Heroes 4.16: The Trial of Hiro

A thoughtful, captivating Heroes 4.16 last night, mostly because of the trial of Hiro.

Actually, he's not really on trial, he's dreaming he's on trial during the dangerous operation to remove his brain tumor and save his life.  This could have been a pretty trite piece, but Heroes served it up nicely with George Takei back as Hiro's father and now judge, David Anders back as Adam Monroe and now prosecutor (a good night for Anders - he was also on 24), and Ando (of course) as defense counsel.  The trial featured some of the best meta-lines of the season, with Hiro mentioning "Law and Order," and Monroe chiding Hiro's defense statement for cribbing from the opening lines of Quantum Leap - "putting things right that once went wrong".  How can you not enjoy that sort of poke-at-itself television?  I certainly did.  And the substance of the trial - the charges against Hiro, that he was wrong to ever try to manipulate the present by changing the past - was pretty good too.  Trials are not uncommon in science fiction, from Star Trek to Dr. Who, but I don't recall ever seeing one quite as focused on the rights and wrongs of time travel as this one.   Could become a YouTube classic.

Meanwhile, Sam and Vanessa almost make it.  But they don't, and this sets Sam on what will likely be his final destructive course.   More interesting and surprising is the strange relationship beginning to develop between Sylar and Claire.   He tells her there are really alike.  She resists, and puts a pencil in his eye.   But he (of course) recovers, and by the end Claire is beginning to realize that the two may have some things in common after all.   Where this will lead is interesting - will Sylar become better (he's already saying he's not his old self), Claire become evil (which would be a significant development indeed), or both...

It looks as if Mohinder might be taking his final leave, when he says goodbye to Noah at the beginning of the show ... but in response to Noah's "I guess this is it,"  Mohinder smiles and replies, "in our lives, when is it ever."

You know, say what you will about Heroes, but I think it still has something very special.  I'd miss it if it was gone, and I hope that doesn't come to be for a long time.



5-min podcast review of Heroes

See also Heroes Season 4 Premiere: Metaphysics, University, Carnival ... Heroes Meets The L Word in 4.5 ... Heroes 4 Mid-Season Finale  ... Heroes Season 4 Resumes ... Heroes 4.15: The Chess Game Continues

See also reviews of Season 3 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? ... Season 3 Finale: Hopeful Deceptions

Reviews of Season 2 Heroes: Episode 1 ... 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

And from Season 1: Heroes in Focus ... Heroes Five Years Gone: Triumph of Time Travel and Comics ... Heroes the Hard Part: Only the Pictures Not the Words ... Heroes Landslide: Winnowing and Convergence ... Heroes Volume One Finale

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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

Heroes 2: Episode 9: How Immutable Are Fate and Isaac's Futures?

The best episode of Heroes so far season - Episode 9 - in which it seems that fate, or, at very least, what Isaac's paintings depict, can't be defied.

Hiro wants to save his father from being thrown to his death from the New York City terrace. Hiro travels through space/time from his father's funeral, where he is about to speak, to the NYC terrace where his father (Kaito - played by Star Trek's George Takei) is talking to Mrs. Petrelli. Hiro watches as they finish their conversation, then teleports/time-travels with his father back to the funeral. Hiro meets his younger self there, and realizes that his father was right to tell him that although they have the power of gods, they cannot act like gods and change fate. Hiro takes his father back to the terrace to meet his "inevitable" fate (Hiro does decide to stick around to see who killed his father). But, of course, the fate is inevitable only because Hiro acceded to it. A nice free-will/predetermination intertwining - one of the hallmarks of thoughtful time-traveling science fiction.

The second example revolves not around time travel but Isaac's paintings - in particular, the one that shows Mr. Bennet shot dead through the eye by Mohinder. Bennet stops that from happening, once, and then gets caught up in a double twist which was doubly satisfying.

Good story telling. But where does that leave us regarding the predictive powers of Isaac's pictures?

The fates they show have certainly been defied a few times prior to tonight - Claire was saved Peter last year, and New York City didn't succumb to a nuclear inferno.

But we've yet to see a consistent explanation of why the paintings sometimes depict unavoidable events and other times do not. Is this changeability of fate due the actions of the heroes - is it within their power to change what Isaac has wrought - or is there some other factor at work?

Either way, Heroes has got me interested. Last week's explanation about what happened when New York City was saved was late in coming, but much better late than never. And tonight not only played well with the paradoxes of knowing and trying to avoid fate, but brought in some good new elements such as Parkman's expanding mental powers, and a mystery woman who looked strangely familiar in that photo of the older Heroes generation.

Good material for the continuing story...

Review of other Season 2 Heroes: Episode 2 ... 3
... 4 ... 7. Heroes Meets 12 Monkeys ... 10. Penultimate in Fall ... 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

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