – whenever that may occur.

My biggest criticism of the episode is that we still don’t have a terribly good explanation for why Adam wants to destroy humanity. It feels lazy to chalk this up to insanity, yet what other information do we have? With his biblical name and explicit references to God and his flood, it feels like the show’s writers were intending to create something much grander with Adam. But in the end all we got was a vague speech about wars and plagues, before concluding that the world would be better off without humans. Humans suck - there’s no getting around that - but the inner-grade-school-teacher in me really wants Adam to show his work here, instead of just blurting out the answer.

Also ruined by being rushed: the Noah-Claire reunion. What could have been a timeless piece of slap-stick comedy got compressed down into one of the weirdest two minutes I’ve seen on TV. The dialog was weird, the timing was weird, and the reactions were weird. It was all weird. The whole scene could have been acted out by monkeys on a trampoline and come off more fluidly. What a wasted opportunity.

Other things:

Mohinder, knowing that the world’s most dangerous man is in his apartment and is holding his adopted daughter hostage, decides that he can handle it on his own. I’ve been joking all season about Mohinder’s growing stupidity, but this is actually insane. Did he think even for a second of telling Bob about this? Doesn’t Bob have guys with guns at his disposal? Or an old black lady who can breathe fire or something?

If Mohinder wasn’t bluffing when he analyzed Sylar’s blood, we now know that Sylar had a strain of the Shanti virus, specifically the same strain they used to “cure” Niki. This seems reasonable – Sylar was held in a Company facility in Mexico – but it again raises the question: what was Sylar doing down in Mexico? Why was he saved, then infected, then hidden? Given all the other crap going on this episode, I guess it’s probably better that they didn’t try to shoe-horn this explanation in. Still, what point did Sylar serve to the story this season?

Unintentionally Funny Moment Number One: Maya to Sylar: “You lied to me!?”

When last we saw Parkman, he didn’t know where Victoria Pratt was. This episode, he returns from Maine, where he evidently found her house with ease. Adam and Peter found her really easily last episode as well. This is ridiculous. Did she go into hiding as a TV weatherperson?

Elle really backpedaled away from becoming an interesting character this episode. Nothing terribly complex or deep about this one: all she wants is her Daddy’s approval. Now that I think about it, there’s actually a lot of father-issue stuff in Heroes. What did Tim Kring’s dad do to him as a child? I’m picturing a pickup truck rolling down a lonely desert highway when Tim’s father pulls over, tell his son to get out and says, “Boy, if you don’t create a moderately successful comic-based serial drama on network television, you are nothing to me.”

Unintentionally Funny Moment Number Two: The picture of Bob holding up a fish. The only thing that would make him any less menacing of an evil mastermind would be if there was a picture of him splashing water on the Haitian in one of those peddle boats.

I’m still not too sure about Peter’s motives; i.e. how does he think he’s going to rescue Caitlin from the future, by changing it? I wasn’t entirely sure I understood this correctly, yet in this very episode, Adam actually confirmed Peter’s motives for both his benefit and the viewers. It still didn’t make a lick of sense, but to Adam’s credit, he did manage to keep a straight face the whole time.

Unintentionally Funny Moment Number Three: Parkman riding Nathan across the country, bareback.

The employees of Primatech Paper are really good at not noticing things. Two dudes stroll into the Primatech Paper warehouse and no-one questions them. Then another dude appears unconscious on the floor beside them with a sword, and no-one bats an eye. If the Primatech employees are in on the conspiracy, shouldn’t they be doing something to stop everyone from strolling into the ultra-secret vault? And if they’re not, why are they so non-chalant? At my office, work stops for hours every time someone gets new office supplies. How on earth these people didn’t notice the parade of men who were armed, flying, or Japanese is beyond me.

Unintentionally Funny Moment Number Four: When Molly can’t find a person it sounds like someone trying to start an engine that won’t turn over. Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick. Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.

For everyone sitting on the edge of their seat, anxiously waiting to find out the fate of Micah’s backpack, you can sleep easy now. It’s OK. I have nothing else to say about this subplot.

Ok, one thing. If a building explodes while Niki’s in it, and no-one’s around to care, does it make a sound?

Unintentionally Funny Moment Number Five: “Sylar’s gone; my dad is going to kill me.”

Special Cliffhanger of next season’s Heroes Analysis!:

Sylar will discover that his powers, impressive though they may be, can be enhanced with the power of spinach. He uses this knowledge to defend his willowy girlfriend from the local town bully.

