Heroes Volume Five, Chapter Eight: Shadowboxing

A mostly joyless and charmless Heroes this week. To preserve my sanity, I’m giving it a bit of a lick and a promise. Rest assured that, even still, more thought and effort will go into this recap than went into Claire’s blasted sorority plotline.

Sylar tosses and turns in bed. I’m not talking about the cool, evil Sylar, mind you -- this is the fragile man-child Sylar who’s been hanging out at Samuel’s carnival. Still sleeping, he shapeshifts into Nathan. He wakes and gets dressed, visibly agitated, and wanders out of his trailer.

At the slaughterhouse, Claire and Gretchen manage to convince the other sorority girls in their rush group that Becky really didn’t turn invisible and attack Gretchen, and Claire really didn’t get impaled on a meat hook -- instead, Becky must’ve put hallucinogens in their water bottles. The girls buy it. Hey, why are college students in Virginia speaking with Valley girl accents? Just wondering.

Back at the dormitory, Claire wants to figure out why Becky tried to kill Gretchen. She decides to snoop around Becky’s room and orders Gretchen to stay put. Gretchen worries that Becky will try to kill her -- Becky might be with them in the room right now, after all -- but Claire spurts a few puffs of baby powder in the room as proof that they’re alone. This… is embarrassing to watch.

Claire visits the sorority, which is gearing up for a Halloween party. Halloween, like Heroes, is yesterday’s news. Claire’s fellow rushees don’t remember anything about the previous night, because their feeble brains have been wiped by the Haitian, who has arrived with Noah at Claire’s request. Aw, man, we so rarely get to see the Haitian! Please don’t squander him on this lazy, insulting, derivative plotline!

Noah searches Becky’s room while the Haitian goes back to the dormitory with Claire to neutralize Becky’s invisibility, should she try to attack Claire and Gretchen again. Claire casually calls the Haitian “Rene.” Rene? Really? That’s going to take some getting used to.

When Claire returns to her room, she finds Gretchen packing, having already booked her flight home. Gretchen says she’s leaving forever. Is that a promise? I’m going to hold you to that, Gretchen. Claire tries to convince her to stay, telling her she’s important to her, but Gretchen refuses, and the only thing salvaging this scene is that the Haitian -- sorry, Rene -- looks a step away from rolling his eyes in exasperation at the sheer tediousness of these two. Gretchen storms out, and Claire asks the Haitian to make sure she’s safe. He takes off after Gretchen. Don’t walk away, Rene!

Noah searches Becky’s room and finds a compass. Invisible Becky stalks him for a while, until he pulls a high-voltage stun gun and threatens to shoot her. She shows herself and accuses Noah of murdering her father when she was five years old. We see a flashback, and yep, Noah burst in to capture Becky and her super-powered dad, who tried to use some kind of force field to protect them. Noah shot and killed him, but couldn’t find Becky, who turned herself invisible. Okay, that’s awesome that they’re addressing that Noah was/is a bad guy, but why have they spent so much of the season downplaying his past misdeeds? Becky explains that she wanted her vengeance on him by murdering Claire… or, failing that, at least murdering a couple of her monstrously annoying roommates. Noah prepares to shoot her with the stun gun, but gets interrupted by the arrival of a couple of sorority girls.

Samuel knocks on Claire’s door and introduces himself as Becky’s uncle. He goes on his whole rambling spiel about how the carnival is family and how super-powered people need to stick together. Noah bursts in and pulls a gun on Samuel. He asks Samuel about the compass, which is like the one they found earlier this season, thanks to the key that was inside Danko (hey, that’s going to get explained somewhere down the line, right? Why Danko had a key hidden inside his flesh?), and Samuel mentions that Danko killed his brother Joseph. Well, now we’re sort of getting somewhere plotwise. Maybe?

Noah handcuffs Samuel, but Becky arrives and frees him. There’s a weirdly choreographed fight where Becky gets tasered by Noah and Claire tries to stop Noah from shooting Samuel and Becky… you know, I don’t know why anyone does anything that they do on this show anymore, and what’s worse, I’ve stopped caring.

Claire returns to her dorm room. She lies in bed, stares at the ceiling, and sighs deeply.

Samuel and Becky return to the carnival. Becky apologizes for messing things up with Claire; Samuel tells her it’s okay and promises she’ll still get revenge. Lydia announces that they have a big problem: Sylar is gone.

