Gabriel absorbing Elle’s powers without removing them from her after Papa Petrelli said that’s how the power worked says to me that there’s a chance Peter still has his powers, but he’s such a doofus it’ll take him a while to catch on and start trying to use them again.
Holy crap. I just realized that the show actually made sense about something. Supposedly, Sylar had lost all of his previous abilities save the telekinesis and his own innate intuition (which is, apparently, being treated like an extension of empathy now). But in the future, we saw him go all Ted-like and blow away an entire city, which had made a lot of people debate how in the world that was supposed to have happened.
It wasn’t Ted’s ability he was using. It was Elle’s.
The show made sense.
I…I think I need to go lay down for a little while now.
No. That was Ted’s ability – they cut to a shot of a mushroom cloud, indicative of the Radioactive Caveman, not of Electro Girl.
However: Sylar’s future prognostipainting now could’ve come from the Magical Negro Friend by way of Arthur, instead of from Mystery Sock.
Actually, now that I think of it, Sylar can potentially get all of his powers back again and it most likely was Ted’s nuclear powers, plus Isaac’s painting. Arthur has Peter’s abilities, and he had absorbed Isaac and Ted’s abilities. It’s possible that Sylar’s other abilities could have been lying dormant somewhere in there, with both Peter and Arthur unaware of them.
Assuming this newfound use of his ability doesn’t make him as stupid as Peter, I’d think Sylar would eventually use it to take on Arthur’s abilities, too.
Maybe Peter’s ability has been the same as Sylar’s all along, just he actually had empathy this whole time (because he’s more of a whiny bitch than sylar, at least until this season), so he would just get the powers without going psycho.
If Peter had Sylar’s powers all along, that kind of invalidates the plot point of Peter needing to copy Sylar’s powers in the future, doesn’t it?
It is possible that Sylar or Peter has Arthur’s power, though.
First off: this week blew.
Second off: it’s weird how they keep trying to have it both ways on how powers are passed on. Sometimes relatives will have powers that are alike, which makes some sense because genetics! Or whatever they want that word to mean in the Heroes universe. But then other times they have bumfuck crazy random powers.
Like, okay, Sylar and Peter are both Arthur’s sons and can absorb powers. That makes some sense. Mama Petrelli didn’t contribute much there. But then Fire Chick and Flying Guy make a baby who’s a healer, when Fire Chick’s brother is very much a Fire Guy. So Claire neither flies nor fries.
They want to keep doing this “SEE YOU CAN SEE SOME LOGICAL CONSISTENCY HERE” thing with powers, while still throwing random shit at the wall.
Third off: If Sylar wasn’t just hungry for power, why did he spend the entire second season leaving a trail of bodies behind him while he searched for his powers? If you want to make him good, fine, but stop pretending he wasn’t evil! That’s bad writing!
[fanwank]
Hypothesis: Peter, Sylar, and Arthur have essentially the same power. The operating mechanism for each is different because of their natural aptitudes/personalities.
Peter is uber-empathy. cf. hospice nurse. He absorbs powers because he understands how they work – not intellectually, but intuitively. He’s so intuitive that his power can operate even without a conscious attempt at doing so. Sort of like people who can sense the “mood” of a room just by walking in the door.
Sylar is mechanically inclined. cf. watchmaker. He understands how things work in a mechanical/physical/intellectual sense; hence, he physically pokes around in people’s brains to figure out their powers and apply them to himself. Empathy/intuition are (apparently) not impossible for him, but it has been a severely underdeveloped skill up to this point. (His adoptive mother was kind of nutso, so I can see where he never really learned empathy. She kept pushing him to be “special” so he ended up with the idea that It’s All About Him.) (Points to the writers for making the point that gaining powers via empathy doesn’t yet allow him to master said powers with the same immediacy as the method he’s more familiar with.)
Arthur is a master manipulator. His way of understanding things is understanding them in a more clinical psychological sense – sort of a combination of empathetic understanding (without getting emotionally involved as Peter would), and intellectualism, ala Sylar. He’s also had a ton more practice than either of them. So not only does he understand the workings of others’ powers well enough to take them for himself, he knows how to shut them off in other people while he does so. Both Peter and Sylar could probably learn how to do that too, though Peter is really of an opposite temperament, and Sylar has no experience with it simply because his victims weren’t left alive when he was done.
