HEROES 3x06 "Dying of the Light" Discuss and Grade

^They've already done it themselves last season - Peter and Nikki both lost their powers at one point or another.

 

Zane's "metal melting power" isn't lame. First off, it wasn't just metal. He "melted" plastic, fabric and other stuff (there were half "melted" phones, lampshades, etc... around his apartment). His power is probably best described as destabilizing matter, or causing matter's cohesion to break down. We haven't seen it tried, but it would probably work on a person as well, turning them into liquid.

That means he could kill people (and get rid of the evidence) easily. He could break into or out of anywhere without a problem.

All in all it was a pretty good power. To bad it is gone and probably never coming back since the shows creator said that Sylar lost all of the abilities he had gained in season one (except for TK).

 

^And Ted Sprague's radiation manipulation.

 

I want Peter to get a new power that doesnt involve sponging a million other powers. Just a new power thats strong & maybe versatile but doesnt make him omnipotent. The same should be done for Sylar. And maybe cut Hiro's power down to just teleporting. I think having overly godlike powered characters on this show was(is) one of its biggest flaws.

 

How many episodes do they have Kristen Bell signed up for this year? Because from the looks of things from my perspective Kristen might think that Gossip Girl is a BETTER show more worth her time and investment?

 

You know that Kristen Bell is only the voice narrator for the Gossip Girls right? Bell can do that anytime over the phone. While being Elle requires her to take the time to actually show up on set, change into character clothes, and have someone do her makeup and hair.

Gossip Girls sucks. If I want to see rich bitchy teenagers I can see them at school.

 

Well they can't be fighting 24/7, so I want to see them bicker, try to cope with being brothers, team up in an iffy alliance, get on each other's nerves, and then go back to fighting. Mixes it up some.

But I could also do with a really good, significant battle one of these days. I still like the way Sylar figured out how to overcome Peter's invisibility via using TK to blanket the room with glass shards. But that kind of fight would be best orchestrated when they're both back to having multiple interesting powers because then you don't know what clever combination they might use.

The fight at the end of S1 really wasn't cleverly orchestrated, which is what I want to see. Ideally neither should be allowed to have super-strength which isn't a power that lends itself to interesting strategy. Just hitting someone, bah! TK, invisibility, freeze-power, electricity and metal-melting are good; time travel, time freezing and mind control are bad in the sense that they give someone too much power (unless both combatants have them).

What's everyone's thoughts on Gabriel's mysteriously secret birth? Are Peter and Gabe twins? That would explain why Nathan doesn't realize his mother gave birth to another son when he would have probably been about 10-12 years old. The original idea for the Petrelli brothers, back when they were the Campbells or something, was that they were going to be twins. Then the producers cast Milo & Adrian because they worked so well together but the age gap killed the twins idea. Maybe that idea was never really killed?

Re Baby Noah, spoilery info from eonline:

Spoiler: future ep

Who could he have know before? Maybe he was acquainted with Elle and didn't realize she was a metahuman. That would be more likely if the Company had been keeping an eye on him. There's also the outside chance it's Meredith. She does like those Petrelli boys, heh. For Sylar to be the daddy of his niece's half-brother is not strictly incestuous but still twisted, in a prime-time-TV way.

My hunch is that Arthur has a long track record of absorbing all sorts of powers with bad side effects so that the hunger won't trouble him much. And this would be mainly because i don't see what the dramatic use would be of making him eeeevil when he's already evil. For Peter to be hit with something like that makes dramatic sense but not for Arthur. They'll whomp up some hand-waving explanation why Arthur isn't affected.

And speaking of the hunger, the original reason why Peter needed Sylar's powers hasn't gone away - he needs it in conjunction with time travel to avert the catastrophe that is probably going to be caused by Vortex Guy's powers destroying the planet.

My hunch is that Peter will be powerless for a while and then regain his original absorption power. Just being near Sylar will cause him to reabsorb that power, but like before, the hunger won't be immediately activated until he wills the power to come to life (different rationale than for the other powers, but that seems to be the rule).

He will be confronted with the choice of deliberately tossing himself back into a situation he knows he will find hard to control, so it will be a much more dramatic choice the second time around. By that time Sylar will have progressed to being more in control so he can coach Peter to do the same, with I'm sure very mixed results.

I agree, it's an interesting power for clever strategies that I'd like to see these characters use more of. Show us more than just them hitting or zapping each other. And it could easily come back into play since there have been characters with similar powers before. I'm rooting for the return of invisibility, which doesn't require the return of Claude.

When Peter gets repowered, he just needs to have some inhibiting factor, such as using powers hurts him physically. Something that will make him stop and think whether X power is worth the cost. Sylar is already inhibited by having to control the hunger all the time. Maybe link this control more directly to the use of powers - he finds that control is easier if he lays off the power-use.

For Hiro, I dunno. I see him as comic relief and if he doesn't make a lot of sense, eh.

 

Likes:

Robert Forster as Arthur Petrelli


The African Precog

No Kristen Bell or Micah

Half-and-Half:
I'm still not sure about the daphne character - maybe its the weird Chiana-like shifting around. I warmed a little bit more to her but I still think its a poor match with her an parkman.


Dislikes:

Claire's ongoing "I'm mad at Dad" act - if she's such a mature young women you'd think she'd have more sense.

Turning Adam Monroe into such an easily defeated chump.

Killing Adam Monroe



General Comments:

Adam Monroe went from the Menace of season 2 to a comedic interlude. You'd think that as the oldest special that we know of to date that he would have not be so easily caught - if I could regenerate like that I would make sure to arm myself with time bomb just in case somebody knocked me out and put me in their van.

Also why would he necessarily start aging rapidly without the healing power? I would think that he'd just start aging under normal time since his power kept equilibrium until now.

