Heroes 4/30

Cafe Society
81

[QUOTE=AndrewL]
Here’s my theory.

My theory is that Hiro never stabs Syler at all. Hiro stabs Peter who is unintentionally appearing to be Syler as a result of just having picked up Candice’s illusion power.
[/QUOTE]

Great post. I was thinking along the same lines WRT Hiro Stabbing Peter thinking he’s Sylar, with one minor difference: Peter doesn’t have to absorb Candice’s illusion power. Syler can rid us of her, take her power and cast the illusion over Hiro & Peter, and that seems like something sneaky Sylar would get away with.

82

[QUOTE=levdrakon]
Syler can rid us of her, take her power and cast the illusion over Hiro & Peter, and that seems like something sneaky Sylar would get away with.
[/QUOTE]

That also occurred to me. I just wasn’t sure that Candice’s power can be used to disguise other people. We’ve seen her use it to hide a dead body, so it’s probably not unreasonable to assume Sylar could use it to make Peter look like him for just long enough to confuse Hiro.

I’m still not sure how to explain Peter’s scar with this theory. Maybe he gets into a knife-fight with the Hatian at some point?

83

Will someone just kill Sylar? I am so annoyed by him.

I lack the brain flexibility to figure out this last episode.

84

[QUOTE=D_Odds]
The scar. If Peter saves Claire, he can regenerate, yet he gets the scar from somewhere. Only other explanation I can think of is that he is cut, then heals while being babysat by the Haitian. We already know that a large glass shard imbedded into his brain for presumably hours can be cured by a couple of Tylenol, so I’m not on board with ‘wounded too much to heal’.
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Except that Future Mohinder remembers being on the subway with Peter when Future Hiro came to give him the message to save Claire. This, and the fact that Claire is indeed alive in this future, makes me believe that Peter succeeded.

I think the divergence between the “Present” and the “Future” begins at the exact moment that Hiro and Ando jumped 5 years into the future, so we can assume that everything that happened in the series thus far DID happen in the past of this Future we just had a glimpse of.

I know it doesn’t explain how Peter managed to get his scar. Perhaps he just chose not to manifest his healing powers out of guilt for blowing up the city. Certainly there’s some level of intent involved in him using any of his powers - maybe it’s only involuntary for Claire, or maybe she can actually control it too, to a degree?

Or maybe the Haitian has something to do with it like you said, but I believe Peter had to have gotten the scar in spite of being able to heal himself.

85

[QUOTE=EastCoastPearl]
Certainly there’s some level of intent involved in him using any of his powers.
[/QUOTE]

There can’t be too much intent involved in coming back from death by glass shard through the skull.

86

Yes, it seems that the future we were shown includes the results of Hero’s trip back to give the Save the Cheerleader message. So does that mean there was actually a third Hiro somewhere? The FutureHiro we saw isn’t the future version of our Hiro, is he? There should be:

  1. The FutureHiro we saw. He doesn’t belong to the timeline we saw. In his timeline, nobody gave the message to Peter on the subway. He went back, gave Peter the message, then went forward in the new timeline. This is why he has to ask PresentHiro questions and doesn’t just remember the information.
  2. PresentHiro. The Hiro who went forward 5 years in his own timeline.
  3. OtherFutureHiro :). The future version of PresentHiro.
87

My thinking exactly, Otto. The regeneration doesn’t seem to be an off/on power - it’s always on.

Now to nitpick a little bit: Sylar picked up super-hearing, which he somehow seems to have gotten under control. Peter has encountered Sylar since then. The super-hearing, at least with its original owner, didn’t appear to have an off switch. So why aren’t Sylar and Peter both adversely affected by this power?

88

[QUOTE=Justin_Bailey]

And this is what I mean. He wants to change one event. Yes, it’s a big event. But in Hiro’s mind it is still just one thing.
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We also learn that while saving the past is a noble ambition, Hiro’s primary motivation for preventing the blast is to save Ando.

