"Heroes" - September 22, 2008 episode - season premiere

The third season of "Heroes" starts four years in the future, where apparently those with special abilities have been outed but have been put in camps and subjected to experiments, so many are now hiding underground. Peter runs into Claire, who tries to kill her, but Peter thwarts the attempt. Instead, he wants to stop the event that triggered all of this - Nathan's announcement. Back to present day when Nathan is about to announce his powers, but it's actually Peter from the future who shoots Nathan, to prevent him from making the announcement.

Nathan is at first thought to be dead, but his previous injection of healing blood is apparently still working, so he makes a miraculous recovery. He no longer wishes to make the announcement, and he says that he's met God, and that the special abilities are from God, and those with special abilities are like angels, and how can they be angels if everyone knows about them?

Peter is happy to hear that Nathan isn't going to say anything, and he reveals himself to Nathan, that he's actually Peter from the future, and that he was the one who shot Nathan to stop him from talking. He says that he's changed the future more than he wanted to now and doesn't know how to stop it and make things right, but he trusts that Nathan is going to do the right thing. Meanwhile, Peter has discovered that his mother Angela actually sees the future in her dreams, and she knows he's not her Peter. She tells him that he has screwed up everything and to go back to his own time.

Nathan's miraculous recovery and declaration of having seen God was caught on tape by a camera crew and then broadcast all over television, catching the eye of the Governor of New York and consultant/lover Tracy, who looks remarkably like Nikki. Tracy convinces the Governor that he should appoint Nathan as the new senator, since the previous senator died in office. At first, Nathan is stunned that Nikki is coming to visit him, but she puts him straight that she's not Nikki. Nathan thinks about the offer and ends up accepting, which makes Linderman, who has been visiting Nathan, very happy, but there's only one catch - no one else can see Linderman, so is he actually dead and just a figment of Nathan's imagination, or does he somehow have some kind of power to appear only to Nathan?

When Tracy was on her way to speak to Nathan, she was interrupted by a reporter (played by William Katt) who had a still shot of a web page from when Nikki was a porn star on the web. Tracy denied that it was her, and when she returns from talking to Nathan, the reporter is still there and says his story is about to run and shows her video footage of when Nikki (really, Jessica) was having sex with Nathan in his hotel room. The reporter's continued pushing finally angers Tracy, who is apparently ice woman because she ends up freezing the reporter, who then bursts and the bits of The Greatest American Hero left over just start to melt and go down the drain. He shattered kind of like the T-1000 in the second Terminator movie, but he didn't have the benefit of putting himself back together again. Guess that means he won't be in any further episodes. And while I'm glad that Ali Larter is back, I'm not crazy about the existence of Tracy. I'm willing to see how they explain her, and from the timeline, it doesn't seem possible that she could be Nikki anyway. The husband posited that she could be Nikki's twin, but then, we know that Nikki's sister died years ago. A couple of times, Tracy's denial of being Nikki seemed real, but by the end, it did seem like she was hiding something. Lots of questions I'd like answered just in this case alone.

After shooting Nathan, Peter-from-the-future pretended to be regular Peter, and he actually sent present-Peter into the body of a prisoner on Level 5 of the "paper factory". When Matt started nosing around too much, future-Peter ended up wishing him into the cornfield, except it wasn't exactly a cornfield, but rather a desert, which then turned out to be Africa, which was Africa-hot, and he was found by a native who knows his name and can apparently see into the future. I half expected him to hit Matt on the head and then tell him to forget about it since it's in the past. But it was funny when Matt thought the turtle was talking to him, and then the native asked why he was talking to the turtle.

Mohinder had sent Molly away to some anonymous place to keep her safe, and while Maya begs him to continue his experiments to try to cure her, he's ready to throw in the towel and go back to India. However, he ends up triggering her anger and sees her power come into action before she is able to shut it down. He figures out that his father was wrong, that the power wasn't in the blood but rather, exists in the adrenaline instead. He takes a sample from Maya and creates a serum that can actually give people powers, much to Maya's dismay, since she sees her ability as a curse. She is almost able to convince him to get rid of it, but at the last minute, he injects himself and then has a violent reaction. When he wakes up the next day, he discovers that he has super strength, and later, we learn that he can also do things like climb walls, and the serum apparently also makes him no longer shy but rather a confident stud and he beds Maya. The next day, though, he finds that side effects are now occurring, as he plucks out one of what appear to be multiple scales growing on his back. I'm just wondering though - isn't Mohinder a scientist? Shouldn't he expect that side effects might occur, and not immediately? Maybe he's just going to end up turning into The Fly.