If we didn’t know that Heroes was ending for the season next episode, this would have been a relatively satisfying episode. We got to find out a bit more about the Company and Adam Monroe, there was a modest amount of gunplay, and one of the Wondertwins got butchered. That ticks off a lot of check boxes. But knowing that we’ve only got 42 minutes of Heroes left this season, it’s hard not to feel like things are getting a bit rushed. The plague that threatens the world just doesn’t feel terribly menacing yet, there’s still a billion unanswered questions about Adam Monroe and the Company, and Sylar has been sidelined for most of the season. In the (potential) final episode next week, these topics are either going to be handled quickly, or not at all. That feels like kind of a rip. At first glance, the only ones we have to blame for this are the striking writers, and by extension, Communism. However, here at Cracked, our editors encourage us to take the long view, so I’m also going to blame George W. Bush, Rich Hollywood Jews, and my parents.

Things we now know:
How did Adam know exactly where Victoria Pratt was? Everything we knew about her suggested that she had gone deep into hiding, and very few people knew where she was. I’ll guess that the Nightmare man read Angela Petrelli’s mind and told Adam about it, even though we haven’t seen any direct evidence that the two are co-operating. Still, it beats my other theory, which centered around an edited scene of Adam and Peter Googling her.

We still don’t know whether it was Bob or Mohinder that decided to save Bennet’s life, although both are aware he pulled a Lazarus. The big question here of course is what form the inevitable father daughter reunion will take when Claire and Noah cross paths again. I’m personally hoping that it’s some kind of Three’s Company-esque situation, where having both had their memories erased by the Haitian, the two meet on a blind date. They immediately hit it off, and are only moments away from a passionate kiss, when they’re interrupted by Matt Parkman, who’s now their landlord.

Micah and his cousins are back, and take part in one of the most inane stories I’ve ever seen on television – the Great Backpack Caper. I understand that there have to be some lighthearted moments in a show that features such grave threats to the world, but this is taking things a bit far. Last year Hiro and Ando’s hijinx managed to lighten the mood of the show without coming off as contrived or trivial. Micah’s cousin (I’ve completely forgotten her name) has gotten a pretty raw deal. To be the worst new cast character in a field that also includes West and the Wondertwins is both astounding and shameful.

Speaking of everyone’s favorite Hondurans, a couple weeks ago I said I’d tolerate their return to the show once they finally did something. Technically they didn’t actually do anything this episode, though fortunately for us, someone did do something to them, in the form of a knife to the abdomen. Alejandro’s ambush of Sylar while armed with nothing more than a wispy mustache was woefully ill-advised.

Incidently, watching Sylar smooth-talk Typhoid Maya is really unpleasant to watch. It feels a little bit like watching old people flirt.

I’m a little fuzzy on how Peter intends to save Caitlin. How exactly does he think that changing the future will save the girl that he left there? For a plot device as overused as time travel, you’d think someone would have figured out by now how to use it properly. I’d suggest writers should steer well clear from using time travel in their stories. Aside from some very specific exceptions - e.g: stories where characters from Star Trek : The Next Generation travel back in time to take twentieth century fan fiction writers back to the future with them - I never use time travel in my own work any more.

It’s nice to see Heroes has finally gotten its teeth back. These last three episodes have booted the first six right in their collective crotch. Although one might suspect that the impending writers strike caused the show’s creators to accelerate the pacing for the abbreviated season, I don’t think that’s what’s happened here. As I understand it, only one episode was retooled to be a potential season finale, and that’s still to come. So this abrupt change from tedious death march to fast paced roller coaster of intrigue was planned from the very start of the season. It’s almost like the writers forgot everything they knew about pacing. One can only guess what the rest of this season would look like if it wasn’t interrupted. Eight episodes of Maya & Alejandro in a hot air balloon anyone?

One thing I really enjoyed about this particular episode was its limited scope. Only three subplots were present this time, with one of them taking up the vast majority of the screen time. This felt like a much better arrangement than past episodes this season, where five or more separate subplots got juggled back and forth, none getting more than a few minutes of screen time. I’d even tolerate the Wondertwins for half an hour, if by the end of it they finally did something.

More things we learned: (after the jump)

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The big news in Heroes-land this week was the apology from series creator Tim Kring for the slow pace of the season so far. Apparently, the show’s writers “aren’t very good” at telling love stories, and maybe the new characters were introduced “a little slowly” and also maybe keeping Hiro in ancient Japan for seven episodes was “not fucking very bright.”

Those quotes aren’t verbatim, incidentally.

I won’t be too hard on Kring here, because frankly it’s refreshing to see someone from a show be so up front about it’s weaknesses. Nevertheless, Tim, it probably would have been handy if you’d noticed these things sometime before all those episodes were filmed.*

*Here of course I’m assuming that Tim Kring regularly reads this blog, as do countless other Hollywood writers and producers - an assumption I feel comfortable making, having seen no evidence to the contrary.

