Heroes Landslide: Winnowing and Convergence

What a perfect, next-to-final episode tonight! Heroes just gets better and better.

Loose ends continue to come together. Sylar is armed and ready to blow up the city. Hiro is armed and ready to stop it if he can - his father (it was good to see George Takei aka Mr. Sulu again) has trained him. But he also must get to Ando along the way, who has gone off in pursuit of Sylar on his own - in pursuit of his death, according to the future we've seen.

Hiro is as ever a well-spring of time-travelling optimism. He tries to convince Nathan to help him, so he doesn't become the "bad person" Hiro has seen in the future - a "villain" - and when Nathan refuses, Hiro concludes that Nathan is a villain, already. But that doesn't stop Hiro.

Nathan may not totally be a villain, as yet. He's elected to Congress. He knows Linderman had something to do with it. He doesn't know Micah's way with machines was able to register enough votes on the computers to give Nathan a landslide. (Yet another argument, if we want to apply Heroes to real life, not to be so quick to rely totally on computers in counting election returns - they're a lot easier to manipulate than paper ballots, even if you don't have Micah's powers....)

But back in the New York City of Heroes and television-land, there's a lot more going on than a hero-fixed election. Some of the movers and shakers were killed tonight - not just Ted by Sylar, but Linderman and D. L. Hawkins, who kill each other, and Thompson (fine performance by the always memorable Eric Roberts) by Mr. Bennett, who now has a gun trained on Molly. Bennett will do anything to protect Claire, but will he kill a little girl just to stop her tracking powers? Not if Mohinder has anything to do with it - but I don't think Mr. Bennett will pull that trigger anyway....

But tonight's killings and plot lines and remaining characters have all converged for the finale next week. The winnowing has made it simpler, clearer, more searing, more powerful.

If the finale continues on this course, Heroes could wind up in our future not only the best new show on network television this season, but the best show on network television this year, period.