Days of Future Past

That was pretty cool.  I was getting impatient with all the "The future might look like this?  He could be dating her?" crap, thinking, "Fine, but we're nowhere nearer to stopping the bomb," but then, and then . . . So the big revelation, for me, was that Ando is supposed to die in the explosion.   Yeah, the other big revelation, the one about the B-O-M-B and P-O-T-U-S, was awesome, mind-bending, scary, cool and smart, but the Ando revelation is possibly a bigger deal.  Both of the plot twists were effective, because they set the stakes -- what will happen if the heroes do not stop the bomb is pretty awful -- but we kind of know that one of those twists can't actually occur, but the other -- Ando could actually die -- as far as I know, James Kyson Lee is not on contract. 

Comments

[Mike]

I thought I was actually watching the show jump over the shark for the first half hour, but then the big reveal turned things around for me. And I don't mean Ando; who cares if Ando dies?

I don't want to sound morbid, but I'm hoping that a bunch of them die. The big bomb shouldn't turn out to be a GI Joe event, where they always show the guys jumping out of the helicopter with opening parachutes before cutting away. If none of these guys die, then where's the danger?

I really didn't like how this episode split everyone into good guy/bad guy camps. Of course it turns out that only Parkman was really a bad guy, other than he-who-we-always-knew-was-a-bad-guy. I'm guessing this means they will kill off Parkman, which I know you won't have any trouble with.

I was also sorta confused. Wasn't that girl who can shapeshift walking around with Parkman? And didn't they show her dead on the floor right before horn rimmed glasses realized that Parkman was going to betray him? And if she was still alive, how did Sylar get that ability?

[peter]

I agree that there have to be real consequences for them stopping Sylar and that one way of expressing that is by killing off one or two characters -- preferably a few pointless ones, like Mohinder, Parkman or D.L.

I thought what was neat about the good guys v bad guys dichotomy in this episode was how completely duped the "bad guys" were by POTUS. None of those people, it turns out, with the exception of the president, were really bad, they just had bad ideas about how to respond to the bomb.

I think that was Hana, the wi-fi girl from the Heroes comics, you saw -- not Candace. Pretty sure Candace is dead.

[Mike]

Maybe it was Mystique, I can't quite tell when I'm watching Heroes and when I'm watching X-men 3. It seems like I've heard this whole are-they-heroes-or-are-they-terrorists story some where before; oh yeah, it was every single mutant comic book in the last five years.

Sylar == Magneto, except Sylar is much more powerful (sorta) and much less interesting

Peter Petrelli == Wolverine. Yeah, he's rogue, powerwise, but storywise, he's Wolverine. Doesn't know if he's a good guy or a bad guy, doesn't really care, but comes through for his friends at the end. And he's the one guy that you really have to have on your side if you want to win; this makes sense with Peter, since he's the uber-hero. It makes less sense with Wolverine, since his powers are (omg he's going to say it) fairly lame, but again, storywise, he's extremely powerful.

Mahindra == Hank McCoy, minus the blue fur.

Parkman == I don't know, sabertooth? Parkman is kinda a throwaway character anyway, its like "who can we set up to be actually evil, hmm, how about that guy no one likes"

Hiro == Magneto, yeah I know I already used magneto, but this is the interesting Magneto. Maybe he's a terrorist, but its for the right reasons (right?)

Horn rimmed glasses == Professor X? He saves all the mutants, and he was acting very Professor X like when he directed Parkman in the break out a week ago.

Clare == pretty much any cute chick who turns out to not matter all that much, maybe Dazzler? No, wait, she's Rogue from the first X-Men movie: important to the villain, but otherwise, not so much.

I was happy to see that the torture scene didn't pan out like a regular 24 torture scene. Actually, I'd like to see some fan fiction laying out how last night's Heroes would have gone if it was on Fox. Ok, not really.

[Melanie]

I have to disagree with Claire not being all that important. She has been a driving force for almost all of the characters and the one person who's personality has not changed over the course of the show and it's story arcs despite going through some major issues.

I also think that there was some conflicting emotions that Parkman displayed showing that he wasn't completely "bad". I'm thinking particularly when he was waiting at the elevator and right before Nathan turned back into Sylar (hells yeah!). But that could just be because I heart Greg Grunberg a lot. Felicity? Sean and Megan!

And, dammit, where's Gay Zach?

[Mike]

I always thought the "Save the Cheerleader, save the world" bit meant that Clare would have some big role to play at the end. We don't know that she doesn't, of course, but last week's episode strongly implied that the saying really should have been, "Prevent Skylar from stealing the Cheerleader's power, so Hiro Protagonist can kill him with his big sword."

To me, that means Clare is more of a plot device wrapped around a power and not so much of a character. The fact that she hasn't changed since the show started demonstrates her lack of character-ness even more, I think. Especially when you consider how much the show revolves around her and how many life changing experiences she's been through.

[peter]

I think we've gotten some foreshadowing that Claire's part in the apocalypse is not over, for two reasons: 1. She was the big-deal dream Peter had in which he blew up. 2. Linderman wants her out of New York. Isn't that what was going on with the whole business with whether or not she was going to go to Paris with her grandmother, and Nathan finally telling her to go? I think Claire has to be in New York to stop Peter from combusting. How, I'm not sure.

I also think that Claire is relatively important as a character. She's pretty central -- related to both the Petrellis and Bennet -- and she's gotten a lot of screen time. I also think that, for a TV character, she's fairly round and has had an actual character arc, albeit one we only sort of saw. Didn't having powers and being friends with Zach somehow lead her to be a less shallow person or something? Plus finding her birth parents, losing her father, something something self-reliance something?