Heroes Volume Five, Chapter Seven: Once Upon a Time In Texas

At this point, eight episodes into the season, I should probably address how I’ve been numbering the episodes incorrectly -- or rather, how the show has been numbering them incorrectly, although I suppose it’s only fair that they get the final say. Even though we’ve had eight separate episodes, with eight different titles, tonight’s installment is Chapter Seven, because the first two episodes -- “Orientation” and “Jump Push Fall” -- are both considered Chapter One. So be it.

Am I stalling with minutiae before getting to the meat of the episode? Yeah.

Hiro, still wearing his hospital gown, travels back three years to the Burnt Toast Diner in Odessa, Texas to save doomed, pretty waitress Charlie. When a precocious kid catches him stealing a Knight Rider t-shirt from a nearby clothesline (excellent choice, Hiro), Hiro fills him in on his past history with Charlie. We flash back to scenes of their tragic romance, for the benefit of those viewers who never saw the first season. Aw, Heroes, that’s cute, but it’s an empty gesture: You haven’t picked up any new viewers since Season One. Really. When Sylar approaches, Hiro reflexively steps in front of the kid to protect him, which is a nice moment. There are huge problems with this episode, but it’s a good showcase for poor underused Masi Oka. Anyway, this version of Sylar has yet to meet Hiro, so he brushes past him and enters the diner.

At the carnival in the present, Samuel and Lydia worry about the failing health of Arnold, the old fellow who sent Samuel through time to meet up with Hiro earlier this season. Samuel makes tattoos of Charlie, Noah, Claire and Sylar appear on Lydia’s back. It’d be nice if Lydia’s power wasn’t so passive. There’s something a bit ooky about Samuel dictating what appears on her skin.

At the diner, Charlie serves coffee to Sylar and, with the aid of her super-memory, gives him a ton of details about the make of his watch. She also cheerfully fills him in on the nature of her ability, which is relevant to Sylar’s interests. In turn, he brings up the blood clot in her brain, mentioning that he understands how to fix things. Being Sylar, he’s totally creepy and off-putting about it. Charlie gives Sylar the hard sell for the diner specialty: Tahitian pancakes. Meanwhile, Hiro hides at the counter, silently observing them. Samuel sits down next to him.

And because everyone in Texas had a hankering for Tahitian pancakes that morning, there’s Noah Bennet at a nearby table, chatting on the phone with Sandra. He’s joined by a hot blonde lady. Oh, look, it’s Lauren, his partner at Primatech! You remember Lauren, right? From back in Season One? Played by Elisabeth Rohm, from Law and Order and Angel? Yeah, I don’t remember her either, but she must’ve been in those episodes, because it would be slipshod and crappy if they just shoehorned some random character into Noah’s first-season plotline from out of nowhere. Lauren and Noah mull over whether to start an affair -- she’s already rented a hotel room, just in case, but Noah is uncertain. Rest assured, this plotline is slightly more tedious and less necessary than I’m making it sound.

Samuel and Hiro talk about saving lives and changing the past and stepping on butterflies. Hiro is still gung-ho on saving Charlie; Samuel wants to make sure Charlie is worth it. Hiro wraps up his argument with Samuel and notices that Sylar has already left to murder Charlie in the stockroom. Before Sylar can lop off the top of Charlie’s skull, Hiro stops time. He carts Sylar away and stashes him in the baggage compartment of a Greyhound bus. But! He then frets that saving Charlie now means he won’t need to go back in time (again) to save her later, which means they’ll never have their romance, which means the whole space-time continuum will be messed up. He looks at the photo of Charlie celebrating her birthday tacked to the diner’s bulletin board and sees that he’s not in the photo, which means they never fell in love.

…You know, Heroes, it’s a bloody good thing you haven’t gained any new viewers since Season One, because anyone who hasn’t watched the original episodes featuring Charlie is going to be out to sea. I’m treading water here, and I’ve seen those episodes multiple times. Like, recently.

Hiro restarts time, then goes to confront his past self in the washroom to tell him he has to save Charlie. And Past Hiro agrees, and teleports off. And Hiro looks at the photo, and now he’s in it standing next to Charlie! The future has been saved!

(Remember watching Back to the Future for the first time, and chuckling at how cute and silly it was, and realizing it was the type of film where one shouldn’t think too closely about the details of its approach to time travel, and, even with all those caveats, still rolling your eyes at the scene where Marty starts to dissolve at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance because he’s been unsuccessful at helping his parents fall in love? The Heroes writers thought Back to the Future was a documentary.)

