Heroes 5/21/07 - "How to Stop an Exploding Man" (SPOILERS)

Cafe Society
161

[QUOTE=Lightray]
You’ve got two timelines mixed up in there. There are actually (at least) three different timelines:

Timeline 1: Cheerleader not saved. Sylar has her power and is invincible.

Future-Hiro comes back from Timeline 1 future to tell Peter to save the cheerleader, thus causing…

Timeline 2: Cheerleader saved, bomb still goes off (and is actually Peter, not Sylar). 5-years later, Future-Hiro doesn’t know why his “save the cheerleader” didn’t save the world and then Present-Hiro shows up.

Present-Hiro comes back from Timeline 2 future to present, thus causing…

Timeline 3: Cheerleader saved, Sylar stopped, Peter + Nathan make big boom.
The trick here is that Claire was Sylarized when Hiro had gone back in time from Timeline 1, but alive and not Sylarized when he returned to Timeline 2. Future-Hiro had changed the past, but it hadn’t accomplished what he’d wanted to accomplish. Hence, his “failure” – which he’d recognized himself by 5YL, when he was making his time diorama in Mystery Sock’s loft.
[/QUOTE]

I see what you’re trying to say, and it would make perfect sense except that when Hiro first meets F-Hiro, F-Hiro says something about how he hadn’t gone back yet (IIRC). But then later on Suresh recalls Peter telling him about the cheerleader on the train, and Claire is alive, but Sylar still regenerated… GAAAAAH head a’splodes

The only thing I can think of is that at some point off-camera, after we first meet F-Hiro, he goes back and delivers his message to Peter.

162

[QUOTE=Gundam_Cricket]
but Sylar still regenerated…
[/QUOTE]

Regenerate from the explosion or the sword? In the second and third timeline he doesn’t explode at all.

163

[QUOTE=Gundam_Cricket]
I see what you’re trying to say, and it would make perfect sense except that when Hiro first meets F-Hiro, F-Hiro says something about how he hadn’t gone back yet (IIRC).
[/QUOTE]

Nope, I made the same mistake in the thread at the time (and got a little exercised about people disagreeing with me, but I digress). F-Hiro starts to tell his tale, Hiro jumps in with the “save the cheerleader” message and F-Hiro exclaims something like “Then it worked! You killed Sylar!” F-Hiro had made the trip back into timeline 1 (T-1) thus causing timeline 2 (T-2) by the time he and Hiro met.

Personally I prefer “Sylerated” 'cause it sounds like “Sylar ate it.” Hee.

164

[QUOTE=Gundam_Cricket]
I see what you’re trying to say, and it would make perfect sense except that when Hiro first meets F-Hiro, F-Hiro says something about how he hadn’t gone back yet (IIRC). But then later on Suresh recalls Peter telling him about the cheerleader on the train, and Claire is alive, but Sylar still regenerated… GAAAAAH head a’splodes

The only thing I can think of is that at some point off-camera, after we first meet F-Hiro, he goes back and delivers his message to Peter.
[/QUOTE]

Otto explained it above, but the important thing to remember is that Future-Hiro doesn’t know that he’s in Timeline 2 – he’s just gotten back from talking to Peter and thought he’d be in a timeline where Sylar got killed but has just realized that the bomb still took place, and doesn’t know why. Because all he remembers is the events of Timeline 1.

165

[QUOTE=Gundam_Cricket]
I see what you’re trying to say, and it would make perfect sense except that when Hiro first meets F-Hiro, F-Hiro says something about how he hadn’t gone back yet (IIRC). But then later on Suresh recalls Peter telling him about the cheerleader on the train, and Claire is alive, but Sylar still regenerated… GAAAAAH head a’splodes

The only thing I can think of is that at some point off-camera, after we first meet F-Hiro, he goes back and delivers his message to Peter.
[/QUOTE]

When Present-Hiro and Future-Hiro meet in the future, Future-Hiro had just gotten back. This was shown in one of the online comics. Here’s my recreation of the Heroes timestream:

Timeline 1: Sylar kills Claire, gets regen powers. Hiro stabs Sylar just prior to “boom”, but Sylar heals from the wound and goes boom anyway. Presumably, TL1-Hiro has time to get away between stab and boom. This is the Hiro who goes back to warn Peter causing…

