Dying of the Light

Finally caught up on posts. Highlight below:

We get to see Hiro kill Ando again, but from a different perspective this time. Here we see that Hiro stops time, travels to a prop shop and trades the real sword for a fake, grabs some fake blood, travels back in time to just when Adam started the fight and preps Ando for what is coming, then returns to the bar with Knox and Daphne so that he can pretend to kill Ando. Ando fakes dead long enough to convince Knox and Daphne that Hiro accomplished his task, but Daphne tears into Hiro for killing his friend. Hiro demands to see Daphne's boss, but she just hands him an assignment. He has to go retrieve Usutu, but it's going be hard since Usutu is a pre-cog and will see them coming.

After Daphne leaves, Hiro and Ando set off to Africa to capture Usutu, and they get frustrated pretty quickly. Hiro finds a painting of himself getting knocked on the head just before Usutu hits him with a shovel. Ando's brilliant plan is to go back in time and grab Usutu just before he knock Hiro out. Unfortunately, Hiro just finds another painting on the rock he's hiding behind and gets knocked out again. Finally, Hiro decides to do things the old fashioned way and wait. Usutu praises him for using his head rather than his powers and then challenges him to make a choice between taking him in and finding the villains that he has painted around the Pinehearst logo. In addition to the painting of the villains, though, Hiro sees a painting of Peter hugging his father…

Arthur is still in bed hooked up to all kinds of apparatus when Knox brings Adam in the room. Adam is not fearful at all until he sees Arthur. When Arthur gets Adam close enough to grab, he latches onto his wrist and Adam ages to the point of decomposition and then turns to dust. Arthur immediately sits up, removes the tubes and is completely healed. Obviously, Arthur has an ability similar to Peter's but with the cost of his victim losing their power. Since Adam no longer had the power to heal himself, his body aged to his correct biological state which is dust.

Peter tries to get inside Angela's head to see why she won't move or respond, and he only gets one image: the Pinehearst logo. Peter heads out to infiltrate the facility, and when he arrives, he is shocked to see Arthur. He asks what happened to Angela, and Arthur just tells him that they need to talk and give him a hug. The same thing happens to him that happened to Adam, it's just that Peter really is his current age so he looks the same. Now that Peter doesn't have any of his powers, this could be point where he gets the scar on his face. The question is, how will he get his powers back? And what did Arthur do to Angela? And what other powers does Arthur already have?

Daphne is out continuing to recruit for Linderman. Her current target is Matt Parkman. Coincidentally, Matt is also looking for Daphne, so when he sees her at the airport, he immediately believes that it is fate. He mistakenly tells her about his vision of them being married, and she responds that he's sounding like a stalker. Totally agreed here, Daphne. Anyway, she does tell him a little about what she's doing and Matt reveals that Pinehearst is going to get her killed. Daphne just says that she needs to keep moving and takes off to somewhere unknown. Matt does ask at one point what they have over her, and Linderman implies that they have some leverage on her. I wonder what it is? Does it have anything to do with her track medal? It does seem curious to me that her most prized possession is a track medal when she is certainly the fastest person that she's ever met.

In between conversations with Matt, Daphne zips over to Level 5, releases Flint, and tries to release Gabriel. Gabriel refuses to go since he's trying to "kick the habit" and Daphne just leaves a card behind for him to consider. I wonder how secure Level 5 really is when everyone seems to be going in and out of there willy-nilly. I'm hoping that when they really do catch these villains, we can come up with something a little more heavily guarded and protected than Level 5. That place is about as secure as an abandoned outlet mall. She also pays Mohinder a little visit, notices his collection of "specimens" or whatever he calls them, gets grossed out, and zips away. Is Mohinder going to join the dark side just to get an answer to his questions about the formula?

Claire and Sandra (one of them, one of us is the company motto after all) set out to find Meredith at Doyle's place. Unfortunately, Doyle does have the ability to control all three women at once. Soon, he realizes that they are all related to one another and so he chooses to play a sick game of Russian Roulette that involves them pointing a gun at each other and pulling the trigger. When it's Sandra's turn, she fires until she finds the bullet apparently killing Claire. Doyle thinks it's great since he doesn't know Claire can heal, and she ends up hitting him over the head with a chair to incapacitate him. Noah then arrives and is genuinely impressed with the fact that Claire brought him down. Claire doesn't seem to care much for her father's praise.

Interestingly, Doyle and Meredith's conversations before Claire arrived indicated that there was a previous showdown between the two of them. The way Meredith talked it sounded as if she had been involved in putting him in Level 5 to begin with, and that fits with her statement in the previous episode about knowing that Doyle was very dangerous. Additionally, Doyle talked as if he's had a long-standing crush on Meredith. If Meredith really was involved in that, then it would seem that she had been working for the company, and if that's the case, then why was the company after her to the point that she started a fire and left Claire behind? Also, how was she involved with Nathan and him not aware of her connection to the company? Hmmm….