We revisit the first-season scene where Eden (hi, Eden!) and Noah try to convince Isaac Mendez (hi, Isaac!) to do more precognitive paintings to find out what happens to Claire at Homecoming. Noah, frustrated about the lack of progress with Isaac, storms out of the room and runs into Lauren in the hallway. Lauren kisses Noah, and they both giggle and blush. Hey, do you remember that episode of Deep Space Nine where they digitally inserted all the characters into footage from the classic Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles,” and all the actors had to wander around wearing those preposterous Sixties-era hairstyles and uniforms, and it was kind of awesome and hilarious? I have no idea why I just thought of that, although I sort of wish I had spent the evening watching Deep Space Nine reruns instead.

Back in the diner, Present Hiro introduces himself as Future Hiro to Past Ando and orders him to stay there and wait for Past Hiro to return from romancing… Future Charlie? Past Charlie? I’m lost. Would this make more sense if I’d ever read the Heroes tie-in novel Saving Charlie: The Untold Story of Hiro and Charlie?

Remember when Heroes was enough of a legitimate cultural phenomenon where they could get away with crap like selling tie-in novels? In hardcover, even?

Hiro hugs Charlie and tells her he’s going to take her on a vacation. She asks to go to Otsu, Japan, where Takezo Kensei was born. You know one thing this volume had going for it? The lack of Takezo Kensei references. Charlie starts gibbering random facts as her aneurysm starts to rupture. Hiro hurries back to the bus to get Sylar out of the baggage compartment, but Sylar has already freed himself. Sylar and Hiro have a zany standoff, with Hiro bopping around through time and space and Sylar just trying to lop his damn head off, until finally they strike a weird bargain: Hiro will tell him what he knows about Sylar’s life and death if Sylar fixes Charlie’s brain. For some reason, Sylar thinks this sounds like a good deal, and he performs a little telekinetic brain surgery on Charlie. In exchange, Hiro tells Sylar he dies alone after collecting lots of powers. Hard to know what Sylar thinks of this; I’m inclined to think that Season One Sylar would shrug and say, “Okay, cool. Lots of powers, huh?”

Noah drops by Claire’s pep rally, and the episode, which has been lurching and chugging along in fits and starts, comes to a full halt while Claire obnoxiously nags Noah about how being a paper salesman is such a lame job. We couldn’t go one single episode without Claire, huh? Not one?

We’re not done with the soul-crushingly dull scenes: Lauren and Noah meet in the hotel room, and Noah tells her he can’t go through with it, because he values her too much as a partner. They talk about how their human resources department forbids relationships between coworkers. We’re still talking about Evil Primatech, right? Primatch, which, at this point in time, was still being run by Evil Eric Roberts. Can you imagine Evil Eric Roberts giving a rat’s ass about his hired guns boinking each other on the side, as long as they showed up to work on schedule to perform routine vivisections on people with abilities?

Charlie, who feels like she cheated death, bawls Hiro out for letting future mass murderer Sylar go free. She calls him selfish for saving her and storms off.

At Primatech, Lauren gives Noah the motel key, wrapped in a note she wrote about how she had the Haitian wipe her memory of their almost-affair. I think “Hiro and Ando stop an Indian wedding” has some competition for the coveted Least Relevant Subplot award.

Noah sits next to Hiro at the diner. They commiserate, in Japanese, about how love is hard. Charlie approaches and apologizes to Hiro. She says she loves him and wants to run off with him so they can have their happy ending. When he follows her out of the diner, however, Charlie has disappeared. There’s just Samuel, who tells Hiro he’s taken Charlie back to the carnival in the present. Hiro angrily teleports them both to the carnival, but there’s no sign of Charlie. Arnold, the time traveler, has died of a brain tumor, which, like Hiro’s, was caused by his ability. His last action was to trap Charlie somewhere in time. Samuel will tell Hiro where to find her, if Hiro fixes Samuel’s past. He made a terrible mistake eight weeks ago, which he needs to fix before anyone at the carnival finds out about it.

Aaaaaaand we flash back to eight weeks ago: Samuel, looking like hell, apologizes to… Mohinder, who is lying dead on the floor.

Yes, Samuel. That does indeed qualify as a terrible mistake.