Heroes Season 3 Finale: Hopeful Deceptions

Heroes wrapped up Season 3 with a compelling, powerful episode, which tied up some loose ends and opened up some excellent possibilities, all about good but nonetheless dangerous deceptions.

To cut to the chase: Sylar kills Nathan, Peter (shape shifting as the President) knocks out Sylar (shape shifting as Nathan), Angela convinces Matt to implant in Sylar's mind that he really is Nathan. HRG sees and approves this.

So Season 3 ends with some hope, but on shifting sands. HRG and Angela will have to lie to Claire and Peter - a satisfying plot turn, since they were lied to for most of the first season. Matt will have to lie, too, if he's brought into this again.

And will Sylar's conversion to Nathan really hold? In the brief beginning we see of Season 4, Nathan is beginning to take an interest in the workings of clocks...

The other big question mark at the end of Season 3 is what will happen to Hiro and his powers? They're beginning to make his body sick. Mohinder tells Hiro he better not be stopping time any more .... But, of course, Hiro does, at least once, and you know he will be sorely tempted to do it again.

This was an interesting, transitional season for Heroes. It still has not regained the sheer sense of wonder of the first season, but it is pulling itself up, slowly, thoughtfully, not easily, to an older, more contemplative kind of show.

Zachary Quinto may not have as big a role as Sylar looking like Sylar next season. That might well be to the good, since I expect the new Star Trek movie to be an enormous success, which will make Quinto more evocative of Spock than Sylar. And Ali Larter will be back in some sort of role next season, which is all to the good, too.

I'll definitely be watching.

See also Heroes Gets Lost ... Heroes 3 Begins: Best Yet, Riddled with Time Travel and Paradox ... Sylar's Redemption and other Heroes and Villains Mergers ... Costa Nuclear ... Hearts of Gold and the Debased ... Seeing the Future Trumps Time Travel ... Superpowered Chess with Shifting Pieces ... Villains and Backstories ... The Redemption of Sylar ... Thoughts on the Eclipse, Part I ... The Lore of the Comic Book Store ... Hiro's Time Traveling Closure ... Augmented ... Shades of Recalibration ... Baby, Rebel, and Last Fantasy ... All that Shape Changes Remains the Same?

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Heroes Baby, Rebel, and Last Fantasy

An unusually sensitive and personal Heroes 3.20 last night, which featured Matt Parkman's baby and his superpower, the identity of Rebel, and the fate of Matt and Daphne.

Matt's baby is great - he has "touch and go" power, as Hiro puts it, and he can use it to turn on television or Hiro's lost power over time. The scenes with Hiro, Ando, and Matt's baby were one of the best in the series, crackling with great one-liners from Hiro, along the lines of "heroes are supposed to change the world, not diapers".

And in another well-played family moment, Tracy meets her nephew, Mica - who turns out to be Rebel. A very nice touch. Mica makes Tracy see that being out for only herself is not the way to go, and she sacrifices herself to save Rebel. Her ice-self is shot point blank by Danko (Željko Ivanek - he of at least four current or very recent series, Heroes, Big Love, True Blood, and, last year, Damages). But she winks after being shattered - and there's always the third sister - so, one way or another, we'll be seeing more of Ali Larter on Heroes, which is all to the good.

But the denouement of 3.20 is sad. Daphne is rescued, seems to recover from her wound, and parts with Matt. But that's not the sad part. He goes after her. Tells her he can fly ... shows her. But she realizes Matt has put this story in her head as a way of making her last minutes happy. In reality, she dies.

But this was a great if sad way of ending their story, and Heroes continues to carve out a deeper groove in our emotions and imaginations.



See also Heroes Gets Lost ... Heroes 3 Begins: Best Yet, Riddled with Time Travel and Paradox ... Sylar's Redemption and other Heroes and Villains Mergers ... Costa Nuclear ... Hearts of Gold and the Debased ... Seeing the Future Trumps Time Travel ... Superpowered Chess with Shifting Pieces ... Villains and Backstories ... The Redemption of Sylar ... Thoughts on the Eclipse, Part I ... The Lore of the Comic Book Store ... Hiro's Time Traveling Closure ... Augmented ... Shades of Recalibration

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Heroes 3: Sylar's Redemption and Other Heroes and Villains Mergers

Heroes tonight - like, coincidentally, The Sarah Connor Chronicles tonight - continues to mine the rich, twisted vein in which heroes and villains coincide.