Meanwhile, back in Japan, Hiro is now head of the company, and Ando is working for him, still concerned about money whereas Hiro misses having a mission. His family's lawyer delivers a DVD to him that his father had made for him, and when Hiro watches it, his father tells him that he has now inherited being the sentinel for a big secret, one that could destroy the world, and the secret is kept in his safe, which Hiro is not to open. You know what comes next, right? Hiro opens the safe and finds the envelope, and he finds that it contains one-half of a piece of paper which contains a formula. Just as Hiro is looking at it, a rush of air passes and the paper is gone. Hiro quickly thinks to freeze time and follows a trail to a woman who apparently has supersonic speed who had stolen the paper from him. She gets away, and Hiro has to figure out what to do. Ando suggests that he go back to the past to ask his father about the paper, but Hiro doesn't want to do the past thing again. Instead, he decides to go to the future to see the result of what happened. He teleports to some time in the future, where he sees the future of himself arguing with the future Ando over the paper, and in the end, Ando uses lightning to kill Hiro to get the paper. (Yeah, Ando doesn't have any powers, that we know of, at least, but with Mohinder's experiment, it's entirely possible that Ando could have been given powers. The husband thinks that it might not even have been Ando, but rather, someone morphed to look like Ando. Maybe we'll find out sometime. Or maybe not.) The events that Hiro sees in the future unnerve him when he gets back to the present, though he initially doesn't tell Ando about what he saw. He hires a company who ends up finding out that the intruder is a woman named Daphne who lives in Paris. When they're searching her apartment, Hiro finally tells Ando that in the future, Ando is a villain who kills Hiro. I find it interesting that Hiro assumes he's still the good guy and that Ando becomes the bad guy, but how does he know that he himself hasn't turned into the bad guy and Ando instead has to kill him to make it right? Hiro tries to con Daphne into giving up the paper, but she outwits him, but not before revealing that she's working for someone else in the quest for the complete formula.

Sylar has been keeping himself quite busy. He first pays a visit to Claire, and he cuts her forehead and has some kind of device in her and appears to take a part of her brain or something like that (I couldn't tell exactly what he was doing) and then is about to leave. Claire is confused that he doesn't kill her, and he says that she can't be killed, and now, neither can he. He also takes some files that belonged to Claire's adopted father Noah containing information on Level 5 inmates. Some "paper factory" people try to apprehend Sylar, but their epic fail is caught on tape, much to the displeasure of Bob and dismay of Elle. Elle later comes back to tell her father that she knows Sylar will come back to try to get to the Level 5 people, but Elle ends up finding her father dead, obviously at Sylar's hand. She goes to Level 5 and releases one of the prisoners - Noah - and tells him Sylar is there. Indeed, after Noah pumps multiple bullets into Sylar, he is able to heal himself and disable Noah and then goes after Elle. As he's cutting into her forehead, she has a massive electricity burst, which ends up disabling Sylar enough so that they can recapture him, but it also ends up shorting out the electricity in the building, so about a dozen prisoners from Level 5 are able to escape.

Claire is very shaken up by Sylar's visit, but she's even more disturbed when she discovers that she has put her hand on broken glass, and while she does heal, she tells her mother that she didn't feel any pain this time, whereas she always did before, and the pain was what reminded her that she was human. Still disturbed, Claire decides to tape another experiment, and she prepares to let an on-coming train hit her to see what happens, but Peter swoops in and saves her at the last minute. It's actually future-Peter, but he doesn't let her know that. When Claire returns home, she discovers her father there, and she's happy he's back, but she then realizes that he won't be staying. He tells her about all the Level 5 prisoners who escaped, and he says his job had been to find dangerous people like them and lock them up, and he now needs to do that again. Claire wants to go with him, but he refuses, and she tries to convince him by saying that people might come after her or her adopted mother or her brother. Noah says they've solved that problem and reveal that they've asked Claire's mother to stay with them and protect them.

Meanwhile, back at Level 5, Angela reveals that with the death of Bob, she is now in charge, and she summarily dismisses Elle. When Angela encounters future-Peter, she asks why he's there, and she tells him that prisoners have escaped. It turns out that future-Peter had put present-Peter into the body of one of the convicts who escaped, someone named Jesse. Peter/Jesse is now on the run with the other bad guys, but Peter/Jesse can't stomach the torture and murder that the others are committing. Back at Level 5, though, things get curiouser and curiouser as Angela announces to Gabriel/Sylar that she is in fact his mother.


I liked the episodes ok, but I'll admit that I started to get bored at the beginning of the second hour. I also found that they were setting up entirely too many questions and not really giving any answers, and they still have an incredibly large cast of characters (and they didn't even touch on everyone from last year yet) and even added a few new people, all things that I found annoying enough with "Lost" that I eventually gave up on "Lost". Seeing previews of coming episodes of "Heroes" sparked a little bit of interest in me, but not as much as I hoped for, so we'll see if I end up sticking with this show all the way through the season.

We watched/fast forwarded through the hour show before the premiere, mostly because they were supposed to do a re-cap, and I really needed that. I forgot that Linderman was dead and how he died, and I forgot that Adam Monroe was buried alive. However, I was irritated that they would show scenes from this season. Ummm, no, I don't want to see footage from the show that I'm about to see after this recap show is over. But the main part of the recap show that irritated me is that they indicated all the connections to "Star Trek" in the show (I hadn't noticed the NCC1701 license plate before, so that was cool), but while they mentioned all the people on the show who'd either been in "Star Trek" (like George Takei) or were going to be in "Star Trek" (like Zachary Quinto), THEY COMPLETELY DIDN'T MENTION NICHELLE NICHOLS AT ALL. What, they forgot she was on the show, playing Micah's grandmother, and she did so for more than one episode? Or did they somehow forget that she played Lieutenant Uhura in the original "Star Trek"? I couldn't believe they left her out completely! I am heavily stunned.