Excellent! Just the kind the stuff I watch
Heroes for.
More than anything this was Angela's origin story. Seeing the reason she emerged as the Black Widow was exhilirating and gives all new depth to her. Also makes me really doubt Arthur's story about Gabriel. Angela either saved Gabriel's life and hid him away, or was protecting him from the evil fate Arthur had planned for him.
Gabriel's story was pretty enlightening, too. After reviewing the S1 DVDs not long ago, I was struck by the disconnect between the Sylar who scrawled FORGIVE ME a hundred times on the walls of his secret room and the remorseless Sylar who emerged not very long afterwards.
I figured it was just one of those discrepencies that crop up in complex serialized shows and it would never be reconciled. It was a small detail, not something that really required and answer.
But now we know the connecting bridge was Elle and Noah's manipulations. Wow. And they remembered to have Sylar actually
say "forgive me" early in the episode to tell us which mental state he was starting with, and foreshadowing where he would be going. Now that's attention to detail that I can appreciate.
Especially with Sylar. So far we have learned in Season 3 that the reason he kills is because of "the hunger" and that he was manipulated by HRG. Sylar was awesome because he was so badass and he was proud of it. I'd rather Sylar made the decision to be evil instead of him being manipulated or having "the hunger" It makes his redemption much more compelling. But TPTB are attempting to sugarcoat his bloody past.
There's no retconning here. The writers are bending over backwards to explain the FORGIVE ME room, providing an explanation for a small detail I never even expected them to bother returning to. There has never been any statement that Sylar was in control of his behavior. On the contrary, there were continual hints from the first that he was not in control and that he was behaving like an addict.
I saw all the hints from the start, which is why I know for certain they were there for everyone to see. People liked the notion of Sylar being simplistically evil so they didn't catch the hints, but that's not the fault of the writers or producers and certainly doesn't constitute a "retcon." You just didn't want to see it. Well too bad because the writers aren't responsible for the audience's wishful thinking.
And this isn't sugarcoating, either. If Sylar has the ability to resist the hunger, then he
is responsible for his behavior. If he were simply insane, and evil in a simplistic manner, then he'd be off the hook. The writers are putting him on the hook, not pardoning him at all.
And if he were simplistically evil, why would he ever change his behavior? The only way for him to be redeemed is for there to be another part to him to return to. A simplistic lunatic only has a straight-jacket in his future. The writers are pursuing this story in the only way that makes any sense, unless they wanted to just kill Sylar around about now, because to keep him a simplistic villain this long would become tedious. Rather than kill off a character, they're thinking of a more creative option. Good for them. They kill enough characters as it is, and if they killed Sylar, everyone would be bitching about how unimaginative they are.
EDIT: another frustrating thing, they never got into why the Petrellis gave up Gabriel.
I am 100% certain that will be revealed in an upcoming episode. Do you want them to tell the whole story in one hour and then have nothing left over? We got some big massive hints in this episode about the likelihood of Arthur's story about Angela being correct, namely, it probably isn't one little bit. Why not relish this slow reveal way of storytelling? The biggest problem so far this season has been that the story is far too rushed. I am very happy to see them finally slowing down to a reasonable pace and letting the characters re-take the focus of the story, versus a lot of frantic, insane rushing around.
There seems to be a MASSIVE continuity flaw with this thread. I keep reading posters here saying that HRG made Sylar into a killer. Clearly you people were half asleep the entire time. Sylar was killing people before HRG came along. That's why HRG was there. He wanted to know how Sylar was taking the powers of his victims. The guy Daphne (the speed woman?) brought to Sylar was ALREADY ON SYLAR'S HIT LIST. Hello! Maybe someone needs to start firing a couple of you cats for your terribly constructed criticisms.
Precisely. Sylar was a killer and knew it before Elle and Noah entered the picture. He was trying to control himself and Elle just pushed him over the edge. Why does this mean somehow Elle and Noah are responsible for his behavior at all? If they had never shown up, maybe he'd gone off the rails on his own anyway.
And that was Elle, not Daphne, who provided lunch. But Elle was also the reason Sylar tried to get rid of the hit list temporarily. Because having any sort of human connection makes him feel "special" and therefore stronger to resist the hunger. This also synchs up with his behavior towards Mohinder when he was pretending to be Zane - he was still killing people but started to act like having a "friend" might change his attitude - and totally synchs with his behavior after he found his Petrelli family, which is like what he experienced with Elle and then Mohinder, except in far more complete a fashion because they represent the "important, special" family he'd always longed for - which he told Chandra about in "Six Months Ago" - and because Angela accepts him for what he is, which no one else has ever done.
This all synchs up to a very impressive extent, and far more neatly than in the vast majority of TV shows I watch. Most don't even attempt anything near this level of connectedness and complexity. The main problem here is that the producers know the details of their own show far better than the audience remembers.
But why was Elle so out of character compared to s2?
I'll give them that as a freebie since we only saw Elle for half a season as a less-than-major character. We saw one side of her and now they're fleshing out the rest. A good, solid, complicated character should take at least one full season for us to get a handle on. Beyond that, any details they want to add must have been foreshadowed earlier, like they've done very diligently with Sylar, regardless of whether people have noticed or been blocking out details they don't want to see.