This was an amazingly cool episode, and seeing Peter actually fight with his powers in the future makes up for the anticlimactic Peter-Sylar duel of last week’s episode. The President Sylar reveal blew my mind, moreso because it was forshadowed in the previous episode where Sylar repainted the portrait of Nathan in the white house but with him instead (so both paintings were actually correct).

89

[QUOTE=Otto]
There can’t be too much intent involved in coming back from death by glass shard through the skull.
[/QUOTE]

You’d think so, but we know that Peter does have to willingly use Claire’s powers by conjuring an emotional image of her. It’s what saved his life when Claude (whatever happened to Claude?) pushed him off the roof.

Here’s an explanation for the scar: The Haitian, at Mr. Bennet’s request (and possibly even Peter’s consent), stole Peter’s memories of Claire. Peter, even if he knew that he used to be able to heal, couldn’t remember Claire, and thus couldn’t access her powers. Still a badass, he got cut while off fighting with Hiro.

As for the time travel, we’ve got three timelines here:
Future Hiro is from a timeline where Sylar killed Claire. Peter later exploded, either from a misuse of Ted or from general overload.

Future Everyone Else is from a timeline where Claire survived, but Hiro never travelled to the future to meet his older self. Since Sylar wasn’t the key Hiro thought he was, NY still go boom. Sylar’s survival is unexplained but largley incidental.

Present Hiro and Ando, armed with both a live Claire, a Claire-Powered Peter (and not Sylar), and future knowledge are in a better position than the previous two timelines to prevent the bomb.

90

[QUOTE=D_Odds]
Now to nitpick a little bit: Sylar picked up super-hearing, which he somehow seems to have gotten under control. Peter has encountered Sylar since then. The super-hearing, at least with its original owner, didn’t appear to have an off switch. So why aren’t Sylar and Peter both adversely affected by this power?
[/QUOTE]

Sylar appears to be able to manifest improved versions of the powers he takes. For example, when he stole telekinesis, he was able to improve both the power’s strength and control, and seems to have gotten the melting-things power under control while its original owner accidentally melted most of his living room. Sylar fixes what’s broken, makes the powers work in ways the original owners couldn’t, so it’s quite plausible that he might have figured out how to shut off the super-hearing.

91

[QUOTE=D_Odds]
Now to nitpick a little bit: Sylar picked up super-hearing, which he somehow seems to have gotten under control. Peter has encountered Sylar since then. The super-hearing, at least with its original owner, didn’t appear to have an off switch. So why aren’t Sylar and Peter both adversely affected by this power?
[/QUOTE]
Maybe Dale never tried to get it under control. Rather, she just learned to ‘live with it’ by using rap music. I can’t remember what she actually said about getting used to it, but maybe she meant she could control it’s targeting (like hearing Sylar-Zane’s heartbeat as opposed to everything else going on around her) but not it’s on-off ability.
Heck, She even listened to rap music blaring in her ears, don’t you think that would be super-loud? I think there’s more to her power than you surmise…

92

[QUOTE=FlightlessBird]
Maybe Dale never tried to get it under control. Rather, she just learned to ‘live with it’ by using rap music. I can’t remember what she actually said about getting used to it, but maybe she meant she could control it’s targeting (like hearing Sylar-Zane’s heartbeat as opposed to everything else going on around her) but not it’s on-off ability.
Heck, She even listened to rap music blaring in her ears, don’t you think that would be super-loud? I think there’s more to her power than you surmise…
[/QUOTE]

She didn’t use the rap music to supress the ability… the loudness wasnt the issue… she got used to the “loudness” and probably learned to control the volume… the rap music was used as a filter, so she wouldn’t hear anything else.

The initial affect, as reported by Dale and seconded by Sylar, upon coming into the power was the “everything is super loud give me a headache no control” bit.

