Heroes Volume Four, Chapter Six: Shades of Gray

Finally! At long last! Huzzah! After his interminable road trip, Sylar finds his real dad, who turns out to be a thoroughly creepy and cancer-riddled taxidermist. Sylar’s dad is played by the most awesome evil TV dad in the long and storied history of awesome evil TV dads, Smallville’s John Glover. This is exciting for many reasons, not least because it opens up the dizzying possibility that Sylar and Lex Luthor could be brothers. This would make a strange amount of sense, actually, and would be a whole lot cooler than last volume’s hastily-discarded revelation about Sylar and Peter’s fraternal bonds.

The air kind of goes out of Sylar’s daddy-murdering sails when he realizes his father is terminally ill, but he gamely tries to pick a fight with him anyway. Like Sylar, his dad can steal abilities from others. He’s also awesomely manipulative: he indirectly calls Sylar a coward and accuses him of leading an unsatisfying life, then somehow talks him into helping him gut a bunny.

While bonding with his dad over killing and stuffing small furry animals, Sylar (foolishly) demonstrates the healing power he stole from Claire. His dad pretends he’s not totally jealous of this, then riddles Sylar with arrows at the first opportunity. He hypnotizes Sylar with one of his myriad abilities and prepares to steal his power. Sylar recovers before his dad can cut his head open and frees himself. He taunts his dad for a while, then saunters off, taking his newly-stuffed bunny with him. Sylar is weird.

Nathan gets a call informing him that a drugged-up and panicky Matt is hanging out in front of the Capitol with a bomb strapped to his chest. Nathan thinks this is strange behavior, even for Matt, so he heads off to investigate. Matt reads the minds of the bomb squad to find out how to defuse it, then talks Nathan through the process. It’s not entirely clear why Matt doesn’t save himself a step or two by having the bomb squad take care of the matter directly, but I’m sure Matt knows what he’s doing. As soon as the bomb is deactivated, Nathan punches out Matt and apprehends him again.

Back at Building 26, Nathan gets cheesed off at Danko for almost blowing up the Capitol just to make a point about how people with special abilities are inherently untrustworthy. He threatens to have Danko fired. Danko is not overly worried. Danko is also becoming aware of the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Nathan -- who has a super-powered mother and a super-powered father and a super-powered brother and a super-powered daughter -- might be super-powered himself. Oh, Danko, you think?

The still-sweaty and shackled Tracy (Ali Larter, you’re a lovely woman, and I sure do feel bad for you having to do these scenes with that tube stuffed up your nose) receives a message from Rebel telling her that help is on the way. Danko interrogates her about Nathan. She tells him that Nathan a) has no ability, and b) is lousy in the sack. She’s not especially convincing on either point.

Danko then tries to worm Nathan’s secret out of Bennet. Just for kicks, Bennet sends him after Angela Petrelli. Angela taunts Danko with veiled references to shady incidents from his past and scares him off.

Nathan fires Danko and promotes Bennet. Danko, who refuses to go quietly, shoves Nathan out a high window and watches in grim satisfaction as Nathan flies off.

Danko returns to his apartment to find a freshly-stuffed bunny sitting on his table and Sylar lurking in the shadows.

Eric Doyle, operating on Rebel’s advice, breaks into Claire’s house, steals her popcorn, and asks for her help evading Danko’s goons. He claims he simply wants to go back to being a harmless and non-evil puppeteer. Claire, who is no fool (this episode, at least), tells him no dice.

Claire decides to take Alex’s old job at the comic book store. There then ensues a painful scene in which Claire is interviewed by the awestruck geeks running the shop while the (all-male) patrons gape at her. Ha! It’s funny, ‘cause girls don’t ever go into comic book stores, and guys who read comics don’t know how to deal with girls! The joke is even funnier now than it was three episodes ago! Hey, Heroes? You need to knock it off with this crap. No need to offend comic readers and women (hint: sometimes those two groups overlap!) for the sake of a hackneyed gag.

Danko’s agents locate Doyle. Rebel sends Claire a text message begging her to save him. Claire rescues Doyle and equips him with a new identity. Back at the Bennet home, agents burst in and hunt for Claire. Claire, meanwhile, hovers safely outside her bedroom window… in Nathan’s arms.

Los Angeles: Hiro and Ando arrive at the address on the “Save Matt Parkman” fax sent to them in India by Rebel. They encounter a frazzled babysitter, who mistakes them for her replacements and hands them a baby named Matt Parkman, who is presumably Matt’s son with his ex-wife Janice. I’m trying to keep an open mind, but I see no possible way a “Hiro and Ando take care of a baby” plotline won’t be dreadful. It’s like stranding Hiro in feudal Japan: some ideas are doomed from the start.

And the episode ends with Mohinderlogue! Aw, man, we haven’t had one of those in ages! Mo yammers on about fathers and sons or something, and it’s swell, but all I can think about is how we’ve now had two Mohinder-free episodes in a row, and how the universe is just a little darker for it. Not that there was anything wrong with this episode, but replacing the Hiro-Ando-baby nonsense with more scenes of poor shackled Mohinder getting buckets of water thrown on him would have really kicked it into a higher gear. But perhaps that went without saying.