Mohinder agrees to meet with Nathan and Tracy and tells them that he can help them. They realize too late that it's a trick and end up strapped down to exam tables. Tracy plays the damsel in distress card and lures Mohinder close enough to grab him. She gives him a little freezer burn (too bad she didn't go all the way and turn him into a caramel popsicle) before busting herself and Nathan out. Unfortunately, Mohinder recovers quickly enough to stop them before they escape. I'm betting that we are about to learn more about what's going on with Mohinder as we see the conclusion to their confrontation.

Angels and Monsters

Sorry it's been so long since I put up a new post. I have been watching the show, and I've got back to back notes on the last two episodes. Highlight below to see more:

Nathan handles the opening narrative this time rather than Mohinder. I don't know if that is significant or not, but it is a first for the series. Anyway, Nathan is still trying to work out the details of how Linderman knew that Tracy would jump from the bridge. Linderman just claims something about God as if he might be an angel or something sent to help Nathan find his way. Of course, we know differently since we saw Maury walking around Pinehurst toward the end of the episode. Obviously, Maury is planting the image of Linderman in Nathan's head to get him positioned for his current boss: Mr. Arthur Petrelli.

Nathan and Tracy both find out in conversations with Angela, though, that God has nothing to do with this. Angela explains that Dr. Zimmerman worked for the company and that he specialized in creating synthetic powers. He was instrumental in giving both Tracy and Nathan their powers. Nathan and Tracy are both very upset over this and decide to go visit Mohinder to find a "cure". Nathan tells Tracy that he's both trustworthy and harmless. Well, a lot has changed since the last time Nathan visited the lab.

How is Arthur still alive, and what is his power? We don't know the answer to either of those questions at this point, but we do know that Angela is very frightened when she sees her "dead" husband in an apparent dream. I think it was more of a vision presented by Maury rather than a dream, but her fear raises the question of whether it was really Linderman that "killed" Arhtur. Perhaps it was Angela. Or even Angela and Linderman working together. Also, in the dream, Arthur promises Angela that she won't be able to move when she wakes up, and that seems to hold true.

Whether Angela is good or evil is still up for debate. She may want to use her sons as weapons, but then again, she might genuinely be trying to help Gabriel overcome his hunger. In the previous episode we see that he finally was able to control it, and that may be directly related to her intervention. Peter is certainly not in the mood to wait and find out, though, as he goes straight for her head when she enters the cell with him and Gabriel. As a result, Peter is left in some sort of coma (perhaps induced) while Gabriel and Noah leave to capture another escapee.

Claire is on the hunt as well, and happens to be headed to the same place as Noah and Gabriel. Claire gets there first and learns that Canfield may not be the monster that is portrayed in his file. He seems to be just a man that hasn't yet learned to control his powers well, and Claire naively trusts Noah to just talk. In the end, Canfield sacrifices himself rather than kill Gabriel for Noah, and Noah and Claire are again divided.

I forgot in my last notes that Hiro had gotten Adam, and it played into a humorous exchange in this episode with Hiro repeatedly returning him to the casket in order to assure his assistance. Adam takes them to a bar that is supposed to hire out specials, picks a fight, and uses that as cover to escape. The only problem is that he escapes right into the hands of Knox. Knox and Daphne are working together to help build Linderman's team (really Arthur's team through Maury's manipulations), and the try to recruit Hiro. As a challenge to Hiro's claim to be "bad ass" Knox tells Hiro that he has to kill Ando. Surprisingly, Hiro stabs Ando with a sword. We'll have to see how that all works out since Ando is supposed to be alive in the future to kill Hiro.

Daphne is not very happy about this turn of events and lets Linderman know when she returns to Pinehurst. Did you notice that the Pinehurst logo is the same "God Send" symbol from the previous seasons reversed on itself? Anyway, Daphne figures out that Linderman is not real, but she doesn't quite know what to do with that. She's left with a mission to find and recruit Matt Parkman. Apparently, that's how they will at least meet so that they can later be married.

Mohinder is still busy working on whatever he's working on. For a light snack, he cases and then abducts a drug dealer and puts him in one of his cocoons. Maya realizes what's going on and in the process of trying to free one of the captives ends up being captured herself. For all of the goofiness of this storyline, I can at least say, thank goodness Maya is gone. The question is still out there, what exactly is Mohinder doing? What is he becoming?

Finally, Meredith is out looking for Claire and assumes that Claire went after a different target. Meredith goes to visit Doyle and ends up getting trapped. Apparently, he's some sort of puppetmaster and can make people do whatever he wants. Sandra had assumed that Meredith found Claire, but when the realize that that wasn't the case, Claire is determined to go find her birth mother.