Sylar has been about as bad as it gets - literally opening up the brains of other heroes to acquire their power. Tonight the ever-dangerous Mrs. Petrelli reveals to Sylar that she is his real mother, and partners him up with HRG to round up the villains sprung from prison last week, due to bad (or, not so good) future Peter's intervention from the future. A bad son maybe turning good to help undue what a good son maybe a little bad from the future has wrought.

And Sylar does behave pretty heroically. But he can he curb his vampiric-like hunger for heroic brains? Well, maybe ... but HRG doesn't believe it.

Meanwhile, while on the subject of Claire's father, Claire herself discovers that she has a little evil in her - or, at very least, her desire to kill villains is not just selfless heroism, but an expression of understandable desire to strike back at those who have hurt her. I like her much better this way.

And as a nice counterweight to good and evil co-existing in the same hero, we discover tonight that Tracy Strauss played by Ali Larter is apparently not Niki/Jessica after all ... though, Micah senses some connection, even though he realized Tracy is not his mother, and it turns out Tracy and Niki/Jessica were "created" on the same day ... Well, I told you this episode of Heroes resonated with The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

But it's all good - and, hey, we have another hero who paints the future - and I'm looking forward to more of the future next week.


See also Heroes 3 Begins: Best Yet, Riddled with Time Travel and Paradox

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The Plot to Save Socrates




"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Heroes 3 Begins: Best Yet, Riddled with Time Travel and Paradox

Time travel and its marvelous paradoxical complications has always been my favorite part of Heroes - my favorite part of any science fiction, actually - which is why I found the two-hour opener of Heroes, Season Three, the best in the series so far. In addition to other goodies, Episodes 1 and 2 were riddled with time travel, drenched the bone with paradox.

In two somewhat separate though no doubt ultimately intersecting stories, actually -

1. Hiro learned his lesson about the damage that traveling to the past can bring. So he travels to the future - only to see himself killed by - Ando. He travels back to the present, and finds that travel to the future is no bed of roses, either, and carries its own paradoxical wallop. We the audience also see how Hiro, in reacting in the present to what he saw in the future - Ando killing him - is actually unbeknowingly starting to turn Ando against him. (But there's a nice new speedster hero in this story - she's blond, travels at the speed of sound, and may be Hiro's nemesis.)

Meanwhile -

2. Peter has not yet learned how dangerous changing something in the past may be - but he learns tonight. Turns out he shot Nathan, in an effort to stop the awful future we saw in Season 2 from happening, since it was due to what Nathan was about to tell the world from the podium. Nathan is not killed. But Claire, seeing Nathan shot on television, calls Peter - who tells her to stay home. Not a good idea - her being home lets Sylar get to her. And in a nice unnerving twist, he takes her recuperative power but cannot kill her, because (according to Nathan) she cannot die. Does his mean she will would survive a bomb that blew her to bits? Always the question with Claire.

But Claire's the least of what Peter's intervention unleashes in the past. Probably the worst are the bad dudes set free from Level 5 - the truest villains in Heroes. But it was good to Jamie Hector - the cool killer Marlo from The Wire - amongst them, playing Benjamin "Knox" Washington.

There's also some fun stuff that (so far) apparently has nothing to do with time travel. Nikki is somehow back - but she claims to be someone else, and her claim seems sincere, even though there's no mistaking Ali Larter. Parkman is somehow in a desert - in Africa - but how knows when. Mohinder may have finally made himself a physical as well metaphorical hero. And Peter's younger self - the one who was already in the present in which Nathan was shot - has somehow been embedded by his older self in someone who looks like former NYC Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik (sorry to say he's a real person in our world - appointed by Giuliani - not a character in Heroes, I'm not kidding).

