I’m blaming the plot-freakishness on the writer’s strike and the need to wrap this the hell up. Please?
Oh yes, that bugged me. As soon as she started the sentence, I said the ending. Back to the teen emo crap. At least the acting in that story line is a little better than New Orleans.
Actually, I was disappointed in the acting throughout.
I don’t know why, but I thought ist was funny when Mohinder is sitting in the cab and decides to take out the syringes and blood just to look at them. Or more importantly, to remind us what he is up to. It was just so…expositional, without actual talking. I know the writer’s mantra “show, don’t tell”, but that doesn’t mean do it in an obvious and awkward way.
And can somebody tell me why they kept the virus around at all? Why not encase it in cement and drop in the Marianas Trench?
Probably the same reason why the CDC, as well as its Russian counterpart, still keeps samples of smallpox around.
Mohinder is the only person who really believes that the Company is up to good. They’re keeping the virus around for the same reason that they wanted to blow up NY last season. Because they’re the Bad Guys. That’s what bad guys do.
For all their vague efforts at moral ambiguity, Heroes tends to stick tight to its sterotypes. I’m half surprised that Bob doesn’t have a Persian cat to stroke while he monologues, really.
Okay, it actually appears that at some point the Company had a scheme to cause a disaster that would unify everyone and which the Company could then swoop in as the savoir to control everything. That was Linderman’s plot with Angela (and Mr. Devereaux?) last season. Appears to have been Adam’s plot with the virus, before. And may still be Bob’s plot now. Mind you, how this would all work out is as vague as any underpants gnome plot, but this is Heroes so we’re going with that apparently.
I don’t know, I thought the whole thing was alright. Yes, everyone’s stupid. They always have been, they always will be. They are, for all intents and purposes, comic book characters, so I’m willing to give them a pass on that. I just feel disoriented by how quickly they’re trying to wrap things up. Yes I know that this is kind of how they’d intended things to go in the first place, but I firmly believe that the Sylar/Maya/Alejandro story was going to go further and be the focus of the second half; what’s happening with that just feels like “Wait, what?”
I think it’s pretty clear that they really wanted to take the show in a slower, more plotty direction this season, and were thwarted by the writer’s strike, so now it’s just a whirlwind of trying to tie up every intricate little plot device they introduced, and it’s breaking my brain.
And I’m sad it’s over after next week. What the hell.
My bet is that the Company kept that strain around in hopes of finding a working antidote for it, releasing the virus to do its work, and just when all looks darkest for humanity… the Heroes Save The Day with a Miraculous Cure! But they never figured it out.
Adam, however, is just so pissed off and tired of the world after 400 years that he wants to break it and see what comes next.
They’ve never shown either Peter or Parkman being able to go into someone’s mind in a general fashion and troll for information. They skim immediate surface thoughts, usually those that are instigated by the read person’s being asked a question. Parkman couldn’t get around Noah’s thinking in Japanese last season. Parkman couldn’t get through Angela’s “get out of my head!” mindscream this season and, apparently, couldn’t get through whatever she was putting up to keep Victoria’s location from him (making him resort to his mind-push instead). Peter had no reason to read Victoria’s mind until after she’d shot him and IIRC she didn’t say anything about Adam’s wanting to release the virus before that. So even if he’d read that Adam wanted to release the virus in her mind, would he believe it? Why would he, in the face of Adam’s having generally been stand-up with him versus the woman who developed the virus and has already lied to him and shot him?
So while Peter may be too trusting and not the brightest, he still outshines, say Maya, who travelled from wherever it was that Alejandro was killed to NYC without apparently pondering for a moment that her devoted brother would vanish without even saying goodbye.
Bob has said several times that they want to use the virus to strip people of overly dangerous powers without killing them. Whether or not that’s the whole truth is up in the air but given the grave threat that most of the supers we’ve seen so far potentially pose it’s not an unreasonable goal.
But that is different than strain 138.
Meant to respond to this as well, and agree whole-heartedly. I am hoping that Nichelle finds out about Monica’s being in danger and unleashes Hell.
Never know when anything might turn out to be useful.
Peter has shown he’s reasonably able to turn on his powers when he wants them, even if they don’t always do what he wants – as witness, just this episode, when he managed to bring back a piece of paper from the future.
Victoria’s accusations were surely reason enough for him to have tried reading her mind again.
And even if not – Peter is abysmally stupid, after all – Adam killing her right after she said he was trying to kill her is ten times reason enough for him to have tried reading Adam’s mind. Even if he got the “Get out of my head! Parkman!” treatment, it would’ve told him not to trust Adam.
And he had the entire drive down to Odessa TX to do it – they were in, what, updstate NY? Canada? (looked like Vancouver-Caprica-Mongo, really). Peter has shown he’s not up to accurate teleporting, and as Nathan pointed out he’s not an airline, either. So they must have drove down there.
