Weekly Heroes analysis saves backpack, world.

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?

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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."