Which does bring us back to time travel. One of its exquisite problems is making sure, if you travel back to the past, that you stay the hell away from your younger self, lest you trigger a cascade of infinite regress paradoxes that will make you totally crazy.

That's why I enjoy time travel so much, why I named this blog Infinite Regress, and why I'm really looking forward to more of Heroes this season.

I want to understand, for example, if Hiro tries to change the present so the future he saw does not come into being, how he could have seen that future tonight in the first place?

Time travel never grows old.



See also Heroes 3.2: Sylar's Redemption and Further Heroes and Villains Mergers

Reviews of Season 2 Heroes: Episode 2 ... 3
... 4 ... 7. Heroes Meets 12 Monkeys ... 9. How Immutable Are Fate and Isaac's Futures? ... 10. Penultimate for the Fall ... Heroes 2 Finale: Heroes Who Didn't Survive

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

Heroes 2 Fall 07 Finale: Heroes Who Didn't Survive - My Predictions Last Week Were Right!

Here were my predictions from last week's post. Let's see how I did:

The coming attractions say a few of our heroes will die next week. Here's what I think:

Neither Hiro nor Peter.

Maybe Nathan, coming to Peter's assistance. Nathan hasn't had much of a story this year, and seems out of place in this world.

Who else? Strictly on the basis of the storyline and characterizations, I would say Niki might not make it. Micah could be raised by his grandmother. Niki also seems without moorings, without a center of gravity, this Fall. And there would be a sad poetry of sorts in her joining D. L. - on the other hand, Ali Larter has a lot of fans (including me).

Villains? Either Adam or Sylar won't make it - but one should survive. The obvious prediction is Adam will die - because the Fall has been his story, not Sylar's. But Heroes could be pull a switch and have Sylar dead. Not likely, because a lot has been quietly invested in his character this Fall ... but, you never know...

Non-super-hero heroes? I can't see Mohinder dying - his role in the series is unique. Mr. Bennet? I assume he can't be killed now, unless someone blows his head off ... it would be a wild twist to somehow kill him, anyway ... but, not likely. (One possibility, though, is that Claire's blood is not 100% effective in repairing him.) Elle's father ... I don't like the character and would love to see him go - but that's no indication that he will go. Possibly all of the above with survive.

Pretty good, huh? I was right about Nathan and Niki (and I really will miss Ali Larter), and there was a special sad poetry indeed in her dying saving someone in a fire - echoing D. L.'s act of heroism.

And it was also Adam not Hiro who was vanquished - even though Adam yet lives to likely menace some other year.

And none of the non-heroes died.

The way Nathan died, though, was a shocker. (I suppose there is slight chance that someone will get Claire's blood to him - they're both in the same town, after all - but I don't think that's likely.) An assassination of a politician in Texas can't help but give chills. And Mrs. Petrelli on the phone - she's getting more evil by the minute.

But who was she talking to? Who pulled the trigger on Nathan?

My guess is Mr. Bennet, much as I like him. But his working for the company, again, as the only way to protect his family, would put him on a collision course with Nathan's speech. The company, after all, does not want any of this stuff public - that's been crystal clear.

I think the next volume of Heroes should be a good one. The two deaths above offset at least a little of the proliferation of new heroes - Claire's flying boyfriend, Monica, Maya, and Elle - all very enjoyable, but I think the show would be stronger with just a fewer number of heroes and storylines.

And I like the way Claire is getting tougher and Elle more human. This pairing alone, along with the respective, almost parallel fathers, makes the Spring 2008 volume appealing.

And I'll be back here, whenever it airs, with more reviews (and predictions).

Review of other Season 2 Heroes: Episode 2 ... 3
... 4 ... 7. Heroes Meets 12 Monkeys ... 9. How Immutable Are Fate and Isaac's Futures? ... 10. Penultimate for the Fall

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

Heroes 2: Episode 10: Penultimate for the Fall

Last night's Episode 10 of Heroes, Season 2 is the last before the "finale" of this first Fall "Volume" of Heroes. And depending upon what happens with the WGA strike, we may have to wait beyond the Spring to see Volume 2.