BTW, anyone notice how erratic the “driving” timelines are? Last season’s Ted-Matt-Noah roadtrip lasted long enough for one diner conversation. This season, it took forever for Annoying Lass and Dead Boy to drive out of Mexico… then in one episode, it’s Virginia-ZOOM!-NY. Adam and Peter go from “up-northish” to TX in even less time! It’s as if we could’ve squeezed the whole season into two episodes if Maya hadn’t kept stopping to kill all those people with the weeping and moaning and suchlike.
All scripts for all WGA projects that are going to get written any time soon have been written. What’s been written has been, or is getting filmed. What’s been filmed and edited is getting broadcast, and in most cases, all shows are just about out of material.
Once the strike is over, the shows have to resume production. Scripts have to be written, then filmed, then edited. If the strike ends too late in the year for the networks to think they can get enough advertising money to make it worth buying the end of seasons of shows, the rest of the year for a bunch of shows might get cancelled.
If this scenario plays out, the nets will need to plan for next year. They will need to strategize about how to get the audiences back that they lost showing reruns and reality shows all winter and spring. They will look at the ratings for show this year, renew the promising ones, and weigh the less promising ones against promising new shows. The least promising potential returning series won’t return. Heroes’ ratings have been down all season, and TV execs have short memories.
So while it’s a fairly good bet the show will come back some time after the strike, there’s nothing guaranteed 100%.
So it’s the volume finale. It may also be the season finale depending on the length of the strike. Depending on how the strike goes and how Heroes’ current fortunes are seen when the dust clears, there’s a small chance it could be the series finale. Hence hedging their bets by calling it the “Heroes Finale”.
You misunderstand. I’m not saying that Peter was incapable of reading Victoria’s mind at any time. I’m saying that what we’ve been shown of mind-reading on this show doesn’t support the notion that telepaths are able to go in and just wander around through people’s thoughts looking for whatever interests them. Telepaths have in general picked up surface thoughts that the person is actively thinking. I know about elephants for instance and have memories of seeing them but if Peter were trying to read my mind he wouldn’t pick up images of elephants unless I were thinking about them at the moment he was reading me (and I can assure you he would not be picking up one damn thought about no elephant). So if Victoria’s surface thoughts at the moment that Peter was reading her weren’t “Adam tried to release the virus in 1977 and he wants to try again and is using you to do it” but were instead “Odessa Texas” as they were, Peter hasn’t been shown as of yet to be able to follow that surface thought to its deeper associational link to Adam’s earlier scheme.
As for trying to read Adam after he killed Victoria, I’m still not convinced he’d think he’d have any reason to. Again, it’s the word of Adam, who from Peter’s perspective is the poor victim of the evil Company who was locked away for 30 years and who helped Peter escape to save his horribly disfigured brother, against Victoria, who from Peter’s perspective is a lackey of the evil Company that unjustly imprisoned Adam and she lied to Peter, tried to kill Adam and Peter and made something that will kill the world including the time-tossed Colleen O’Lassy.
I’m not saying that Peter isn’t being dim here or overly trusting. Just that he isn’t being quite as rock stupid as people are saying he is.
And Peter isn’t exactly in the most perfect state of mind either. I mean he is travelling through time, recently recovered his memory, has powers he doesn’t even know of, is concerned about the babe he just hooked up with and learned that basically 93% of the planet’s population will be wiped out if he doesn’t do something about it. Kind of a lot to process.
I’m officially disappointed with Hiro. He was cute last season. This season he spent too much time dicking around in feudal Japan and apparently while there gained full mastery of his abilities. He can blink to any place and any time effortlessly. And what does he do? Not much but blink around in the background observing things and finding things out and occasionally touching base with poor, underused Ando. Whatever happens next episode I expect Hiro to just bliink off on some boring, stupid lame fact-finding mission for the rest of the season. He’s really pretty useless. Give Ando some ability. Ando might actually do something.
The problem with Hiro is that he has way too much power. He could kill anyone, any time, unless there a hero who could detect someone coming at them through time and space. He could also destroy the virus the moment it is made. So he’s got to be kind of a douche bag blinking around doing stupid stuff, or the series is over.
And while that’s all true, I can’t help but wonder if it would have hurt hit to spend a few more moments of frozen time telling Peter exactly what’s going on with his buddy Adam over there.
Tough call. What’s important to the story, what’s sufficiently boring to relegate to a webcomic? About half of the Hiro-/Sylar/M&A story could have been told off-screen, in a comic. But that begs the question, what is important enough to put on-screen, what’s boring enough to tell in a comic? Half this season could be in a comic. They’ve taken way too long to get to where they are, and now it’s all supposed to come together next ep.
Another problem with last night’s episode - if Micah could talk the streetlamps into turning off, why couldn’t he talk the cars into not running?
That’s an easy one. He had to touch the streetlamp to get it to turn off. If he ran up to the van to touch it, well, there’s those guys with guns there.