Heroes Volume Five, Chapters One & Two: Orientation/Jump Push Fall

Double episode, folks, so this is a long one. The fourth season (and fifth volume) kicks off with carnival owner Samuel, surrounded by his band of misfits, burying his brother Joseph and monologuing in a distinctly Mohinderesque way about people with special abilities over a montage of scenes from previous seasons. None of the scenes include Mohinder. Just thought I’d point that out.

It’s six weeks after the events of the season finale, and Claire is off to college. She moves into her dormitory room and meets her snotty new roommate Annie, who is taken aback that Claire got into a (presumably prestigious) university with a GED. Annie is a grade-A twerp, but still, that’s a fairly astute observation. Claire informs her that she got really good test scores. Later, Claire gets overwhelmed by her linear algebra placement test and walks out. Ah… Claire? Remember that C-minus in biology you yammered on about in the first season? Still planning to stick to your “I got really good test scores” story? Claire meets fellow Texan Gretchen, who: a) knows all about Claire’s involvement in Jackie’s murder back in Odessa, and b) definitely comes down on the wrong side of creepy.

Noah visits Claire in her dorm. Nothing happens. Really, nothing. It’s this odd vortex of nothingness. Moving on.

Claire attends a mixer, where she and Gretchen make fun of Annie and play Guitar Hero. Watching other people play video games in real life is boring as snot. Watching other people play video games on a television show? Excruciating. Awful. At this point, I was an eyelash away from turning off the television, going to bed, and never thinking another thought about this damn disappointing show. When Claire returns to her room, she discovers Annie dead on the sidewalk, having apparently fallen out of the window. Even though the police find a suicide note, Claire suspects murder. In that inimitable and loveable Claire fashion, she gets sullen and self-righteous with the cops.

Sandra visits Claire at college, and yet again nothing happens. Look, it’s perfectly plausible that both of Claire’s parents would come visit her at college, especially in the aftermath of Annie’s death, but if nothing of importance happens, we don’t need to see it.

Claire and Gretchen decide to find out who killed Annie. Gretchen suggests swiping a cadaver from the medical school so they can replicate Annie’s plunge to see if she was pushed or jumped from the window. In the middle of the night, Claire jumps out of her dorm window to test the trajectory of Annie’s fall. She lands within the chalk outline of Annie’s corpse, suggesting Annie really did commit suicide. She looks up and sees Gretchen watching her.

Sullivan Brothers Carnival: Lydia, a naked tattooed chick who can show prophetic visions in the patterns on her back, reveals a picture of Danko to Samuel, who has a moving tattoo of a compass on his wrist. Samuel sends his henchman Edgar to kill Danko. When Edgar refuses, Samuel stains Edgar’s wrist with ink, which spreads up creepily and magically to his throat.

In Tokyo, Hiro and Ando set up a side business (Dial-A-Hero) dedicated to helping people in need. For their first assignment, Hiro and Ando help a girl rescue her cat from a high platform. Ando falls from the platform, so Hiro freezes time and saves him. When he unfreezes everything, he freezes himself into a comatose state for a while. He resists Ando’s attempts to take him to see a doctor: he’s has already seen one, and he knows he’s going to die soon.

There’s a little plot detour about Ando’s crush on Hiro’s sister Kimiko, who has apparently loathed Ando ever since he accidentally dumped a slushy on her at a carnival fourteen years ago. Hiro remembers he met a fortuneteller at the carnival who told him he would become a hero, which was the incident that set him on his current path. While he’s pondering this, Hiro accidentally teleports back in time fourteen years to Samuel’s carnival.

In the present, at the carnival, Lydia produces an image of Hiro on her skin. Samuel tells an elderly man he’s found someone who can help them fix the past. The old man sends him back in time fourteen years. At the carnival, Hiro is approached by a younger version of himself, who asks him to take a picture of himself with Kimiko and Ando. Dude, hasn’t Hiro encountered various young versions of himself about eight times by now? After young Hiro scampers off to the fortuneteller, Samuel approaches Hiro and introduces himself, saying they’re going to be great friends.

Samuel encourages Hiro to correct the past. Somewhat accidentally, Hiro prevents Young Ando from dumping the slushy on Young Kimiko, then returns to the present and finds that the timeline has indeed been altered: in the new timeline, Kimiko and Ando have been a happy couple for years. Hiro decides to devote the remainder of his life to undoing all his past wrongs.

Angela Petrelli meets Sylar-as-Nathan for sushi in a very long and very tedious scene, in which Nathan babbles on about how he’s determined to change himself for the better and Angela tries to convince him he’s having a midlife crisis. Later, alone in his office, Nathan moves coffee mugs telekinetically and shoots blue lightning from his hands. Freaked, Nathan calls Peter, who ignores his calls.

