Heroes: Season 3, Episode 1 Review: The Second Coming

The Second Coming

Original Airdate: September 22, 2008

Writer: Tim Kring
Director: Alan Arkush

It’d be an understatement to say that Heroes has had a bad year. Its breakout season ended on an anticlimactic note and the second season was bogged down by unimportant plot lines and a lack of momentum. Before it could prove itself, the writers’ strike happened and cut the season in half. When the writers went back to work, Heroes opted not to return in the spring because their demanding post production meant too few episodes to bother. Adding insult to injury, Heroes had to stew in the breakdown lane figuring out how to get back on track as Lost was doing victory laps while blasting “Machine Gun” by the Commodores in their best season yet. While Heroes isn’t on Lost’s level, it still can be very entertaining (a similar analogy can be made between Prison Break and 24), but they lost their way. Not to mention the lack of momentum didn’t help this episode. However, this reboot has a lot of potential of reviving the popcorn fun of the first season.

The reveal that Peter from the future shot Nathan is pretty satisfying. In 2011, Peter (here after will be referred to as Future Peter) travels back to the moment where Nathan comes out as an evolved human. Apparently, this moment sets off a chain of events leading to a future where evolved humans are hunted and killed, and Claire wants to blow Peter’s brains out. I’m inclined to believe that Claire, despite dying her hair black to imply that she’s gone bad, is still good and that Peter is bad. Really Peter couldn’t go back a little further and convince Nathan not to go ahead with the press conference? He has to shoot him?

Contrast Future Peter’s tactics to Future Hiro. Future Hiro presumably spent a long time learning the rules of his time travel so as not to create a rift. He even makes sure to be careful how he words his warnings. Future Peter, however, shoots his brother twice within minutes of his arrival. It’s almost like that “Treehouse of Horror” where Homer goes crazy in prehistoric times after failing to reverse his mistakes in careless time traveling.

Future Peter messing things up in the present paired with Hiro’s brief encounter in the future bring up the important issue of whether time travel is an overused device on the show. So far it’s been done four times, three of them involving Hiro. While it is a valid complaint, the uses are brief (Hiro seeing his death) or done in an interesting angle (Future Peter as a major character). Seeing that two characters can bend space and time, this is going to be part of the show until both of them leave and that is unlikely.

Much like the one in “Five Years Gone”, Future Peter is more adept at using his powers than present Peter. He can transport people to different sides of the world like Matt or their consciousness into another person like Peter. He also helps override a lot of those plot contrivances where a problem exists only because Peter doesn’t use one of his powers, like him blocking Matt’s attempt to read his mind. It doesn’t explain why he doesn’t heal that scar, which is really more the classic identifier of who’s from the alternate reality.

This Peter also brings up interesting questions about his powers. Peter has so many powers and presumably encounters more that it’d be easy to be corrupted. The only problem he faces is decapitation, and several of his other powers can easily avoid that problem. So he gets greedy and thinks he can do whatever he wants, leading to disastrous repercussions.

After Nathan is shot, he is presumed dead when suddenly he makes a full recovery. Now how that is possible is left for some speculation. Future Peter doesn’t try to inject some of his blood, which would surely help like Claire’s or Adam’s. Then we see Linderman in Nathan’s hospital room. Since he can heal the wounded, it’d make sense that that’s what saved Nathan, except DL scrambled Linderman’s brain months earlier. Whatever the reason behind Linderman’s presence, seeing Malcolm McDowell back is more than welcome.

With his figurative but not literal bullet dodging, Nathan is thinking that he is “born again”. It may be a slightly annoying angle, but it does garner the attention of the Governor of New York, who sees him as a fitting candidate to fill the vacated space in the Senate. While the plans of Angela and Linderman in season one didn’t pan out, they may get their second chance here. Nathan may be willing to be plied for a higher power as he has for political reasons.

Not directly addressed in the premiere is Niki, last seen in an exploding building in New Orleans. Here she appears to be mistress of the New York Governor, under the name “Tracy”. It would be a safe assumption that this is another personality like Jessica or Gina, but the lack of explanation of how she got there, not to mention the missing Micah and Monica, raises some suspicions.

Hiro, who apparently runs his father’s company rather than his more involved sister, is growing restless and looking for another adventure. So learning that his father had a secret safe containing a formula that could create devastating consequences for the world that he has to protect and never open no matter what, his curiosity gets the best of him (as his father predicted), leaving it exposed and ready for Daphne’s taking.

