Two interesting bits of Heroes news out today:

• Heroes is going even more multimedia than it has been (which is considerably more multimedia than most TV shows): for 10 weeks, Digital Spy tells us, NBC will offer graphic novels for mobile devices, interactive SMS synced to broadcast, and a $25,000 sweepstakes linked to the interactive story. Also, NBC is gearing up games and online one-minute scenes tied into the airing episodes.

• Meanwhile, Hugh Hart at a Wired blog has an intriguingly titled post: Heroes Stars on Season 4: Deathbed, Yes; Lesbians, Maybe. The entry includes a video and phone interview with Masi Oka (Hiro), and Hayden Panettiere (Claire). ‘Ware spoilers!

Thoughts on last week:
Peter, that was a truly unfortunate time to freeze up…

Also, how does Nathan know that Claire got onboard the plane?
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Hiro, Matt, and Mohinder, like hobbits hiding from the Black (Ops) Rider. Hobbits in orange coveralls.

Matt’s powers are pretty cool. But when did it change from drawing the future to telling him to go one way or another?

Noah Bennet can call in multiple missle strikes? Do you have any idea how much those cost?

Ah, okay, it wasn’t Mr. Bennet. It was scary Homeland Security guy. And I find it very hard to believe that Nathan didn’t expect the situation to spin out of his control.

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Daphne and Ando!

So how does Daphne get across oceans?
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Sylar. Yet another reason not to go back to New Jersey.

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Go Claire! Stop allowing yourself to be the excuse of the men.

Does Killer-Hunterguy have a name, or is he just the evil plot device?

Wait, wait, now Claire goes along with what Noah Bennet says?

“You can trust me, Tracey,” just doesn’t sound very convincing from the man who’s indirect body count must be into the dozens over the last 24 hours.

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Luke is microwave boy. Also being recruited to be Sylar’s sidekick.

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So: Daphne, Hiro, Ando, and Matt are, apparently out of the picture? Ah. An illusion? Or just something Nathan told whoever he was on the phone with?

Peter is going all guerrilla captain, with his posse.

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Carjacked Mohinder!

Why is Noah Bennet working with Nathan Petrelli? The Claire factor?

Matt the Prophet? And wow, that was fast. What was all the guff about everyone having only one power? Usutu has more than one powerl apparently, and no so does Matt.

Ando-cycle! Is a chick magnet! Hiro is trying to be Alfred to Ando’s Batman!

oohl Claire shows some agency! And Dad has a lot of explaining to do!

And ha! Peter can absorb people’s powers again.

I can’t wait!

Huh. Sylar gets to do the introductory voice-over.

Ooh, Peter! Good one!

Yay! After all the foreshadowing,

I’m glad we’ve finally gotten to the scene.

Although I’m not crazy about the horror-flick setup. (Then again, I hate horror movies.)

Oh Hiro! Woobie.

Knox and Peter, huh? Strange bedfellows.

<blockquote class=”right”>”Back in a Flash!” says Daphne before she runs off — very very quickly.</blockquote>

Yay Hiro, you saved yourself! And then you save yourself again!

Go Claire!

Huh. If you really want to trash a lab, trash the computers and the big equipment. Reagents can be replaced.

Huh. So a horse-shot full of adrenaline will make someone with powers loose control of them? Well, okay.  What else will adrenaline do?

“Everybody always roots for Peter, but he always ends up losing.” Oh really, Nathan?

Hiro, come on! We’re not going to have any superpowerless characters left., if HRG remains unpowered. Although figuring out Ando’s new superpower is a bit of fun.

Okay HRG, good plan with the glass! Bulletproof glass is usually glass layered with polymers (like polycarbonate). And the glass and polymer don’t expand at the same rate, which means that heating it causes internal stress.

Oh! Ando is a repeater! An amplifier.

Yes, yes, yes! “If you can travel faster than the speed of light, you can theoretically travel back in time” Thank you Matt!

Oh Daphne, you get all the best lines in this episode!

That doesn’t seem very Nathan-like. Although power appears to have corrupted him quite thoroughly.

Although Peter getting his powers back rocks!

Ooh, the hints for the next volume (“Fugitives”) look good! (Also look a lot like some X-Men story lines.  “God Loves, Man Kills” anyone?)

Oh, Kaito and and Mama Nakamura! Woobie!

What do you think, Claire and Hiro as a potential couple?
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Goodbye Elle! You were just getitng interesting.
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Peter faces his moral crisis.

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Whoa, whoa, Tracy is bullding an army, and talking “Intelligent Design”?! That’s … I’m…

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Claire offers to change the baby… but she already has.
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Wait, Sylar… you learned how to pick up abilities without killing….ah, but it feels better that way?
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Oh, come on Claire! You’ve been grilled my Noah Bennet a zillion times in your life! You should be able to BS him excellently by now!

Oh noes! My television is giving out!

But I got to see Hiro’s great family drama. So, wait… the catalyst went from Mama Nakamura to grown up Hiro, which means that it was absent from the world for 16 years? Oops. Nevermind.

