I know a lot of folks are going ga-ga over this episode, especially Harry over at Ain't It Cool since Hiro referenced the Alamo Drafthouse showing Yojimbo, but for me it felt like the episode didn't add up to the sum of its parts. This was a flashback episode, and so felt very LOST-y, but it was a flashback only because Hiro accidentally teleported himself back that far, rather than the 24 hours he'd intended in order to save the cute waitress. And so the writers used the opportunity to give us a heck of a lot of "Secret Origins." The origin of psychotic hero-killer Stryker Sylar was interesting and apropos. It worked for me and filled in a bunch of gaps. However, there's such a thing as too much of a good thing--the writers crammed in the origins of half the cast's super powers this time out, and to me that's overkill. It's stretching the borders of credibility well past the breaking point that everyone discovers (or at least starts to manifest) at the exact same point in time. Dr. Suresh's list of names of potential meta-humans is just too convenient. Sure, we now know how Stryker Sylar is hunting them all down, but how did someone who's never manifested any ability previously (such as the Cheerleader) get on that list? It's cut from whole cloth. And the Petrellis... hoo boy. I know this is comic book logic, but for a series touting itself as a "real world" take on super heroes, doesn't it seem like a fast turnaround for Nathan Petrelli to go from an unknown assistant prosecutor working on bringing a organized crime kingpin to trial to a serious congressional candidate in just six months? And he just happens to discover his flight powers at the instant his wife is paralyzed in an accident.

I'm serious. That's as sloppy as Indiana Jones discovering his fear of snakes, scarring his chin, picking up a bull whip and wearing a fedora all in one two-minute sequence aboard a circus train. Would that all of life's formative experiences happen with such a flip-of-the-switch immediacy.

But what annoys me the most about this episode is the ultimate pointlessness of it. Hiro falls in love with his waitress but fails to kiss her and fails to save her. Fails to change the future. That's treading water in a narrative sense. Particularly since we've already seen that Hiro can change the future, and has already done so, in fact. I'm still holding out hope that his actions have somehow subtley altered the timestream in ways that aren't yet apparent, and that the waitress has indeed survived. But despite their overall cleverness thus far, I'm not convinced that the writers have that degree of wheels-within-wheels plot deviousness going on. We shall see.

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