Let us not forget, that one of the two Fire Sibs is admittedly stupid. And the other one has not demonstrated any greater-than-Peter levels of smarts, either. Although she seemed considerably stupider in this episode than previously.
They actually are, in-character, dumb. (Unlike characters such as Mohinder, who are supposed to be smart, but so obviously are not.)
Exactly. They have super-powers, but their idea of a heist is to rob a grocery store, something they could have done with a couple of shotguns, with the difference being that they can walk outside, turn off the flame, and not be obviously armed & dangerous. Not villainous acts of epic proportions.
Actually, since whenever Arthur used his mental ability, they used the same visual/audio cues that they use for the Parkmans (and Peter when he’s using Matt’s ability), I thought it was a pretty good possibility that he did get the ability from a Parkman, we just don’t know who exactly. That’s what I was going on. Of course it could be that the show just uses the same effect for ALL telepathic abilities. Oh well.
I think Adam had to have known Arthur for a long time. Obviously Adam has been around a long, long time so he could easily have observed a young Arthur using his ability to absorb others’ abilities. It’s probably something that we’ll never see unless they decide to cover it in the online graphic novels, though.
Hmmn. So if Arthur can implant suggestions into people’s heads why go to all the trouble of changing Angela’s mind to hide the truth about his Evil Plan to kill Nathan when he could in fact just forcibly change Nathan’s mind in the first place instead? Grr.
Also annoyed by the continuing Sylar retcon as this week they totally ignored him murdering Chandra Suresh. Given we see Mohinder driving the cab having arrived to pick up his father’s ashes, as Elle leaves the apartment for the last time, this has obviously occurred sometime before his Big Choice of whether to kill Trevor the emo or not. I can see why they downplay it -kind of goes against this revised version in which Sylar only kills because he can’t help it, poor thing. Conveniently forgetting that Syar also kills non-powered people when they just get in his way or piss him off like Chandra or the car thief back in Season 2. Fine, except it meant that there was ever any hope of “saving” him as Elle was trying to do here - he’d already chosen his path by killing Suresh Senior.
Heroes used to my favourite show ever and I’m still enjoying this season but the lack of consistant charecterisation and clumsy retcons aren’t helping…
Double post. Sorry!
Well… Peter had to inherit his brains from someone, right?
And let’s face it, Arthur obviously hasn’t read the rules for evil overlords, has he? No 10-year old to point out the stupidities in his plans (like that one), tripped up by his loyal henchman who has the hots for his mind-controlled wife, has Maury the mind-controller working for him but waits over a year until Adam is out of jail so he can eat his power to heal himself, etc., etc.
But it looked like Arthur and Linderman were trying to keep their plan secret; if Arthur just went around using his power to manipulate people in conspicuous ways, maybe others of the original 12 would have recognized it and tried to stop him. And Adam wasn’t exactly wandering around in the open with a name tag on for anyone to find, either; he was out of prison for a relatively short time before being buried by Hiro; Maury was, at the time, still on his own anyway; it may very well be that Maury thought that Arthur was really dead at first. As for Sylar killing Chandra…well, he was going to commit suicide over the fact that he was a murderer (regardless of whether it was one or two murders that he had on his mind), and his Hunger was in fact what led him to murder Chandra; I think it all comes back to that.
Adam had been imprisoned by the Company. Arthur and Angela were two of the controllers of the Company. Arthur knew where he was – he was one of the people who locked Adam up!
And had Arthur convinced Nathan to stop persecuting Linderman, it would have had the same noticability as if Arthur had mind-controlled Nathan to stop persecuting Linderman. Whacking his son – successful, or not – brought more visibility to their secret plan, not less.
I don’t think it would have looked conspicuous - it would have looked entirely natural for Nathan not to take the case because of an obvious conflict of interest. It would also have seemed emotionally plausible given that we see in the Six Months Ago episode he was in fact going to change his mind anyway. It was only Heidi’s accident that changed his mind back. Besides, of their group it is really only Linderman who is on the spot to notice anyway - the rest are scattered across the globe or inprisoned.