Peter and the Haitian and talking about responsibility, sins of fathers (and brothers).

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Re Scott: Uh… that’s not informed consent. That’s the way to create a new villian.

Sylar and Elle, huh? Without powers but still thuggish enough to take what they want… sort of the new Bonnie and Clyde?

Noah Bennet as vigilante isn’t powerless. An ass, but not powerless. How long until Elle and Sylar get guns and this turns into a Western?

“All the wisdom of the world can be found in a comic book store!

The relationship between the eclipse and the the powers is may be, says Mohinder, “Gravity, electron density, maybe just a coincidence.” Okay, gravity yes. Electron density? What the heck does that have to do with anything? Next, he’ll be reversing the polarity of the neutron flow…

Okay, Daphne has a miserable horrible disease, and her powers improved her quality of life more than most of the others. But a disease is not a moral judgment, Daphne.

Oh, Hiro! The Hiro and Ando show has yet to get old. Best day ever!

Oh Peter! How satisfying is it that Peter finally saves Nathan? Been a long time coming.

Sylar: this is not the plan you agreed to. Also, why were you carrying Elle on her good side, rather than on the side of her hurt leg?

Oh dear… I wonder what the body count will be on this episode?

Wait, wait wait, Claire not healing means that her entire immune system fails?

Claire heals, even afer she was more dead than less. With lots of witnesses.

Yay! Re-powered Nathan and The Haitian (oh, this is killing me, not having a name for him! Even though they threw the “names have power” line in) come back for Peter.

Okay, why is the Haitian willing to attack his brother Samedi now, but not before?

Being a hero gives people hope. Go comic book store gurus!

Huh. Nathan makes the argument, basically, that everyone should have a gun power, rather than only a few who could use it as a weapon against the less-powerful. Which… hm. Okay, an understandable position. This was not a concern of his before now? He has been jerked around by the powerful before, although maybe not shackled… He never articulated it that way when he was the one whose family had money, and privilege, and a variety of super- as well as (for want of a better word) secular powers.

Nathan, the bonus points you got for acknowledging that Peter done good? You just lost them again by abandoning him in a different country!

Sigh. Sylar, on the other hand… While I can see him going evil again, I could wish for some more character development to lead up to it. Besides the familiar Noah Bennet mind-games. And I really would have enjoyed Sylar and Elle doing a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style rampage.

Hm. When Hiro decides to move people, he doesn’t waste time, does he?

Still… props for letting so many of our characters interact, and in ways that make sense!

So the eclipse is the deadline, and Claire is the catalyst.

Note to Dad: bonus points for teaching your daughter self defense. You waited until she was how old before starting? After she’s started dating, after people have attempted to rape her, shot her (multiple times), and stalked her through her high school? This is lousy forward planning. Also, during at crisis is not the time to motivate with mind-games.

Mohinder’s ability is to make his clothes turn to goo!

Mohinder is going Kafka-esque. His scales have gone away? I missed that part. Maybe he was becoming gecko-like? But geckos don’t use goo to stick to walls, and Mohinder is looking pretty gooey right now. Hey! Mohinder’s ability is to make his clothes turn to goo!

Welcome to Haiti, Nathan and Peter. Presumably in Haiti, the character has more of a name than, “The Haitian.”

Samedi is The Haitian’s brother. His skin is impenetrable, huh?

Okay, 10-year-old Hiro is silly, but he has a point when he’s talking to Matt: it’s not the size of your power that’s important: it’s what you do with it.

Okay, Mrs. Bennet, this is the second time I’d suggest you kick Mr. Bennet to the curb.

Okay, let’s talk eclipses. A full solar eclipse is when the moon is directly between the sun and the earth. The moon doesn’t shadow the entire daylight side of the Earth, so some places see a complete eclipse, some a partial eclipse, and some no eclipse at all.

An eclipse has two effects. First, obviously, the light changes. But for people and critters who are used to artificial lights, there’s some question of how much difference that makes. Second, the two biggest gravity wells near our planet are lined up on the same side of the planet, which means that we see bigger tides as their gravity pulls water (and solid ground, to a lesser extent) towards it. Most of the ocean’s tides are dictated by the moon (it’s much much smaller than the sun, but it is a whole lot closer, and the force of gravity falls as the square of distance), so an eclipse doesn’t create catastrophic tides, but it is a noticeable effect. Neither of these have anything to do with superpowers, though.

Zimmerman tells Tracy that there were three identical triplets. DNA manipulation. If there were three, then one, ideally, would be the control. Zimmerman is an odd blend of forthcoming and utterly useless. “We had no right” sure sounds … if not ethical, at least honest, but what’s that about “they made us forget”? Shades of The Haitian?

Matt Parkman has an aural breakthough thanks to our (Jung-reading) (but as yet unnamed) black character. What, are they going to call him, “The African” — sort of like “the Haitian”? While we’re at it, can we get a character just called, “The European”? Edited to add: Okay, according to the blog, his name is Usutu and they’re in Botswana. Was his name mentioned and I just missed it? When?