Timeline 2 (seen in “5 years later” episode): Cheerleader is saved. Peter goes boom, and survives due to having her healing ability (although the scar is problematic). I see a few options here:
TL2A: Hiro stabbed Sylar, and (for some reason) left the scene. When Peter exploded (and Nathan spread that Sylar was responsible), Hiro assumed that Sylar had gotten to Claire at some point out of his sight and survived the stab. The fact that Bennet has kept Claire hidden makes this plausible, TL2-Hiro may not konw that Claire is alive in his timeline.
TL2B: Prior to the explosion, Sylar kills Candice, giving him the “illusionist” power, and used that to make Peter look like Sylar. Hiro attacks “Sylar”, he heals (since Peter has Claire’s power), and Sylar / Peter goes boom. Sylar continues his brain drain rampage, helped by the fact that everyone thinks he’s dead and he can make people see whatever he wants. Nathan is brain sucked (this could actually be before the explosion), and Sylar takes his place. Masquerading as Nathan, Sylar continues / starts the misinformation that he caused the explosion.
TL2C: Hiro never got to Sylar, since he accidentally time-jumped five years forward after getting the sword from Linderman, and was missing during the whole encounter. Unfortunately, this should mean that Future-Hiro doesn’t exist. And he definitely did live through the years after the explosion, since other people in TL2 know him (Bennet, Peter, Niki, Nathan, etc).

So Present-Hiro-in-the-future time jumps back to “present” with Isaac’s uncompleted last comic, branching the future yet again (Timeline 3), which is what we saw.

One complication with TL2 is that the future Hiro we see is originally from TL1, so may not know the actual events of TL2 (and on preview, this apparently has been hashed out while I was typing). So when he was talking about Sylar regenerating after being stabbed, he was talking about what happened in TL1, not TL2. Maybe Hiro’s memories of the TL2 history merge soon after he returned from warning Peter (or TL1 and TL2 were so close that his friendships / contacts existed in both). It couldn’t have been immediate, since Future-Hiro had to ask Present-Hiro and Ando whether or not Claire had been saved. And Future-Hiro may have had incorrect information just due to not being present at certain times or making wrong conclusions.

Personally, I was liking the sound of TL2B, so was rather surprised last night that Sylar didn’t get to Candice.

166

[QUOTE=AuntiePam]
it would have been great if they had gotten together, compared what they knew and made some plans. Or at least exchanged e-mail addys.
[/QUOTE]

Like noahb@primatechpaper.com? Someone at NBC’s gonna with they’d thought of that. (Not that Mr. B’s associating himself with them anymore, but it was the first example I could think of.)

A thought occurred to me - Sylar has Isaac’s powers. He’s also just seen the comic book. Assuming he believes the premonitions to be infallible, he knows that Hiro’s going to stab him, one way or the other. So he just lets him. Perhaps he already knew he was going to survive anyway.

167

OK, a review online of the last few minutes clarifies a few things:

Noah (heh) says, in response to Claire’s complaint that their house burned down, “Home is wherever our family’s all together”, to which Claire replies, “You’ve got a plan…?” It seems at first that it’s an answer to where they’re going to live, but it could just as easily refer to a plan to get them all back together, i.e. rescuing wife and son, presumably with Molly’s help.

As for Sylar’s departure, the blood marks going away from the body area are clearly drag marks, along with two bloody footprints on the other side of the manhole. If Sylar couldn’t walk, he couldn’t leave bloody footprints as he struggled with the manhole cover, and if he could walk well enough to open the manhole, we’d see footprints in with the other blood all the way from where his body was laying. Meanwhile, Mohimbo is narrating, “…The simple, human need, to find a kindred, to connect, and to know in our hearts, we are not alone.”

Something or someone definitely dragged Sylar, alive or dead, into the sewer…for some reason.

168

I dislike the current trend towards unresolved season-finales. We’d still watch next year, if they’d actually brought anything to conclusion: there’s no finality in the finales. There’s five characters that we don’t know whether they’re alive: Sylar, Matt, DJ, Peter, Nathan. What, they’ve all got contracts under negotiation?*

It would have been nice to have some conclusions regarding Devereux’s powers. Mama Petrilli is clearly some sort of persuasion, but not as powerful as Eden’s. Why didn’t Candace turn into her “real” self when she was unconscious, she’d certainly said that her real self was ugly/fat/teased a lot?

What happened to the Haitian? He was killed in a future time-line, but he would have been the perfect foil here: he walks out and Peter’s explosive power negates. He seems to have just disappeared from everything…

In short, I’m annoyed at the massive irresolutions.

  • [sub] Ref to Han Solo being frozen in EMPIRE STRIKES BACK because it wasn’t clear if he would agree to appear in RETURN OF THE JEDI… negotiations about $$, natch.[/sub]
169

[QUOTE=C K Dexter Haven]
…Mama Petrilli is clearly some sort of persuasion, but not as powerful as Eden’s.
[/QUOTE]

Clearly? People keep saying that, and I’m thinking that it clearly isn’t so. Either that, or it’s the suckiest hero power we’ve seen yet.