Last night's show developed and brought together a lot of threads nicely. Claire is coming into her own as a hero in better control of her life - an adult - and stands up well to Elle. Adam has been fully revealed for what he is - a monster in some ways worse than Sylar, who is regaining some of his old ways pretty quickly himself. Hiro saw last week that Adam/Kensei killed his father, and is back on the case in America. But Peter needs (or thinks he needs) Adam to save his Irish love, and in the last scene we see Peter confronting Hiro on behalf of Adam.

Which is a pretty good setup for the Fall finale. The coming attractions say a few of our heroes will die next week. Here's what I think:

Neither Hiro nor Peter.

Maybe Nathan, coming to Peter's assistance. Nathan hasn't had much of a story this year, and seems out of place in this world.

Who else? Strictly on the basis of the storyline and characterizations, I would say Niki might not make it. Micah could be raised by his grandmother. Niki also seems without moorings, without a center of gravity, this Fall. And there would be a sad poetry of sorts in her joining D. L. - on the other hand, Ali Larter has a lot of fans (including me).

Villains? Either Adam or Sylar won't make it - but one should survive. The obvious prediction is Adam will die - because the Fall has been his story, not Sylar's. But Heroes could be pull a switch and have Sylar dead. Not likely, because a lot has been quietly invested in his character this Fall ... but, you never know...

Non-super-hero heroes? I can't see Mohinder dying - his role in the series is unique. Mr. Bennet? I assume he can't be killed now, unless someone blows his head off ... it would be a wild twist to somehow kill him, anyway ... but, not likely. (One possibility, though, is that Claire's blood is not 100% effective in repairing him.) Elle's father ... I don't like the character and would love to see him go - but that's no indication that he will go. Possibly all of the above with survive.

Next week - and the next volume - should be good. I hope the number of heroes is at least slightly reduced, so we can have more of them in our fields of focus every week.

But this volume is ending up on a high note - and I'll be back with more next week.

Review of other Season 2 Heroes: Episode 2 ... 3
... 4 ... 7. Heroes Meets 12 Monkeys ... 9. How Immutable Are Fate and Isaac's Futures? ... 11. My Predictions Last Week Were Right!

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

Ten Reasons Why I'm Looking Forward to the Return of Heroes on Monday

Counting up from 10 to 1 ...

10. I have no knowledge or evidence of this, but I have a feeling we're going to see some cross-pollination between Heroes and other TV series this year, and I always love that in a show. (There was some speculation/suggestion of this between Heroes and Lost last year - I'm thinking about something much more explicit.

9. I like the comic-book overlay. It's fun to see the comic-book narrative get its day in the TV sun.

8. I find the proliferation of heroes and powers refreshing - who says a television series has to continue to deal with the set of characters and powers it first came in with? Life evolves, so should a television series.

7. I like shows that surprise everyone with their initial success. Great things often come from them.

6. I like the blend of art and science in the series. Most narratives either rely on art or science - on the allure of images or the power of statistics and scientific research. Heroes does both, and very effectively.

5. I'm an unabashed New York City chauvinist, and enjoying seeing the city through Hiro's enthuasiasm.

4. I like Ali Larter.

3. Mr. Bennet (well played by Jack Coleman) is a really complex, compelling character. The only thing predictable about him is his love for Claire, and that has led him to switch allegiances, and do some pretty bad things. This kind of intensity and motivation in a character is rare for TV.

2. I like TV shows in which a major, important character can be killed off unexpectedly. Not that I like seeing good characters die, but an unexpected death can really keep you on the edge of your seat. Only one TV series that I can think of put its major characters in such continuing jeopardy - V, the series (not the mini-series). But Heroes does it much better. The heroes are in continuing jeopardy.

1. I love time travel stories - in novels, movies, and television - especially those that take the paradoxes of time travel seriously, as Heroes and Hiro certainly do. Heroes has the potential be among the best time-travel narratives ever told.