HEROES: Four Months Later

HEROES is back! Yay! And it answered that burning question we all have: What happens to unemployed ALIAS actors not named Greg Grunberg? Well, if you're David Anders, you become the famed swordsman Takezo Kensei in 17th century Japan.

I've been hearing that these first few episodes of season two will serve as a jumping-on point for new viewers. Jumping onto what, I'd like to know. This episode was very, very continuity-heavy, and apart from Cheerleader Claire relocating to California, I couldn't see much in the way of coherent narrative for Heroes newcomers to grasp onto. Which is good, in that us faithful viewers aren't stuck treading water as the show repeats a bunch of "secret origins," but still.

Otherwise, I thought the episode did a good job of setting the balls rolling on quite a few interesting plot threads that may or may not converge by the end of the season. One thing I found annoying was the afore-mentioned character played by Grunberg having gone through a divorce in the preceding months. His tenuous marriage gave his character much-needed depth, and the move (while plausible) smacks of the showrunners getting tired of juggling his pregnant wife and simply writing her out of the script. On the plus side, the living metahuman radar system that's now living with him, Molly, is coming across more like a little kid as opposed to the badly-written dialog regurgitator she was last season. But does anyone else find it weird she's living with this guy who's not a relative, who was a police department washout not that long ago and presumably spent much of the previous four months in the hospital with multiple gunshot wounds?

Nathan Petrelli has the worst fake beard in the history of fake beards.

Mr. Sulu is dead. And he never even got his big sword fight. That sucks. The fact that his being thrown off a building to go splat on the sidewalk below is another nod to The Watchmen is cool. Except that we never saw his power, unless being a really good swordsman counts.

That Mr. Bennett and Mohinder are trying to play the players is pretty cool. It'll all end in tears, though. Mark my words.

Claire's new potential boyfriend-to-be, despite his goofy, aw shucks personality, is bad news I'll wager. His creepy flying voyeurism at the end of the show is deliberately evocative of a similar scene from last summer's Superman Returns, and I don't think they meant it to show that this guy is as noble as Clark Kent. The opposite is true for the new character of Maya (played by the same woman who was Calliso in the X-Men 3 movie). Her power is a nasty one--judging by the body count and blood on her victims, it's an uncontrollable area effect ability, perhaps sonic, perhaps vampiric. It's all vague right now, but unlike flyboy, who has a relatively benign power he'll likely use for bad, she's a person who hopes to purge herself of what she sees as a curse (and who can blame her?).

Finally, we see an amnesiatic Peter Petrelli chained up in a cargo container in Ireland, doing his best impression of Lightning Lad. Obviously, he survived going boom in the season finale, and in the interim has encountered at least one other metahuman from whom he absorbed these new abilities. I hope the amnesia bit isn't drawn out too long. I mean, really. That'd just be stretching credibility.

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