(And theoretically I suppose, if their power amounts to “I understand how you work and can manipulate that”, it may be possible for Arthur [or Sylar] to turn Peter back on, so to speak.)
Hrmmmm…
[/fankwank]
Does anyone else just imagine writers for this show sitting in room with crazy diagrams and flow charts everywhere?
It’s like they are trying to keep the show going and make some kind of sense, but at some point someone just gave up and threw all the papers in the air.
No one knows what’s going on anymore.
From now on I’m skipping the show and reading Annie’s summary instead. It’s a lot more entertaining.
Or it could just be as simple as it’s passed on paternally and because Nathan was given a formula to get his random power, that meant that Claires was also random.
Claire then rolled a 49 on the D100 and using the X-men sub-table of powers that got her Wolverine.
I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.
Although I have my doubts about powers being passed paternally. DL’s phasing didn’t have a lot in common with Micah’s machine-talking.
I never understood that thing about going to get Sylar’s power. In the past, Peter just absorbed powers from whoever he got close to. In fact, he’d already done that to Sylar–That’s where Peter got telekinesis.
This mission to gain Sylar’s power is the only time they wrote Peter’s power-absorption as if Peter had to choose what he wanted to take on.
Since both Gabriel and Arthur seem to need to target their power, Peter should always have more abilities than either of them. Particularly if he runs into them occasionally, so he can take on whatever new stuff they have. Though he doesn’t know about a lot of the powers, and not all of them seem to come out intuitively when he needs them. They have the advantage, I suppose, of being aware of each and every trick they’ve got (though it’s unclear how many of Peter’s abilities Arthur knows about). Unless taking Peter’s power now allows Arthur to pull abilities out of the air…I wonder if he can fly now, even though he never touched Nathan?
I know those last 3 paragraphs contain more careful thought about these abilities than the writers have put in, so I guess I’ll just stay on the ride and see what they do next.
did anyone else catch the mother (her name escapes me at the moment) telling author to let her go. i bet that that is a power of hers and auther learned it from her.
They’ve already established her power as precognitive dreaming. If she has two, she’d be the first, absent a native/root ability to absorb powers from others.
Speaking of which - the electric shocks burned up his shirt - but not his pants. What’s with that? Asbestos trousers? In the first scene after she got done trying to flash-fry him, they were sitting together on the floor, and I actually tried to see if he was obviously wrapped in a blanket or something (yeah, I’m a perv). A few minutes later it was obvious that he was wearing real pants.
Anyone else thinking that maybe the Hiro/Ando sequence with 10-year-old Hiro just might have been a fantasy? The scene with the comic - that looked like one of Mendez’s comix - couldn’t have been done by Mendez, as that future didn’t exist as a possible outcome until after he was dead. I thought Hiro behaved about like a 10 year old boy would with those powers, though 
I can just picture the writers of the show searching the internet for posts like yours, and frantically scribbling notes on them. “Yes, yes, that’s what we’re doing - of course! We knew it all along!”
Was it just me, or was the shirtless scene with Sylar and Elle pretty freakin’ hawt?
Hey - I just realized. The show Heroes explains something about the new Star Trek movie: how Spock might be getting his mind-meld powers!
(for those who don’t feel like following the link - Zachary Quinto is Spock, though with MUCH nicer eyebrows. Seriously, dude, buy some tweezers!).
Yeah, I thought Sylar and Elle were about to get it on, which would (in my opinion) improve the series. The show is so freaking frenetic – yeah I’m following it (sort of), but it’s all over the place. I’m wanting some down time – I don’t know, say Sylar and Elle lying in bed after making love and explaining what the hell has happened and what the hell needs to happen or is going to happen. Too many loose strings, too many possibilities, too many “who’re the good guys and who’re the bad guys.”
By the way, anyone else recall that in the first season an eclipse caused the super powers? That was a new one on me. Maybe things will improve next time when the eclipse takes away the powers. All I know is I’m losing interest.
It certainly looks to me as though she can persuade people. They’ve hinted that she has the power of persuasion since the first season and there has been much speculation that that was her power. If anything, they’ve dropped the subtle and are being pretty overt about it now.