Peter and Future!Peter see people flying. So in the future, a formula to give people abilities, and Future!Peter thinks that people choosing to have abilities is what will destroy the world? That leap of logic seems… a little farfetched. Going with it, for now.

Future!Claire and Future!Haitian cooperate to shoot Future!Peter together so he can’t recover. But… doesn’t he recover once the Haitian leaves the room? Ah, one of those bullets is in the back of Future!Peter’s head, okay.

So badass Future!Claire and Future!Daphne and Future!Knox are off to track down Peter-from-our-time… why, exactly?

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Hiro in Level 2, and Ando finally gives him what for.

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Nathan shows some gumption in the face of ghost!Linderman. Okay, so what are the possible explanations for Linderman?

He could be a hallucination of Nathan’s, the proverbial devil on his shoulder. Nathan gets that himself, when he talks about brain damage from the shooting.

Linderman could also have discovered a variant of Claude’s power: he’s invisible (and silent) to everyone except Nathan. One wonders what would happen when the Haitian were nearby?

Other than that? I’m coming up empty.
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Mohinder has lost it. And what gets Maya a backbone now, when she didn’t have one before? Must be the spoiled milk.

Mohinder’s rash, aggression, transformation.

Seeing the bug skittering over the recorder seems particularly Kafka-esque. Ooh! Kafka? Metamorphosis?
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Domestic Sylar is terrifying is a deeply waffle-icious way.

And now Peter is being The Bad Guy. Driven on by o’erweening pride…the hunger to know more, to have more… very MacBethian.

I appreciate the watch-mending metaphor for figuring out how things work. But I have some basic problems with it.

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Matt and Daphne are raising Molly? “It’s time for you to slow down”? That’s a nasty thing to say to someone whose power is speed.

And okay, the images of a cracked planet are dramatic, but… yeah, not so much. The earth is pretty big, and pretty solid, and we can destroy all live on the surface without making much of a dent on the solidity of the earth.

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You know, freezing the phone really shouldn’t stop it from working… make the components more brittle, true. But phones are tested to fairly cold temperatures.

Oh Tracy. Oh Nathan.

Yeah, saw that one coming.

Talk about the most awkward first date ever.

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Wow. Mama Petrelli barely even has to try to manipulate Hiro.

Oh hey! Hiro and Ando do a turn as the Winchester Brothers.
Except instead of salting and burning, they’re exhuming… so it’s not so much Sam and Dean as Mulder and Scully, maybe?

Okay, Tracy might just freeze things, not turn them to water. You don’t add coldness to something: cold is just an absense of heat, and heat is kinetic energy. So Tracy’s power is pulling kinetic energy out of things very quickly. Without (apparently) pulling the kinetic energy out of everything. We have some technology that can do that: refrigerators and thermo-electric coolers. I think it was U. Penn. that had some recent work on new cooling systems?

Peter is stuck in the body of someone else. And although he seems to be thinking the same old way, he doesn’t have his old powers. How did that happen? And how did future!Peter shove him out? And where was Jesse during all that? And where was Peter’s body? Theorizing an explanation for that without resorting to “magic” is going to be a trick.

Mama Petrelli is shaping up to very evil indeed. Bridget, we hardly knew ye.

So Matt has found Isaac mark 2 (which is still time travel). One wonders whether there are two of every power?

Ooh, Sylar cleans up pretty. And snarky.

Micah! Still the cutest hacker ever!

So Meredith asphyxiates Claire, huh? I have some problems with Meredith’s power anyway, on a chemical scale, but I’m even more dubious of how airtight a shipping container is.

Dr. Zimmerman made clones, eh?

…the second coming of hubris and misplaced guilt, maybe. Although the show makers get points for quoting Yeats in the voice-over.

Future results are not always indicative of present performance, Hiro!

Advice to the characters:

Mohinder, darling, this is why we have peer review. To keep passionate researchers from going bugf— nuts. Also, you have lousy research protocols.

Hiro, have you learned nothing in the past two seasons? Future results are not always indicative of present performance.

Mama Petrelli, I’m glad we finally (finally!) get to know that your power is dreaming the future. But you have that terrible supervillian tendency to tell the good guys (and passing sociopaths like Elle) too much! However, I am glad that you have more lines in this episode than you did the entire first two seasons put together. I sincerely hope that your fierce bitchiness is a sign of a hero pushed into a corner, but given the show’s handling of women thus far… I am worried for your character. Especially if you turn out to literally be the mother of most of our heroes and villains.

HRG, not only is it stupid to refuse Claire’s help, but it is particularly bad parenting to suggest that your high-school superpowered daughter needs her biological mother to super-babysit her. (Also, if I were your wife, I’d be kicking your absent ass to the curb about now.)

Tracy: Ooh, interesting power! Although how you turn the reporter to water when you freeze him is sort of problematic. True, our bodies are mostly made of water, but what about all those inpurities like, say, hemoglobin? One wonders if Tracy’s ability to turn all sorts of interesting molecules to H2O is similar to the power that Bob had (say goodbye, Bob!) to turn all sorts of interesting molecules to Au?