Aw, drats, true, I noted that at the time, but then forgot about it later.
I guess it’s pretty unlikely I’ll get the approach to time travel I want, but I’ll still be crossing my fingers.
Now after Hiro does this, and New York blows up, does he still go back in time and tell peter to save the cheerleader? He obviously won’t because he knows that Claire was saved and that the explosion still happened anyway.
I think that the writers are not revealing which Sci-Fi theory of time travel this show is following on purpose. The picture of Hiro and the smart waitress was a clue that the future could be changed. The way the story is told now is done for us to think that the future can’t change, but I think soon it will be reveal that it definitely can.
Every time Hiro has went back in time he changes the course of time in very subtle ways. What is happening is a version of what Revenant Threshold has said. Hiro can change the future, he is just not very good at it.
So we do not get to see the first time line (time line A) of events, where Hiro’s friend dies and he decides to alter the course of history. We can assume that in that time line everything is the same as in our current time line (time line B) up until the point when Hiro A (from time line A) meets Peter in the Subway. Hiro A then goes into the future that he has altered and is now in Time line B.
From what we know, all that has changed in time line B is that Claire is alive. When Hiro A left the subway, he jumped five years into what he thought was time line A, but he really now exists in time line B. Time line B will get disrupted however, because Hiro B decides to go into its future. The rule seems to be that people can only diverge time lines if they have knowledge of how the time line is supposed to go. If you do not have this knowledge, the time line will continue moving toward its destined course, completely unaltered.
Now we still have time line B, but only until Hiro B alters the course it is supposed to take. Hiro A can’t really be trusted on these things because he only knows time line A. So when Hiro A said he stabbed Skylar, he was talking about the now non-existent time line A. It is like in movie Mr. Destiny, where a man is put into a completely different time line of events (diverging when a previous strike out becomes a game winning home run) and does not know what has happened in the new time line. In time line B we know Skylar does not die either, so simply saving the cheerleader does not help things. It is totally irrelevant now because Hiro B has knowledge of how it is supposed to go. We will never see how time line B gets played out.
Now that Hiro B knows the future of time line B, he will now change it into time line C once he diverges from how time line B is supposed to have went. What we will see in future episodes is time line C being played out. 
Things get really messy if you try to figure out why Hiro B, when he goes into the future, does not see the future as if he had made the trip into the future. I won’t go into the mechanics of that in this post. It is nerdy enough as it is. 
The only constant we have had in the show is that Isaac’s paintings come true… therefore the bomb must go off… its the after affects that need to change (Hiro B’s ‘dark’ future) - and for that to not happen, we do not want Sylar in charge, and preferably dead.
Now, Hiro has certainly changed the path, as was noted earlier Ando is now with him in NY when in the very first instance he was in Tokyo… Also, when Hiro first got the “ninth wonder” comic, it could be argued that he actually caused the events in the book to happen (little girl vs truck) - because he wanted to be a hero.
So, him wanting to be a hero again is causing events to transpire that he actually wishes to prevent, becuase he keeps missing the target. (and the point, perhaps)
How, then, would it have had meaning to Bennett when Ando and Peter mentioned the thing about saving her at homecoming from Sylar? That appeared to still have happened in this timeline.
So it would seem that Peter saved Claire in this timeline.
And yet, Future Hiro says that he stabbed Sylar, and Sylar regenerated.
Well… this can’t be a single consistent timeline, right? Or else Future Hiro wouldn’t be surprised to see Present Hiro in Mystery Sock’s apartment. Because he’d remember that meeting, because he’d already experienced it from the other side.
It’s like in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (which, IIRC, is one of the few movies that handles time travel intelligently) - in the beginning, you see Bill and Ted meeting their future selves, and their future selves say “oh, woah, cool, I remember this!” and the present selves are confused. Then, later in the movie, the characters become those future characters, and go back, and now you see the same meeting from the perspective of the future Bill and Ted, and it makes sense why they remember it.
So if it was one consistent timeline, Future Hiro should say “oh, great, you’re here, I’ve been expecting you”, which he certainly doesn’t.
Which is a shame, because the single consistent timeline time travel story, while hard to pull off effectively, is really the only fair way to do it. Every other method is kind of an arbitrary gimmick.
Could it be kind of like 12 Monkies where
the main characters think they know what caused the disaster, and therefore try to stop it in the past? But it turns out their information/understanding was incorrect - they were chasing a red herring, and so their actions had no effect on what had occured. Because it’s a single consistent timeline, what they’d tried had actually been part of the original timeline, so they when they went back to the past, they were just performing the same actions they already had originally. Nothing changed, their actions were always part of the original timeline.
So how that applies here is that perhaps Future Hiro’s conclusion that Sylar has to be killed is a red herring, and won’t have any affect on the bomb. Or perhaps it somehow actually makes the bomb incident come to pass. And whatever Present Hiro does now, he may feel he’s trying to do something different, but he’d end up doing the same things he did originally/has always done. Meaning that in Present Hiro’s timeline, the bomb is still going to go off.
