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!

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?