93

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
You’d think so, but we know that Peter does have to willingly use Claire’s powers by conjuring an emotional image of her. It’s what saved his life when Claude (whatever happened to Claude?) pushed him off the roof.
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In that instance, being the first use of the power away from the original possessor, he had to learn that he still had the power. He had no idea to that point that he retained powers for any significant length of time past his exposure to the original Hero. If you had super-healing and people threw you off roofs and shot at you on a regular basis, wouldn’t you, once you knew you had it, leave it on all the time?

94

[QUOTE=AndrewL]

My theory is that Hiro never stabs Syler at all. Hiro stabs Peter who is unintentionally appearing to be Syler as a result of just having picked up Candice’s illusion power.
[/QUOTE]

Hmm, interesting idea. Not sure why Peter would be disguising himself as Sylar though, unless the power is just manifesting wildly and he can’t control it.

Here’s my own attempt to try and explain this all. It depends on the idea that there are two timelines and Future Hiro isn’t in his own timeline once he returns from the past (our present). The timeline has changed as a result of his actions, but he only remembers the old timeline (for whatever psuedo-scientific reason you want).

Timeline one: Sylar kills Claire and gets the regen power. Hiro stabs Sylar, but Sylar heals. Sylar either blows up destroying New York, or Peter does it and everyone thinks it was Sylar (I think this makes more sense, but it’s not confirmed). Hiro spends a lot of time piecing together events, and eventually decides that stopping Sylar from killing Claire and getting her power is the key. He goes back into the past and warns Peter, then returns to the future. But, it’s no longer his future, it’s changed to…

Timeline two: Future Hiro returns to his time and finds himself face to face with regular Hiro, who’s jumped to the same time point. Future Hiro tells Hiro about the events of “the future”, such as Sylar being stabbed and regenerating, but even though that’s what Future Hiro remembers, it didn’t actually happen. In this timeline, Peter did rescue Claire and Sylar didn’t get her power (though Claire did drop out of sight eventually and everyone thought she was dead for whatever reason). We don’t know what happened between Hiro and Sylar in this timeline; perhaps they fought and Sylar survived in some different fashion, perhaps the timeline is so changed due to Claire’s survival that they never fought before the explosion. Whatever. The key point is that this is no longer the future of Future Hiro. This is why, for instance, Future Hiro has to ask Hiro/Ando if the cheerleader was saved. If she was saved in this timeline and Future Hiro remembers this timeline, then he’d know, but he doesn’t. (Also why he doesn’t remember jumping into the future as Hiro.) However, saving the cheerleader wasn’t the pivotal event that Future Hiro thought it was, because either Peter steps in and blows up New York in Sylar’s place, or it was always Peter who did it. So the fact that Claire was saved and Sylar didn’t get the regeneration ability didn’t save the world after all.

And now, with Hiro back in the present, knowing what he does, we’ll see yet a third timeline. Whew. I think this is more or less the same as what Revenant Threshold was saying, but I got lost a little bit on that post. My brain hurts, but I think this mostly explains everything.

95

[QUOTE=AndrewL]
Sylar appears to be able to manifest improved versions of the powers he takes. For example, when he stole telekinesis, he was able to improve both the power’s strength and control, and seems to have gotten the melting-things power under control while its original owner accidentally melted most of his living room. Sylar fixes what’s broken, makes the powers work in ways the original owners couldn’t, so it’s quite plausible that he might have figured out how to shut off the super-hearing.
[/QUOTE]

I think Sylar doesn’t really need to kill others to get their abilites, he just does it because he’s batshit crazy, which means his actual ability is more like Peter’s. Peter’s is more passive (he just absorbs it, sometimes without even being aware of the power) and Sylar has to think about the power in order to get it. He may actually steal the power from the original person instead of just copying it which would render them powerless if he didn’t kill them in the first place.

Claude hinted that he once knew someone else like Peter and I have another theory that this person saved his life when Bennet tried to kill him, using Claude’s own invisibility power. It couldn’t have been Sylar since he’d only been doing this for 6 months. It just stands to reason that abilites are not a one-time, one-person deal.