If we were working with a single consistent timeline here, it would be just like 12 Monkies. Hiro thinking he had to save the cheerleader, and hence, be able to kill Sylar would be equivelant to Bruce Willis’ character thinking that he could stop the plague by stopping the army of the 12 monkies. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that’s possible that that’s the case, if Future Hiro never went through the Present Hiro/Future Hiro meeting from the perspective of Present Hiro.
I’m not even sure the writers know exactly where they’re going with this, because it’s hard to make sense of it.
Ultimately, I think the only really satisfying way to handle a story like this and not feel like it’s cheating is to cleverly construct a single consistent timeline. That doesn’t seem to be possible here, from what we know.
So, then, we’re having to work with multiple timelines (in seperate universes, or what?) where the Hiro from one timeline can interact with the Hiro from another. It’s hard to find a storyline like that satisfying.
Peter may pick up Candace’s power at some point. Maybe he masquerades as Sylar to protect his brother? Just a thought…
Time travel can never be handled intelligently. All that happens is geeks like us affix on a method that we like best and apply all other time travel stories to it.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the writers end up missing some of the nitpicky things we point out, or that key information that seemed minor to the director somehow got left on the editing-room floor.
I Just watched this episode online, and wow im still absorbing things. One thing i wanted to say though is CLAIRE DOES NOT NEED SAVING, she CAN’T be killed. “Save the cheerleader” simply means “don’t let Sylar get super healing”. Thats why she is alive on this episode. When Bennet meets with her he clearly says “someone knows you are alive”, which means everyone else thinks shes dead because Sylar cut her brain open and learned her power.
I think that Peter got his scar from Hiro’s sword. Can’t think of any other situation that would make as much comic book sense.
Nope. When Sylar got ahold of her he said he’d been waiting a long time for it while cutting Claire’s head open. Why would he be cutting her head open again if he already had her power?
I am putting my money on this. Claire was not alive. Hiro changed that. Time is trickier than that and adjusted things so they end up the same. Hiro has to go back and fix something else. He has a few episodes to do it. He will change things otherwise there would no longer be a need for a show. If the timeline can’t be changed then we already know what is going to happen so why bother watching?New York will not be blown up. I guarantee it.
As for Peter’s scar, he has already shown to have difficulty when too many powers are being used. When it first happened it was because he couldn’t control it. Maybe at some point he has to use multiple powers at the same time and the healing won’t be able to work the way it should.
A note to George Lucas: If you want to know how to turn a whiney punk into a badass, see Heroes.
I’ll wager 20 doper dollars on that one…NY will blow up.
Good thoughts here, I agree. Hiro appeared in the picture of Charlie’s birthday but didn’t change his own memories of his first meeting of her, which surely would have gone differently had she known him from six months previously. The timeline adjusts around him–when he changes things he has no recollection of the new past he’s created for himself, because he never experienced it. So Future Hiro’s past happened exactly as he’d remembered it the first time around, but when he changed the past he didn’t recognize the differences that had taken place.
Twice agreement, here. Hiro has proven he can change things.
I’ll take that bet.
I think you all are analyzing this WAY too deeply. Much as I enjoy Heroes, have we ever seen anything on the show to indicate that anything approaching that level of complexity and rigor goes into its plotting? It’s just superpowered people having kaboom-y adventures. Sometimes they don’t make sense.
Oh, and I will be SHOCKED if NY goes kaboom. This is fun primetime TV entertainment. No way it actually kills 3 million people. Just. No. Way.
In the present, Hiro hasn’t learned how to use the sword yet. Maybe the scar is an accident caused by Hiro before he learns how to properly use the sword. Maybe Peter gets in the way when Hiro’s trying to kill Sylar. Doesn’t Future Hiro say something about training in swordplay? Ando says something like “you finally learned how…” and uses the wrong term and Hiro corrects him, right?
I want in on this action. No way NY goes kablooey.
Maybe a mini-explosion for drama’s sake, but I don’t think the producers are going to kill 3 million people.
I’m in too.
My quote from a previous thread: these are pretty people doing entertaining things for our amusement, nothing more. They seem to be doing it better and better as it goes on. I can overlook things like bad science and paradoxes. It is a comic book after all.
I think you are spot on with this. I’m cynical enough to think that their request for people to submit predictions about what will happen in the show was simply a way to get ideas for the storyline.
Ah, at last, a man after my own heart. 
Ok i thought i was crazy there for a while. I watched the episode online on the nbc site since i missed it this monday and i had no idea what you were talking about, but i just went back and rewatched it and there was a huge chunk of it missing the first time i saw it. You are right, Sylar didn’t have Claires power which means Peters scar or the fact that everyone thinks Claire is dead make no sense. That scar looks like a sword slash, i don’t buy it being a result of the explosion.