In Los Angeles, Matt Parkman is now back together with Janice and helping her raise Matt, Jr. He’s also an LAPD officer again. He fields a call from Angela, who wants Matt to do another mind-whammy on Sylar to make him continue believing he’s Nathan, but Matt refuses. He’s being haunted by a psychic manifestation of Sylar, who keeps taunting him and threatening his son and being a general nuisance.

When the apparition of Sylar shows up at Matt’s addiction support group (Matt is addicted to mind-reading, apparently, which is almost as cool as Willow being addicted to magic back in late-series Buffy), Matt yells at him like a crazy man. Matt and his partner, who is played by Simon the Cylon, interrogate a drug suspect, but Sylar won’t stop taunting him. Matt goes bonkers and yells and throws a chair against the wall, which perturbs Simon the Cylon. Watch out for that guy, Matt. He’ll steal one of your ovaries if you’re not careful. (Eh, skip it. A little Battlestar Galactica humor there. My apologies). Back at home, Matt acts like a creep to the good-natured water delivery boy, who has established a friendship with Janice. While Sylar gloats, Matt bribes the guy to never visit Janice again.

Angela calls Noah, who is currently living in D.C., to warn him that Tracy Strauss is murdering people involved with Building 26. When Noah gets in his car, it floods with water and ice. Danko arrives and saves Noah from Tracy’s wrath by shooting out the windows of his car. Danko wonders how Tracy survived after he shot her last season. I’m kind of wondering how Danko is out wandering around after Sylar framed him for murder, so let’s call it even. Seriously, Heroes, there’s not a whisper of a mention of the whereabouts of Mohinder, and yet Danko is still kicking about? Low blow, Heroes. Low.

Tracy confronts Noah in a sushi bar for an overly long and tedious scene in which they talk about redemption and Noah offers to get Tracy her life back. Kind of a long, talky episode. Not bad, just… long and talky. Later, Noah meets with Danko and tries to give him a buttload of money to stop hunting Tracy. Danko refuses, so the Haitian pops up out of nowhere and wipes his brain. When Tracy shows up on Danko’s doorstep to kill him, he doesn’t recognize her. Edgar shows up and knifes Danko to death in super-speed. Edgar tries to hack Tracy to bits, but her freezing power protects her. Edgar zips off.

New York: Paramedic Peter Petrelli leaps and hops his way through back alleys in a distinctly superheroish fashion to reach a pregnant woman trapped in a wrecked car. Even though he saves her, he mopes and complains to his long-suffering partner, Hesam, about how he almost wasn’t fast enough to save her. There’s a chapter in The Emerald City of Oz where Dorothy encounters the Flutterbudgets, a magical race who spend all their time moping and panicking about things that didn’t happen, but could have happened. Peter is a Flutterbudget. Anyway, Peter has been living like a recluse and doing a whole bunch of super-powered rescues, thanks to the powers of strength and agility he absorbed from Mohinder. Yeah, that’s our only reference to Mohinder’s existence in this entire two-hour block of Heroes. I have no comment, other than to point out that the world is sometimes a dark and empty place.

In D.C., Noah burns his dinner in his crappy apartment. He calls Sandra, but hangs up when a strange man answers the phone. Tracy summons him to Danko’s apartment, where Danko lies dead. Noah rummages around inside the wounds Edgar made in Danko’s abdomen and finds a key to a safe deposit box. Tracy refuses to get involved further, so Noah picks up Peter and takes him to the bank. They open the box and find a broken compass. Edgar bursts in and attacks them, but Peter absorbs Edgar’s super fighting skills and fights him off. When Peter touches the broken compass, it springs back to life.

Later, Peter responds to an incident report and finds Noah Bennet badly injured, having been attacked by Edgar, who stole the compass. Tracy visits Noah in the hospital and shares some clam chowder with him.

Edgar returns to the carnival and tells Samuel he met an empath (which the closed captions decided to translate as “impasse”, which… sort of works, too). Tattoos of all the various heroes (I mean, not Mohinder, naturally. Let’s not get crazy here) magically appear on Lydia’s back...

Much as with last season's finale, I'm not quite sure yet how I feel about this episode. Parts interested me, parts dragged. Overall, did I like it? No, but I'm bearing in mind that I haven't liked much of anything lately (except last week's episode of Psych. That was kind of awesome), and the problem might be with me, not with Heroes. Maybe by next week, I'll have mellowed my current anti-Heroes stance.