Daphne, who looks a little too much like Kristen Bell, is poised to be a counter to Hiro. While she can’t stop time, she is fast enough to override Hiro’s ability and that is certainly interesting. She must have a way not to run full speed into a wall and liquefy herself. It wouldn’t be hard to believe she uses her power like Hiro’s and can actually slow time, enabling her to appear to be going at super speed. Whatever it is, it’s an effective way of stealing the formula, leaving two questions: who wants it, and how did they figure out when it’d be vulnerable.

Instead of going back to the past to ask Kaito what exactly is the formula and what does it do, he travels ahead to see if it is as bad as his father believed and witnesses Tokyo as it is literally collapsing. He finds another Future self arguing with Ando, who presumably kills him with a shot of red lightning. So this leads us to the likely conclusion that Ando will get a taste of this serum Mohinder’s concocting. It’s also going to make things awkward, as Hiro now believes that Ando’s going to betray him. That’s a good observation, but like Future Claire and Future Peter, looks can be deceiving. We’ve been told some of our heroes will engage in more villainous activities, and really Hiro would be the biggest fall.

It’d be a safe guess to assume that this formula ties into Mohinder’s serum of unknown powers. While Mohinder is ready to get on board with a breakthrough that could give anyone powers Maya, who somehow managed not to get hit by a bus in the first two minutes of the episode, serves as the counter to that argument. While some may get powers that serve a good purpose like regeneration, they could also get Ted’s and go nuclear. However, Mohinder could care less at this point and wants to take it for a test drive. While his power wards off his would be attackers, they are likely going to lead to major trouble, like what causes Tokyo to lose power and collapse in the near future.

In Kaito’s video, he mentions a “light” that can help avert the disaster this formula can unleash. Here it sounds almost certain that that light is Claire with her conversation with Sylar after he gains her power. While Sylar’s killed all his victims to steal their powers, he can’t do it with Claire, claiming she’s more special than the others and that she (and now he) can’t die. Sylar likely doesn’t know Adam’s exception to that rule where decapitation becomes unrecoverable, but maybe Claire’s regeneration has improved over centuries as one more advanced than Adam’s.

After two seasons, Sylar and Claire have the showdown Isaac predicted and Sylar gains her power. The Claire and Sylar scenes clearly mimic Halloween down to Claire hiding in the closet. This is reminiscent of the early Sylar stuff before Zachary Quinto was cast and detracts a bit from him as a villain. Also, how does Sylar blow up the light fixture?

Not to mention the complete lack of connecting Sylar in the gutter curing himself to him across the country at the Bennet house. This may have something to do with the strike curtailing last season. Originally Sylar wasn’t going to appear at all in Volume Three while Quinto was working on Star Trek. This could work, but with that cut storyline, his abrupt arrival feels like a rewrite without rereading thoroughly.

This is the first time Sylar’s power retrieval process is shown and it may be a bit disappointing. He just pokes at her brain until he finds the right spot. Then again, Sylar grabbing the brain and suddenly getting a rush of power wouldn’t work either. Sadly, those hoping for him to eat brains will never get their moment as he dismisses it as “disgusting”.

Sylar gaining Claire’s regeneration gives him another boost against Peter, even if Peter knows the one thing a regenerator can’t survive. By the end, Sylar reveals he has an ulterior motive for stealing the power besides the obvious. Sylar now has a “shopping list” of abilities of the most powerful, dangerous men The Company have under their control and now few have the power to stop him.

Unfortunately, the big reason behind Sylar’s shopping spree isn’t revealed in the episode. As staff writer Remy Minnick and executive producer Jonah Weiland said in a chat on CBR news, Sylar lost all the powers he gained throughout the first season except for his telekinesis because of the Shanti virus. This should’ve been included, or at least made more explicit, as it makes Sylar’s motivation more interesting than him just getting more powers for their own sake.

One of the big elements of this season’s advertising was the hype over Level 5 (“Where evil resides”, the ads promise). Here they are cells not much different than what we’ve seen in Primatech. Bennet is one of the prisoners, as if The Company would let him back with no reservations after what he’s done. Another, claiming to be Peter, is played by Francis Capra, who was on Kristen Bell’s previous show Veronica Mars. The one that I’m really excited about is Knox, played by Jamie Hector. Hector’s best known for playing Marlo Stanfield on The Wire, and he was stone cold evil on that. Every other character on The Wire had some degree of redemptive characteristics, but not Marlo. He’d kill anyone who looked at him wrong.

So while some things in this first episode don’t work, it’s a step in the right direction. The stories are moving ahead with enough speed that the uneven elements are easy to forgive, much like Heroes is at its best. Hopefully this season gels faster and in a more entertaining way than the last.

Overall Score: 7/10