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?)

Backstory, ho!

Okay, so hold on a minute. Meredith makes flames and Clint makes fireballs? That’s the sort of related talents that I’d expect from people in the same family, but that aren’t shown in other families, like, say, D.L. and Nikki and Micah, or the Petrellis.

Mention of Claude! I’d love to “see” more of Claude! We like Claude.

Ooh Trevor, emo short-lived glass-breaking boy. And his finger-directed blasts could be done, relatively easily, with a focused (or soliton) sound. Although it’d be easier with antenna, or some sort of wave-shaping. [Edited to add: really, sound is far from the only option. He's just delivering energy, in some form that we don't see or hear. So it could be sound beyond our hearing -- and probably at frequencies above our hearing rather than below. Or Trevor might be using infrared light to heat the glasses so quickly that they shatter. Or radio waves -- if he could focus them to a fairly high energy and used waves that were resonant with the size of the glass, that could, conceivably, shatter the glass... I don't know. ]

Ooh head-ripping-off — that’s pretty gruesome, Papa Petrelli.

So… so far as we can tell, Hiro and Matt are the only superpowered characters that haven’t changed their stripes in the course of the show… (well, Claude, too — he’s always been grouchy.)

Okay I have problems with the premise, the binary choices of angel or monster, hero or villain.

Ooh, Meredith dissing Sandra Bennet for not being superpowered? Not the point, lady! People are people.

Hiro lacks some subtlety, but he does have some hot moves.

Ooh, Linderman talking to Daphne… but other people don’t see him. I think he’s using a version of Claude-vision. (No, no, he’s an illusion. Ah, welcome back, Nightmare Man!)

Mohinder = Shelob. Y/N? Discuss

Wow, Mohinder is really upping the bodycount of this season. And what is that… did he
cocoon the neighbor? Like a spider, pantrying meat for later?

Ooh Vortex-Man! How in the world would that work? (And who is Pinehearst?) Vortex-man apparently can create quite a sucking vacuum. Hm. Opening a wormhole into space? The amount of energy required would be phenomenal. And why couldn’t some of Sylar’s powers couldn’t mess with Vortex-Man.

Cantina scene! Specials for hire! I wonder if Wolverine is in the corner. Adam set that up rather nicely.

Of course Zimmerman worked for the Company. Synthetic abilities explains a lot. Gene therapy, without oversight or patient consent.

Oh Maya. Have you ever had a boyfriend who wasn’t a murderous superpowered wacko?

“A world of dangerous people” — is what we have always lived in.

Wow, this is like “The Revenger’s Tragedy.” Everyone is either a user or used, and usually both.

Aw, adieu Vortex-man! I hope the other end of the vortex put him someplace nice. Throwing oneself into a Cuisinart of one’s own making to avoid being used as a murder weapon is undoubtedly heroic. Phyrric, but heroic.

Wow, Daphne and Knox don’t even have to try particularly hard to manipulate Hiro.

Hm. That doesn’t seem at all like Hiro. Although… he can stop time, change swords, add a stage-blood pack inside Ando’s shirt, and tell Ando to fall down “dead”… alas, I fear Hiro may not be smart enough to do that. More his style: maybe he thinks he can come back “later” and get Ando to the hospital before he bleeds to death?

Puppet-master guy has Meredith, oh noes! How is his puppeteering different from Sylar’s telekinesis, though? Or Eden’s mind control?

Ah, Mama Petrelli is fighting Papa Petrelli! It’s all a particularly ugly domestic dispute!

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?

—

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

—

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.
—

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?
—

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.

——

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.

–

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.

—

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?