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.

Did you see the Heroes ads during last night’s Superbowl? (And how many of you recognized John Elway?)

On Team Heroes: I’m not sure I buy Peter as the quarterback, but Hiro as a receiver was lovely, and yes, nice touch with Sylar at the end.

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?)

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.

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.)

Ha! Last week I called that stunt with Hiro and Ando exactly right.

Go Sandra! I wonder if there’s a support group for parents of superheroes? Something like PFLAG?

Eric has some pretty twisted ideas of love. Not to mention dating.

Oh Adam. I imagine that’s pretty hard to recover from. Papa Petrelli is a life-leach. Explaining that might be challenging.

Meanwhile, Matt continues to talk to the turtle. (Actually it’s a tortoise. Although Matt may not know the difference.) And talking to Daphne. Daphne, who zips in and out of sight in a crowded public space without apparently exciting any interest from the people around her. Huh.

Nathan and Tracy visit Mohinder. And I have to wonder if Zimmerman also experimented on himself.

An injection “tags unusual DNA”? That’s an excitingly vague promise, Mohinder. Ah, okay, it’s actually the latest appearance of DARTH MOHINDER.

Daphne zips in and out of Level 5 without tripping security alarms?

Sylar is having a crisis of conscious, Peter is being a brat — stuck in demanding unreasonable accommodations and rapidly heading for a meltdown.

Oh Hiro, still the comic relief. Even as you make bad decisions. And incur multiple headwounds.

Eric is plenty creepy, but not very interesting, from a powers POV. Is there a point to this other than horror story put-the-women-in-danger? Okay, being a sadist with powers makes a villain. And wow, Claire recovered much faster than previously!

Daphne, you still got Darth Mohinder in touch with Papa Petrelli.

Superpower cage fight! Advantage Darth Peter.

Uh… freezing doesn’t automatically make things weaker. More brittle maybe, but not necesarily weaker.

I like Usutu. Except for how he’s being used as the Magic Negro.

Papa Petrelli knew that Peter was coming? Ah, he’s not life leech, he’s a power leech.

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.

—

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?

Oh, how great is this? Swiss pilot Yves Rossy crossed the English Channel via jetpack!

Yves is not quite Nathan Petrelli — he was wearing about 120 lbs of equipment, but hey! It’s a lot less cumbersome than most ways of flying!

Not quite Nathan Petrelli — but getting close!

A jet-pack and a wing (and a crash helmet) seem to work a whole lot better than just a jet-pack.

–ooh, bummer. He didn’t start from the ground, but bailed out of a plane at 8000 ft.  On the other hand, it’s very very cool that his body is the fusillage, so his head motion controls the direction.

“Jet Man” Crosses English Channel Like a Human Rocket.

Nat’l Geographic has a video.