96

[QUOTE=AndrewL]
Here’s my theory.
[/QUOTE]

Your theory is totally awesome, and I’m now rooting for the show to turn out exactly like that.

97

[QUOTE=EastCoastPearl]
Certainly there’s some level of intent involved in him using any of his powers - maybe it’s only involuntary for Claire, or maybe she can actually control it too, to a degree?
[/QUOTE]

My thoughts exactly. Maybe Peter wants the scar to remember the pain that he caused on the day of the explosion.

AndrewL, that was a fantastic post! I like your theory.

98

AndrewL - wow, that’s very nearly identical to what my brother and I had come up with this morning! Only we had a chart and stick figures. I’d been considering the possibility that there are no alternate timelines, Hiro is completely incapable of changing the past, and he’s simply running an experiment in futility. Everything that’s happened is actually what happened in Future Hiro’s past, too, and he’s actually setting up the future he’s trying to stop. But, then something occurred to me.

Ando.

At the very beginning of the season when Hiro went to find Isaac and saw the bomb go off he had the cops call his friend who could speak English, right? And Ando said he hadn’t seen Hiro in weeks. Ando is safe in Japan, a continent and an ocean away from the blast, when New York gets hit.

Which means that Ando dies in the future because Hiro brought him to America. Hiro’s time travel has caused direct changes to the timeline that resulted in the death of someone who would have otherwise survived. So, we’ve got at least two timelines in play: one in which Ando survives in Japan and one in which he dies in New York.

99

[QUOTE=CaerieD]
AndrewL - wow, that’s very nearly identical to what my brother and I had come up with this morning! Only we had a chart and stick figures. I’d been considering the possibility that there are no alternate timelines, Hiro is completely incapable of changing the past, and he’s simply running an experiment in futility. Everything that’s happened is actually what happened in Future Hiro’s past, too, and he’s actually setting up the future he’s trying to stop. But, then something occurred to me.

Ando.

At the very beginning of the season when Hiro went to find Isaac and saw the bomb go off he had the cops call his friend who could speak English, right? And Ando said he hadn’t seen Hiro in weeks. Ando is safe in Japan, a continent and an ocean away from the blast, when New York gets hit.

Which means that Ando dies in the future because Hiro brought him to America. Hiro’s time travel has caused direct changes to the timeline that resulted in the death of someone who would have otherwise survived. So, we’ve got at least two timelines in play: one in which Ando survives in Japan and one in which he dies in New York.
[/QUOTE]

Yes, the other main thing I can think of where there was a “change the past” type thing is where Hiro ended up showing up in that waitress’s birthday photo, where previously he had not been in the photo. However, ever since then, including in the very next episode, there has been a definite vibe of inability to alter the past/future/etc. And the birthday photo is a pretty minor thing, as is, to a lesser extent, Ando’s situation on the day of the explosion. I think maybe the writers changed their mind about how they wanted things to go and time travel to work. (Especially if, as I think they do, they just write the show as they go along, instead of having planned almost everything out in detail from the start). It’s conceivable that the writers will devise some back-continuity thing to explain the Ando situation (or maybe even just silently drop the issue) while still presenting a single “almost-consistent” timeline, with Hiro unable to “change time”.

I, for one, would be very happy, damn near escstatic, if they had the courage to go with something like that, instead of wrapping things up in the predictable, conventional way in order to prevent the explosion. But I happen to have a particularly strong fondness for time travel stories with single consistent timelines.

100

Although I still think that this was a future where Peter had Claire’s power, there is more evidence against it. Syler’s goal seems to have been taking Claire’s power and then eliminating all rivals. He knows that Peter has Claire’s power. Peter healed right in front of him. It’s hard to imagine him waiting five years for Claire when there was so much opportunity to ambush Peter. Maybe he did, leading to the scar.

Future Hiro did not remember meeting his future self or that Claire was saved. This seems like strong evidence that he is from a different timeline. But future Peter remembers Hiro’s development from his past self into his future self.