She failed to convince Peter to amend his ways and give up his craziness.
She failed to convince Claire to go to Paris or to get on the helicopter.
She failed to convince Nathan to let the city blow up and be the man she wanted him to be.

Heck, she apparently didn’t even convince Mr. Devaux of whatever her opinion was on their mysterious plan.

I can’t think of one person that she successfully persuaded… maybe Nathan’s wife? It looks like her power is clearly persuading people to not do what she wants them to do. And, heck, I’ve got that power.

170

OK, this timeline stuff is making me crazy. I just have a simple question -
How did saving the cheerleader lead to saving the world ?

171

[QUOTE=ChuckForbin]
OK, this timeline stuff is making me crazy. I just have a simple question -
How did saving the cheerleader lead to saving the world ?
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that’s a nice simple question all right…

172

[QUOTE=Otto]
Yeah, that’s a nice simple question all right…
[/QUOTE]

Claire was able to convince Nathan that the future wasn’t inevitable. Nathan flew Peter high enough no one else was hurt (for some reason, Peter could not fly himself).

No Claire. No Nathan. Big Boom.

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Of course, none of that is the reason Future Hiro originally spoke the words “Save the cheerleader, save the world!”. He spoke those words because he believed Future Sylar had gotten the ability to regenerate from killing Claire, and had thus grown too powerful to defeat.

But with back-fitting and belief in destiny and whatnot, Peter no doubt adopted an interpretation of the words at the end of the last episode which fit the reality which actually went down, such as perhaps the one outlined above.

174

I don’t remeber - what was the final outcome of Hiro’s efforts to save fast-learner-girl in Texas? Does she end up dying of more or less natural causes or does she still die from Sylar - If he did take her powers (even post-natural mortem) it would make his instamastery more understandable.

175

Manhattan didn’t blow up because Isaac figured out how to stop it. Remember what Isaac said just before he died. He knew that Sylar was going to get his brain. He knew that Sylar would use his painting power to learn how he could become President by tricking Peter into blowing up Manhattan. Isaac needed a way to throw a hitch into that future. He needed to create something that wouldn’t just show the future but would change the future – a comic book. What could be more appropriate for this show?

176

In addition to what Glory said, there’s the reason that Hiro went back in time to tell Peter to save the cheerleader in the first place:

If Sylar had killed Claire, then he’d have had her regeneration power, and would’ve been unbeatable. By saving the cheerleader, Peter kept her power from Sylar, and kept him vulnerable to defeat.

Future-Hiro originally thought that was all that was required to save the world (defeat Sylar). He learned otherwise by the time that Present-Hiro went forward 5 years later.

Unfortunately, time-travel stories just don’t lend themselves to simple explanations. So I’m kinda surprised that Hiro seems to be one of the definates for next season – I know he’s the breakout star (along with Milo), but his power just complicates the storyline so much. It’d’ve been easier keeping around someone with Nathan’s (or Matt’s) power.

177

[QUOTE=MMI]
I don’t remeber - what was the final outcome of Hiro’s efforts to save fast-learner-girl in Texas? Does she end up dying of more or less natural causes or does she still die from Sylar - If he did take her powers (even post-natural mortem) it would make his instamastery more understandable.
[/QUOTE]

She told Hiro she had a brain problem, but in the series, I’m pretty sure Sylar got her, because we see the blood running down her face from a Sylar skull-slice.

But if Sylar hadn’t gotten her, she would have died of her brain disorder (aneurysm? tumor? I forget.)

178

Re: Mama P’s and Mr. Deveaux’s powers:

I always thought that Mama Petrelli had present-cognition or remote viewing ability. She knew an awful lot about what happened to Claire when there was no one around who would have reported that information to her (i.e. coughing up a bullet). Peter could have picked up the present-cognition from mama and his dream of Nathan’s accident was actually seeing the accident at the time it occurred and not dream pre-cog. Mr. Deveaux could then have the dream pre-cog and Peter picked that up later.

Other possibilities are astral projection for either Mama P. or Mr. D or both, Mama P. having pre-cog and Mr. D having astral projection or both being pre-cogs. I don’t think we can assume that abilities are not duplicated just because we have not yet seen any duplicates. It stands to reason that with so many possible “heroes”, there will be some duplications or at least similar/related abilities, like someone going into a trance and painting visions of the future and someone else dreaming visions of the future.

179

[QUOTE=Gundam_Cricket]
I don’t think that Kensei is actually Papa Nakamura, but it will probably be the same actor, as I believe Kensei is an ancestor of the Nakamura family.
[/QUOTE]

Well, that might make up a little for that scene deleted from Star Trek IV.

180

[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
Well, that might make up a little for that scene deleted from Star Trek IV.
[/QUOTE]
Please, allow me to be first: :confused: