I don’t think it’s about the thrill of killing (maybe some), but power-getting it, having it. Which is why putting Claire back together was kinda weird- destroying the indestructible girl would have been quite the Evil-League-of-Evil calling card. I think he’s starting to see her as a soul mate re: his telling HRG “you don’t understand her at all”. Like he gets ten minutes in her brain pan and sees her soul.:eek:
Last we saw Parkman’s dad he was trapped in that mental prison Parkman locked him into. They definitely gave the impression that he couldn’t get out on his own – otherwise why not follow Parkman out? Unless there’s another dream-walker out there, Parkman’s got the only “key.”
Leaving something embedded in the brain would do it, as we saw when Claire died (stick in brain… woke up during autopsy), and when Peter died (glass in brain, from Sylar), and when Angela Petrelli told Parkman(?) that if things got really dire with the releasing-the-virus thing, he’d have to shoot Peter in the head. The trick is just to make sure that it never becomes dislodged. Decapitation, I would guess, would work in the same way… you’d probably need to keep the head away from the body so they couldn’t heal back together. (Or else it’s like Claire’s toe, and the severed head would regenerate a new body, and the body would regenerate a head… twins! 
)
The “can’t be killed” kind of threw me. She has been killed, just not permanently. You could make it permanent, you’d just need extraordinary measures to do so. If Sylar had just taken her brain, as he’d done with other victims, I’m skeptical that she would have regenerated a new one. So maybe it is more of a “kindred spirit” sort of thing for Sylar now. I think he’s probably worked harder to get to her than for anyone else.
I’m having a tough time getting a bead on her this season. Past seasons, she was a zealot, but I got the idea that she truly felt she was doing the best thing she could for the world and for her family, however misguided she actually was – the ends justified the means, even if she knew the means were rather morally grey, but she seemed to have a desire to be noble. Now she’s willingly complicit in the murder of history-object girl, and I’m sort of doubting that she really thought Sylar would totally behave himself outside of a Company cell (she’s creepy but she ain’t stupid). The “means” seem to be getting quite a bit less grey now. Yeah she was going to allow a couple million people in NYC to get blown up, but her finger wasn’t on the trigger, she was just doing nothing to stop it. Someone with a less-strict moral compass such as hers could justify that. Here, she’s basically loading the gun, taking the safety off, arranging the target at point-blank range, and handing the gun to Sylar. What her game now? Has the power of finally running the company herself gone to her head? Already?
I honestly don’t want any of the main characters to become “pure evil.” They’re much more interesting when I don’t quite know who I should be rooting for.
I think Mama Petrelli thinks she has a pretty good grip on him - she’s twisted with mind. That’s her power.
I don’t think his desire to kill is a sign that he’s out of control. Ms. Petrelli obviously doesn’t mind him absorbing other people’s powers - she even provided a snack for him.
I think Sylar is meant to kill these guys. He’s a vacuum cleaner. Rather than jail all these guys, she’s going to let Sylar aborb all their powers, killing them in the process, then she’s going to take out Sylar.
Of course, in such stories a plan like that may never be allowed to succeed. It all has to go horribly wrong and make things worse. So I imagine Sylar will absorb a few brains, then break free more powerful than ever.
That is absolutely not her power. Her power is seeing the future in her dreams. She explicitly told Peter that this season. And it has been implied since the beginning of the first season, since Peter got the power to do that from someone he was close to.
Well, in a way it is her power. It doesn’t have to be an extra-normal X-man mutant power to be her power. It’s kinda like how Noah can wade into a mess of super-powered bad-asses and be totally confident. That’s his “power.”
I think the manipulativeness is more an acquired skill than a ‘ability’-Manchurian Mom.
And the 4400. What do you call a drug, derived from the biological material of people who have superpowers, that gives ordinary folks superpowers too? Promicin.
I haven’t watched this show since the first 2 or 3 episodes of the first season, but I’m watching now to make someone else happy; I watched long enough to know who half the characters are, but that’s about it. Can someone point me in the direction of something that summarizes seasons 1 and 2?
Especially since every time she has used that “power” on someone they have gone and done the complete opposite 
elfkin477 - the Heroes Wiki summarizes everything pretty well and will even get into the nitty, gritty geeky details if you want.
I forgot about that. But just because they said he couldn’t get out doesn’t mean he can’t, they are often wrong. Parkman lived with Mohinder for a while and surely caught some of his stupid, maybe he forgot to lock the back door, after all it was his first time really messing with people’s heads to that degree. Or it could surely be another person with powers messing with Nathan’s head or Nathan could just be nuts.
