Six months ago, on Heroes …
Eden had long hair. Peter became a male nurse. Nathan regretted buying a convertible. Claire received the cheerleader outfit that she wouldn’t take off for six months. Matt ate a dozen doughnuts. Hiro couldn’t save the waitress he had grown to love. Niki the recovering alcoholic took on her dead sister’s personality as an alter ego. D.L. wasn’t in jail yet. Papa Suresh wasn’t dead yet. And Isaac apparently wasn’t even born yet.
In this week’s Heroes, Sylar pointed his finger at somebody’s head and starting slicing the top of their skull off!!! That was awesome. You know, in a really sick way. It was just that annoying other cheerleader anyway, so it’s hard to feel bad. This episode is what I imagine the X-Men movies would look like if John Hughes wrote them. The popular girl who accepts the freaks & geeks (& gays) becomes the homecoming queen. But the bitchy homophobic popular girl is punched in the eye and gets scalped. (Cue Simple Minds song, “Hey hey hey HEY …”)
I enjoyed this week’s episode of Battlestar Galactica … even though I’m not entirely sure what happened. Or more precisely, I know what things happened, but not really why they happened.
This week on Heroes, Hiro falls in love with a waitress, Photographic Memory Girl. They flirt and bond like crazy, and in the end, he has to go back in time to prevent Sylar from making her a pop-top. So then where are they now? And why did they leave Ando behind?
Bold dramatic moves on Battlestar Galactica this week. Galactica boards the infected Cylon base star and learn about the virus. Once they determine that it can’t hurt them — Boomerthena included — Apollo immediately jumps to the harsh idea of using the virus as a genocidal weapon. When did he get so cutthroat? This is an idea I would have expected from Starbuck or Tigh, not him. Does Apollo maybe hold the Cylons responsible for his weight gain during the occupation?
In this week’s Battlestar Galactica, it’s clear that the writers are still doing the math along with us regarding the 12 cylon models. We don’t actually get an answer about the 5 remaining models, because Six gets interrupted just as she and Baltar begin talking about it. But the fact that the point was raised at all is promising. And I trust the answer must be interesting, based on Six’s pained expression and the fact that she didn’t seem to want to talk about it.
As for the rest of the episode, I’ll keep it short, because I’m posting late this week …
Heroes took an interesting turn and slipped away from the Sylar hunt into kind of an X-Files “freak of the week” mode this episode. Based on all the pins we saw on Suresh’s map, I wondered if/when this would happen. After all, they can’t all be heroes, right? As a mind-reader, Matt is even better suited to be Mulder than Mulder was. But if Clea Duvall isn’t going to get more than a guest-starring credit any time soon, I suspect that “Scully” won’t live long enough to build up any sexual tension between the two of them.
This week’s episode of Heroes confirmed for us that Eden is indeed working for Claire’s father. Although his surprised reaction to hearing that the “heroes” have been told to save his daughter made me think for the first time that maybe he’s not a bad guy? Is it possible that when everything shakes out, he could end up being the “Professor X” to this group of “mutant” misfits? I mean, he’s clearly deceptive and secretive … but I suppose that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s bad.
In this week’s Battlestar Galactica, the last of the new “summer webisode” characters bit the dust. Alas, poor Jammer, I knew him hardly at all. His death comes at the hands of a secret jury called The Circle, who declares him guilty of collaborating with the Cylons on New Caprica, and shoots him out into space, just as they’ve done with a dozen or so other collaborators in the past few days. The Circle is a creation of de facto President Tom Zarek, and when Roslin and Adama find out, it’s immediately shut down.
One of the many things I loved about this episode of Heroes is how it just went balls up and committed to a large multi-season plot arc in the first five minutes. Essentially, what Future Hiro spells out for Peter is that what’s happening now — “Save the Cheerleader” and whatnot — is only the tip of the iceberg for all of them, plot-wise. Get past this, and it’s a whole new world.