Which brings us to Episode 8, the dawning of a new age in the Heroes world. According to the omni-present ads, all the mysteries of the past 4 months would be revealed. Will this mark a turning point for the franchise, or has it slipped forever from the attention of today’s ever-fickle youth? I hear the kids talking about that new Kelsey Grammer show a lot these days. Maybe that’s stolen Heroes thunder.

Things We Learned: (after the jump)
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It’s a little surprising that NBC waited until November before releasing the first episode of Heroes this season. To this point it’s been sort of like the NFL preseason: few things have happened, and none of them matter. Watching our favorite old characters dink around with second string rookies has been a pretty hollow experience compared to the finished product.

Like I briefly hinted at in the last recap, these large multi-arc shows are at their best when their separate plotlines intersect and weave together. The first half dozen episodes of this season saw almost no intersections, as each group of characters went about their own business, independently explaining their powers to the camera while enjoying Nissan products. But in this episode, I counted at least five instances of storylines intersecting. It made for a very satisfying episode – admittedly a pretty low bar, given the number of Honduran Wondertwin moments we’ve endured lately.
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Hayden Panettiere, the bite-sized star of the TV show “Heroes” (as lovingly chronicled on this blog), has developed a wide following among teenage girls and the pasty middle-aged men who love them. But what her fans may not know is that she’s also a daring eco-warrior who travels the globe protecting adorable species from harm, although not always successfully, as demonstrated in this video (presented here in German, for comedic effect):

For those of you slackers who don’t spreken zie Deutsch, here’s the scoop:

“It was really frightening,” Panettiere said. “Some of us were hit by the [fisherman’s] boat hook. But in the end, all we really worried about was the dolphins.” Growing emotional, the actress said they were close enough to the dolphins to see them “sky-hopping, jumping out of the water to see us… One little baby dolphin stuck his head out and kind of looked at me, and the thought that it’s no longer with us is really difficult to take,” she said, tears streaking down her face.

Yes, that’s very sad. Next time please wear a bikini.

However, since Ms. Panettiere in a wetsuit saving dolphins went over so well, I’d like to offer my suggestions for further sexy celebrity activism, such as:

• A lingerie-clad Jessica Alba chains herself to an endangered tree, like the one in my backyard
• Scarlett Johansson boycotts clothes for 2008 to protest sweatshops or whatever
• Kim Kardashian refuses to sleep with any more rappers until Paris Hilton is released from jail
• Michelle Obama challenges Obama Girl to a Jello-wrestling match to raise money for her husband’s campaign
• Britney Spears goes on a hunger strike to protest her own horrible Halloween costume
• Ben Affleck lays down in front of a bulldozer in a rainforest, preferably one driven by a deaf and blind person

I guess some interesting stuff happened in that episode. It was good to see Mr. Bennet reclaim a bit of his bad-ass-ness finally, and Suresh’s feet-stomping, stool throwing tantrum was both sad and hilarious. But all the subplots feel really adrift from each other right now. Until they subplots start to combine, they’re basically nothing more than ten minutes vignettes which air once every two weeks. The promise of what’s to come when these characters start to cross paths is tantalizing, but until that happens, it all feels like a bit of a dry hump.

On that note, I can’t help but notice how much more enjoyable this show was when I was able to watch several episodes all at once. Last season I didn’t get in to the show until after Christmas, and got to catch up on the first 11 episodes in a couple sittings. It was great - cliffhangers were less obtrusive, and if nothing happened in an episode I could always fire up the next one immediately after. Maybe next season I’ll forego the regular blog updates, and instead write a 12000 word treatise on Season 3 after it comes out on DVD the following summer. People would want to read that, right?

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If you’re a fan of The CW (and statistics prove that you’re almost certainly not), then you were likely on pins and needle last night waiting for the Heroes debut of Veronica Mars star Kirsten Bell. And if that’s all you were looking for, then you didn’t go to bed disappointed, as indeed Heroes was on TV last night, and a character played by Kirsten Bell did appear on it. Everything else about the show would likely have let you down greatly. And disappointing fans of The CW is no small feat.

Despite my eloquent protests last week, this episode continued to spend an inordinate amount of time on the development of a new Hero with uninteresting powers. I consider it a personal slap in the face that the show’s creators were unwilling to scrap a multimillion dollar episode and then rewrite and re-film it within a week. Come on guys. Someone learning how to jump rope is not very gripping television. That should have been taught to you on the first day of television school.

Other things we learned:

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The most interesting Heroes subplot currently running is the mystery surrounding the Nightmare Man, and his connection to the previous generation of super-power enthusiasts (Lindermen, Kaito Nakamura, the Petrelli’s, et al.) Consequently last night’s episode of Heroes was one of the most interesting of the season, despite the fact that it introduced yet another new character that no-one will ever care about.