In his apartment, Noah has a bunch of newspaper articles posted on the wall. He writes “Samuel” on an article about the sinkhole that swallowed the mansion where Samuel used to live.

New York: Peter gives emergency medical treatment in the back of an ambulance to a man who was paralyzed in a train collision. Peter uses the healing ability he absorbed from Jeremy to heal him. At the hospital, which is in chaos due to all the accident victims, Emma wanders around in a daze and is generally totally worthless. This is someone who does not belong in an emergency room. At some point, she finds a surgical kit and starts stitching up a wound, which is a step in the right direction. Peter spots her, and they exchange dewy glances. Peter keeps growing weaker and weaker whenever he uses Jeremy’s power -- it drains out of him, and he has to wait until it replenishes. He asks Emma where she learned to stitch people up. “Clown college,” she replies, before admitting she dropped out of medical school.

Emma and Peter find a random girl randomly unconscious in a random supply closet. Dear Heroes: Please don’t be this half-assed. Emma diagnoses the girl with pneumothorax, and no, it’s never addressed why this girl’s lung collapsed in a supply closet. Emma tells Peter she needs to do an emergency thoracoscopy, which is a major, risky surgical procedure that apparently takes about eight seconds and can be performed without anesthetic on the floor of a supply closet, while a trained nurse with the power to heal anyone twiddles his thumbs next to you.

Later, Emma goes off on another of her Starburst commercials, playing the trusty hospital waiting room piano again and marveling at the colorful lights. Peter joins her. She shows him a photo of her nephew, Christopher, who drowned while she was babysitting him. Peter gives her a tiara and says “Meagan wanted you to have that.” I guess we’re supposed to conclude that Meagan is the girl whose lung randomly collapsed? He places the tiara on Emma’s head, and it’s so joyless and low-energy it hurts to watch.

Back at his apartment, Peter takes down the newspaper articles about his rescues that he taped to his wall. There’s a knock on the door, and it’s Nathan/Sylar. Nathan hugs him and tells him, “I think I’m in trouble.”

Matt, with Sylar in control of his body, moves through airport security at LAX. Sylar is headed to New York to see Peter to find out what happened to his own body. It seems like Sylar should maybe know Matt’s thoughts, seeing how they’re sharing a brain and all, but that’s not the case. Anyway, Sylar gets busted at the security checkpoint, thanks to a gun Matt smuggled in his suitcase.

Four hours later, after sorting things out at the airport, Sylar and Matt are driving across the country. They end up with a flat tire, which Sylar, in Matt’s body, tries in vain to repair. (Sylar: “Do you have any upper-body strength at all?”) A friendly tow truck guy arrives and offers to help. Sylar whacks him repeatedly over the head with the tire iron. Now that’s the Sylar we know and love: the rat bastard who kills even when it actively goes against his best interests (see: murdering Candice in Volume Two). Sylar orders Matt to keep in line, or he’ll kill more people.

They stop at the Burnt Toast Diner in Midland, Texas, where Sylar flirts with the waitress, Lynette, and orders the Tahitian pancakes. He reminisces fondly about almost killing Charlie here, then threatens to kill Lynette unless Matt tells him where his body is. Matt finally breaks down and tells Sylar the truth about how he and Angela and Noah conspired to make Sylar believe he was Nathan Petrelli (“Well, that’s just crazy,” Sylar says, which… yeah). Sylar, who doesn’t seem to realize he’s frantically doodling on a napkin, decides to find Nathan and get his body back, then kill every single person even remotely involved with the conspiracy. That’s sort of okay with me, actually. I pretty much despise Angela and Noah these days, and I’m not really feeling that kindly toward Matt, either.

Lynette clears away the dishes, and finds that Sylar, thanks to Matt’s influence, has written “I have a gun, and I’m going to kill everyone in here” on a napkin. When Matt and Sylar get outside, they’re surrounded by cops. Matt decides to do a little suicide-by-cop to take Sylar down with him, which actually is a much sounder plan than his big “I’ll drink Sylar out of me!” idea a couple episodes back. He pretends to reach for a gun, and the cops riddle Sylar -- Matt -- with bullets.

Next episode: Mohinder looks beautiful and gets murdered. Mohinder, my dear, you’ve been missed.