One thing I do wonder is that so far I have assumed that Claire and Munroe's power were the same. Are they setting it up to where Claire's healing ability is superior in some way? Recall that sylar said that he didn't know if she could be killed... maybe I'm reading to much into it...

Also the thing with Adam begs the question - if Arthur is so evil then why wait until now to suck Adam's power?

It's good that the writer's have admitted exactly how Hiro's time travel ability makes for bad drama and precogs aside they should probably find a way to limit that ability with something stronger than Hiro's personal honor code.

Whether its niki, jessica, tracy, gina or whatever I just can't get into any of the characters played by Ali larter, she needs to go and be replaced with a cute brunette.

I hope they take the evil mohinder thing further and don't cheese out at the end.

 

School was a long time ago for some of us.

Considering the amount of narration she does each episode, I doubt that she is being paid too much less than the other actors who get face time. Now she can do her voice overs in a sound booth anywhere in the country and probably a few of the adjacent countries to America without too much hassle but she can hardly phone it in like she done did on Heroes.

I like the cunning evil plots in Gossip Girl.

I wish Heroes had plots even half as cunning or evil.

 

Mohinder still hasn't killed anyone innocent (dead drug dealer guy was bad) as far as we know. So they can change him back to one of the good guys if they really want to. But I think he should definately be punished for all the mad scientist crap he has been doing all season. Let's have Noah break Mohinder's nose again like season 2!

 

Let's lock Mohinder up on Level 5 and never hear from him again.

 

Mohinder is a good plot device. He takes characters, like Maya, that the writers have no idea how to move forward, and wads them up. I fully expect him to head down to New Orleans and wad up Monica, Micah, and Grandma Uhura; after which they'll never be heard from again (shame because I liked Monica, but she was used very poorly). And if the creators really had it their way, he would travel back in time with Hiro and wad up all of Season 2.

 

I'm actually a bigger fan of the New Orleans family just never making another appearance. Maybe Micah...

If Monica shows up, it should only be to either lose her powers or to die. She was annoying. I think it would be cool to find out that Mohinder has actually had her this entire time wrapped in a cocoon.

 

Isn't it justifiable? She watched her Dad drive an innocent man to suicide. She just can't handle the terrible choices he needs to make. Considering Vortex Guy and Sylar are both incredibly dangerous, his choices are not obviously wrong but I can see how even a mature 17 year old would not want to accept that the world she is growing into an adult in, is so dark and ugly. That would take a mature sensibility that has lost all youthful idealism and is veering into cynicism.

Maybe he'd prefer not to kill off Adam if he can help it? Adam could be useful in other ways.

Also, he could have solved his problem by glomming Peter's powers in lieu of Adam, since Peter must have absorbed not just Claire-style regeneration but also Adam-style (whatever the difference might be - anti-aging?) So why kill Adam just to preserve Peter's powers? I don't think Arthur is using his sons as power sponges. He wants them to have their powers in their own right and doesn't want to "wreck" them unnecessarily, so Adam was more disposable. But when Peter rebelled, Arthur couldn't trust him, so taking his powers was a defensive move.

I have a feeling Gabriel will be a more compliant son. He'll realize that following in daddy's footsteps is just the thing he's always wanted. And Arthur shouldn't have been surprised at Peter's rebellion or that Nathan is going to be no more tractable. Gabriel will now be the obvious successor, something I doubt Nathan is going to sit still for, and not because of envy either.

 

maybe just maybe for a regular coddled middle class western teen but consider that she herself was ready to shoot sylar, had been burned to a crisp and had her head opened up - you'd think her dad trying to get vortex guy to kill sylar would have made sense. Would it be cynicism or just the acceptance that reality is not all roses and teddy bears?

 

Sounds like a good character arc for her to embark on. She doesn't yet have the context she needs in order to understand what Dad has been fighting all his life and why. I hope she starts to figure it out but we need to actually see her evolution not just have it happen all at once.

And I don't think she was upset about Dad trying to murder Sylar as the fact that Vortex Guy, who was entirely innocent, was driven to suicide. She's all for fighting bad guys but balks when innocents are inevitably hurt in the process. The fact that Dad was willing to stab his erstwhile partner in the back might have been somewhat upsetting. In her mind, Dad was showing his corrupt side by accepting Sylar as a partner in the first place and then made it worse by trying to off him.

 

Is there a certain irony in the fact that the one hero/villain who could have arguably just up and cured Arthur is the one Maury Parkman was forced to employ for his subterfuge? I'm guessing Linderman and Arthur were NOT close or on speaking terms for the past few years....

 

The season one reveal was that Linderman's thungs/or and Linderman killed Arthur which meant that nathan had a crusade to go one to avenge his Pa... So since Linderman did that to Arthur, no they were not on speaking terms.

 

I'm trying to get the Linderman/Petrelli family connection timeline right in my head. As far as I can figure it is like this:

-Linderman and the Petrelli's are longtime allies, although possibly not friends.
-Word of Arthur Petrelli's connection to Linderman leaks out and the DA wants Nathan to pursue the case against Linderman & his own father.
-Linderman's goons force Nathan & his wife off the road to send a "message" to back off the case.
-Arthur Petrelli "dies" of a stroke before Peter and Nathan can turn on him.
-Something happens (not shown on the series) that gets Linderman to finance Nathan's run for congress. Linderman sends Nikki to seduce Nathan so he can blackmail him later.
-Linderman sends Nikki to kill Nathan.
-Linderman, Nathan & mama Petrelli work together to let Peter blow up New York.
-Linderman killed by D.L.


Is that about right?

 

Season 2? I wasn't aware that Heroes was on last season.

But seriously... Maya and Alejandro's road trip, Japanese Fedual Era sopa opera and West are probably best forgotten.