Watching ordinary people discover newfound abilities and observing as they learn how to cope with them makes a good story. It’s also a story that’s already been told. Last season we watched a dozen people discover their abilities and how they affected the greater world around them. To watch it happen again is eye-wateringly boring. I nearly barfed when Micah’s cousin said “I just feel like there’s something great inside me.” Can we please declare a moratorium on New-Hero-Discovering-Themselves stories for awhile? I only want to see a new hero introduced if they’ve progressed to the leotard-clad ass kicking stage.

Other things we know now.

The aforementioned interesting revelation is that we now have a picture of several people involved in the Symbol Conspiracy. And one of them is Parkman’s dad. The other major revelation was that Parkman’s father is also the mysterious Molly-frightening creature that we’re now evidently called the Nightmare Man. Technically that’s an accurate name, although it is a little lacking in menace. I guess “Night Terror Head Fucker” is probably a little strong to say in the presence of an 11 year old.

The other problem with the Nightmare Man is that the more we learn about him, the less menacing he becomes. Prior to this episode it was easy to imagine he was an all powerful Demon Leopard living in a fortress carved underneath the South Pole. Now we know he’s a doughy middle aged guy who keeps an apartment in Philadelphia. Which is a bit of a let-down, although he is related to Parkman, so that’s probably par for the course.

I’m beginning to suspect that West’s ability to fly is only his secondary ability. His true power is the inability to take “No” for an answer. I consider myself a father-figure towards Claire, along with several other television characters, due to some mental problems of mine that I don’t really want to get in to here. Consequently, I only want her to be happy, and worry about her being around a fellow who’s so irritatingly persistent.

Watching Sylar stumble into the path of Maya and Alejandro felt like a huge lazy writing coincidence - a case of Sylar Ex Machina if you will. I wonder if someone is manipulating his return to the States? Also, is that Claire’s stolen car they’re riding in?

Micah’s cousin Monica has discovered that she can learn anything just by watching it. Admittedly, a pretty cool power, although it would have been better if there was a scene of her staring vacantly into the middle distance and saying “I know Kung Fu.”

We learned a little bit more about what happened with Nathan. The pain from growing a beard caused him to turn to drink, which drove away his wife and family.

Last night, the third episode of Heroes contained what should have been the biggest revelation of the season: Sylar is still alive. This would have been a big surprise if you hadn’t seen any of the ads over the last week that repeatedly announced “Sylar’s back.” In the world of advertising blunders, this ranks right up there with advertising Bruce Willis as ‘a crime solving ghost’ in The Sixth Sense.

This was also a great episode to see a perfect example where artistic vision can intersect with business practicality in a harmonious union. Entertainment executives, take note: a shape shifter can be easily replaced with another actress entirely. Expect to see producers in the future use this as leverage in negotiations with difficult actors. If this breakthrough had only been made a few years ago, Friends could still be on the air.

Other things that we know now.

This blog’s favorite character, the Nissan Rogue, made a dramatic reappearance in Mexico. How will the Rogue’s sharp styling and rugged suspension handle Mexico’s unevenly maintained highway system? We’ll have to tune in to find out!

Hiro is fixing history with great success, and developing a hopeless crush on a woman old enough to be his great-great-great etc… He’s also sending messages into the future via the most contrived device one could possibly imagine. As a code, “Ando, open” would feel sloppy even in a Dan Brown novel.

Micah has been left with his grandmother, played by Nichelle Nichols. Nichols is perhaps best known as Uhura from Star Trek, and was hurriedly cast after George Takei’s character was killed off, due to a little known Screen Actors Guild regulation.

The final painting in Isaac’s series of posthumous plot devices reveals that Mr. Bennet will get a bullet in the face by the end of the season. What the other six paintings display is as yet unknown, but given the shows love of plot twists, expect at least one of them to show Bennet paying a homeless man $50 to wear an unusually realistic looking mask of him. It’s either that or a shape shifter. Maybe a homeless shape shifter?

Peter is now a brother of the brother of the sister he is now kissing. This was a very challenging scene to watch, and possibly an homage to Star Wars.

Sylar has lost his powers, which was one of the few predictions where I really stepped out on a limb during my pre-season analysis. This blog entry will return to its regularly scheduled tom-foolery after this “accurate prediction fist pump.” <fist pump>

Also, Candace claimed that when she rescued Sylar she was working on behalf a third party. But who is this mysterious third party? The number of unknown conspiracies in this show is really starting to add up. At this point probably the safest bet is to say she was taking orders from a shadowy group jointly led by Leonard Nimoy and a Nissan Altima.