Doesn’t Sylar just kill Chandra because he’s angry with him for rejecting him as being Not Special? I forget. And I’m not really arguing he’s a murderer - my point is that he seems to carry out a second murder offscreen during the same time period we see him wrestling with his conscience at the enormity of his first crime with Elle. After all, the timeline seems off for Chandra to be dead too when Elle makes her first entrance but I might be wrong there.
I think because planting thoughts in to someone involves “scarring” their mind, as Linderman explained to Mama Petrelli. Linderman healed her scars so she’d remember, while Adam would just heal them on his own.
Going off the same idea that thought implanting doesn’t work on healers, they didn’t actually know what Nathan’s power was. By this point, they had encountered two healers - a baby that survived a fire (Claire) and Adam. Hell, after the car crash, there’s a good chance they probably thought Nathan could heal, since there was no way he should have been able to survive it according to Linderman.
What seems odd to me is that Angela seems so nice and loving. Then once she finds out what her husband was up to and decides to murder him she becomes very cold and manipulative. But it just seems like she’s been at it for longer than a year. I wonder if Arthur had to keep implanting suggestions every time she started to get out of line to keep her nice and pliant?
It also makes me wonder if the story Arthur told Sylar about Angela trying to drown little baby Gabriel is true or if he was the one who decided to get rid of the baby so he could follow his path, go crazy and be useful to Arthur later on. He could possibly have made Angela forget there was a second baby up to the point Linderman healed her. Remembering everything he made her forget, not just the Nathan must die bit, could certainly be enough to turn her into the cold bitch we now know.
If they thought he could heal, what good is the car crash going to do?
what do you guys mean by retcon
Right, but I got the impression that the people left in charge of the Company (Linderman, then Bob, then Angela?) all were hostile to Arthur, so he wouldn’t have wanted to contact any of them, and Maury was in hiding at the time, and later was put on Level 5, so he wasn’t in a position to bring anyone to Arthur. So when Elle accidentally released the level 5 prisoners, Maury made a beeline for Arthur, having heard his telepathic call…Or maybe I’m getting timing mixed up. Work with me here!
And the point was made I think that if Nathan had been convinced to hand off the case, he could easily make the case for conflict of interest.
retcon… retroactively con-something. Basically means to put something into your story that rewrites a prior part of the story just to justify something new and different after the original story was written. So, in Season 1, Sylar was the Bad Guy. Evil to the core, soulless serial killer. Now that the actor’s playing Spock in the next Star Trek movie, and people are getting weirdly sympathetic to him because he keeps killing all the whiny supers we hate, they’ve started portraying him as a more sympathetic, likeable guy. Towards this end, they retconned the scenes with Elle having him be a fluffy, nice, likeable guy, even though he’s already killed at least a couple people in cold blood.
But Noah Bennet used exactly the same strategy when going into a bank against 3 of the worst villains all at once. OK, maybe he had a handgun. And in the flashback this time, Noah’s old boss (forget his name) used precisely the same strategy against metal-fist-man, and on and on.
It keeps working, but only because of extraordinary stupidity and not-killing-when-they-have-the-chance on the part of the villains.
I thought Arthur had tried to implant the suggestion into Nathan’s head, but it didn’t work for some unknown reason - remember that Linderman had asked Arthur to talk to Nathan before, and that Arthur had called Nathan back before oddly pausing and saying he looked good in a suit.
Agreed. It kind of made sense when he had the Haitian as backup… but without him, Noah’s looking to become Horn-Rimmed Stain on the Wall.
Retroactive continuity. This linked website has a lot of good description about what TV “stuff”. Came highly recommended from your fellow SDMB members.
You know how savantism often seems to involve a kind of tradeoff, like being able to calculate cube roots of 15-digit numbers in seconds while otherwise mentally retarded for all intends and purposes?
I’m starting to think Heroes-powers have something similar going on, and the price you pay is your common sense.
(Mohinder might just be an actual savant.)