As has been pointed out many, many, many times: Mama Petrelli is just about the worst manipulator ever. The only person I can think of who actually did what she told them to do is Nathan’s wife – and it’s been so long since we’ve seen her that Mama Petrelli may well have gacked her when she didn’t listen.
Seriously, every time she tried to get Nathan or Peter to do what she wanted, they’d go off and do the exact opposite. Even Sylar seems to be heading down that path, what with eating that villain’s brains at the bank when he wasn’t supposed to.
Unless you’re thinking that her almost-a-power is convincing people to do exactly what she doesn’t want them to do? That might work.
This isn’t specific to this episode, but has been bugging me: Whatever happened to Caitlin when Peter left her in the future.
When he returned to “now”, he returned to a time after they went forward. So it’s not like it “didn’t happen” - Caitlin is stuck in a future that won’t ever happen.
I dunno… Heidi got the hell outta town after Angela played with her hair at the hospital when Nathan got blowed up. Heidi probably just finally realized her MiL was a wacko.
One of the first episodes she was telling Peter “you were always my favorite”; that’s some classic parental mindfuckery, but evolutionarily unremarkable
So, her diabolical plans don’t always work out? Gosh, I’ve never seen that happen in a comic book before.
Yes, that is exactly what they are going for with her. But that is a far cry from “her diabolical plans don’t work out” being her power.
Well, she’s one of the surviving elders of this secret organization. She raised Nathan & Peter knowing more or less what they’d become, she gave away Sylar for some reason, she knew the truth about Claire, and who knows what else she knows and has been successfully manipulating. The future can obviously be changed, and she’s had to deal with that, and she seems to be doing a relatively good job. She’s still alive and she appears to be in charge of the Organization.
She’s not doing that poorly, and she’s got bigger balls than I have, coming within 10 miles of Sylar knowing what he’s capable of.
Nathan and Peter eventually got on to her manipulations, which is part of the story, but it took them well into adulthood and developing their own powers before they began to even fathom even the surface of what mama is up to. Nathan going into politics was almost certainly her manipulation, and for all we know, she had a hand in Peter becoming papa Deveaux’s home nurse.
We’re seeing her plans thwarted now, but that’s where we enter the story, and she does seem to be adapting.
How do we know letting Sylar have a relapse and feed wasn’t all part of her plan to further win him over with mommy’s understanding and acceptance, metered with just a bit of disappointment and withdrawal?
What i still don’t get is what was the point in “feeding” Sylar other than it being a “look how evil i am” moment for Mama Petrelli. If she was trying to make him useful i don’t see how encouraging his bad side helps.
The “real life” answer is that it got lost because they changed the storyline due to ending last season early because of the writers’ strike.
I’m hoping they find a way to tie up that loose end sometime this season. For the moment, however, Present Peter is having issues with Future Peter, so he hasn’t had a chance to try and find her.
Hmmm… maybe that’s coming up, given that Future Peter just took him to the future.
It occurs to me that there may actually be more characters with parent issues on this show than on Lost.
Just aired in the UK.
Apparently Mama Petrelli is now molten evil, feeding hapless supers to Sylar like the goat to the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.
Has Sylar lost all his prior abilities or what? How come he still had telekinesis?
Future Peter meeting Present Peter - did he never watch Back to the Future?! It’s incredibly dangerous to meet a past incarnation of himself! He’ll be hitting on his teenage mother next. Although that would explain a few things…
The Parkman in Africa storyline is a giant snoozefest, this season’s equivalent of Hiro in Japan.
Speaking of Hiro; it’s annoying how inconsistent his power in. Can he stop time or not? Apparently not, if the story demands it. Speedygirl or whatever she’s called needs to run off a cliff, she’s incredibly annoying. Just punch her in the face and take the formula, you idiots! There’s two of you and one of her! Not particularly chivalrous, but the fate of the world is at stake. The Haitian as always kicks much ass.
Glad to see no SpiderSuresh this episode. Hopefully he goes nuts and offs Maya(aaa!) and then himself. Speaking of people I’m glad not to see; with NotNiki turning up in New Orleans I was sure we’d see old whats-her-face McBurgerking Sassy girl again. Thankfully not. I also breathed a huge sigh of relief last week with the scene where Claire’s about to be hit by the train - who’s that flying? Please, God, not West! Fortunately he must have realised what a waste of screen time he was and flown into a jet engine or something.
Noah’s line at the end made the episode, though. Someone’s who isn’t chronically stupid. Maybe it would be a good idea to kill the murdering psycho? Anyone?