Sententia 2.0

1. Coda the First to "Save The Cheerleader", as we jump back six months before the events of "Homecoming". I suppose my biggest problem with this episode is that, while it purports to deliver the "origin stories" of the cast, it actually raises two questions with every answer. We learn how Sylar became what he is, but not the specifics of his power-thieving skills. We see Chandra Suresh tracking the Heroes down, but how did he find these people in the first place, and how could he have missed Sylar's mutation the first time? We meet Niki's dad and discover the source of her fractured mind, but why did Hal seek her out in the first place? And then, of course, there's the big question "Heroes" has yet to answer: up until this point, the assumption had been that the solar eclipse witnessed in the first episode was somehow responsible for "activating" the Heroes' powers. But here we see Nathan, Eden, Claire, Matt, Peter and Jessica use their powers long before that celestial event happened. So are we to believe that the Heroes had superpowers all their lives? And if so, how is it possible that no one figured it out all this time?

2. I love Ali Larter's subtle shifts of expression when she transitions from Niki to Jessica and back. Say what you will about her storyline (and I have), but Larter's definitely playing it well. Another question: Niki refers to D.L. as an ex-con, which means he was a criminal before the Linderman thing. So... what? When did that happen? What happened?

3. PARADOX! If Hiro and Charlie had a whole relationship before he was snatched away, why didn't she recognize him the day she died? That said, it was interesting to see Hiro's present-day storyline unfold alongside a flashback episode.

4. We're once again witnessing Nathan's ambiguous nature: having used his power of flight to escape his wife's fate, Nathan tells his brother he has no idea what happened. Is he telling the truth? Is he lying? Is he really, really good at repression? There's no way to tell, and that's what makes him so intriguing.

5. Umm... Mr. Bennet used Eden to get Claire's name off Chandra's list? Then how did Sylar know there was a Hero in Odessa, Texas?

6. Questions aside, though, this was a solid episode, and while I wasn't very impressed with Zachary Quinto as Sylar at the time, he's done an excellent job of growing into the role since then.

1. Also known as "The One Where All Hell Breaks Loose", this episode serves as the climax to the "Save The Cheerleader" arc. It's worth pointing out, again, that this storyline lasted for five episodes, start to finish, and included foreshadowing, character development, action, resolution, payoff, denouement and the creation of new story threads. Pacing 101, ladies and gentlemen.

2. I like how this episode slowly progresses from high school melodrama to outright horror - we start with somewhat typical depictions of the popular/unpopular schism in high school, Homecoming intrigues, and a Very Special Episode aspect to Zach's last conversation with Claire (the "I'm finally finding out who my friends are" speech). By the end of the episode, a girl is horribly murdered and everyone's covered in blood.

3. In the blah area of things, the Hawkins family crosses the border from dull to actively irritating. Someone please explain to me why Micah only speaks Comicese, and blames his father for "leaving" when he earlier expressed belief in D.L.'s innocence? (Which means he was framed, which means he didn't "leave", he was ARRESTED, you stupid kid!) And why didn't the dumbass kid tell his father about Jessica before they, you know, drove a hundred miles out of Vegas?

4. "Homecoming" also stresses, in a very subtle way, how unreliable Isaac's paintings can be. Technically, everything he painted came true, but the ones that got the most attention were misinterpreted: the shadow chasing Claire in the stadium isn't Sylar, it's Peter. The dead girl in the Sylar portrait isn't Claire, it's Jackie.

5. Mohinder's subplot... ugh. Well, like I said, he basically ends up right back where he started, except now he has a list of the Heroes. It's worth stating, though, that there is absolutely no explanation why Mohinder was able to figure out Chandra's program here when he couldn't in New York, or whether Chandra actually did find Sanjog (wouldn't locating the boy have offered proof of his theories, so people would realize he wasn't really a mad scientist or something?). Big, big, big mess.

6. You know, I'm back to "Yeah, good thing they killed Simone" again. As this episode demonstrates, she didn't have much going for her - way too easily manipulated by Nathan, still wishy-washy on whether or not she believes Peter... eh.

7. PARADOX! If the old waitress that Ando talks to recognizes Hiro, why didn't she peg him when he and Ando first arrived? (Well, now that I think about it, maybe she wasn't actually there until after Hiro teleported away.)

8. Anvilicious moments aside, Zach's attempt to reach out to Claire is sweet, as is Peter's genuine attempt to console her about life after high school.

1. This is where Mohinder's storyline started dragging its feet. He stares. At a key. For hours. Before unlocking. The drawer. Ugh. This is a rare example of a Heroes subplot being mangled: Mohinder spends the next two episodes in a holding pattern, going around and around until he ends up right back where he started in the pilot. It's... well, it's awkward. And a rather transparent holding technique.

2. Charlie is, in a way, the perfect victim in storytelling: you see just enough of her to recognize a sweet, sympathetic person (without feeling like you're forced to like her for the sake of cheap drama). Then she gets a swift, brutal death, and you're left feeling a little sad for it.

3. The Matt/Ted/Audrey scene just doesn't work for me. Again, it's Matt being a mouthpiece, and since he can't actually pierce the surface of a person's mind, it's not clear why Ted thinks his responses rather than just, you know, saying them out loud.

4. Yeesh, Isaac looks terrible without stubble.

5. This is also where Eden started losing her villainous aura: her concern for Isaac seems genuine, and the sinister overtones of her interactions with Mohinder are gone now. Either Zehetner learned to tone down her telegraphing of the character's intentions, or she was rewritten as a foil to Mr. Bennet's ruthlessness. Either way, it's a change for the better.

6. Er... so if Chandra Suresh thought his daughter was "special", and he knew about Sanjog Iyer (the dreamwalker) before leaving India, why is Sylar "Patient Zero"?

7. We get to see Sylar's murder of Chandra Suresh here (albeit in a wonky dream/flashback), and it's actually more significant than you'd think because it contradicts the graphic novel supplements that NBC has been putting out since the show started (specifically, the first issue, which showed Chandra Suresh's taxi cab crushed and torn apart). I'll have more to say about the comics when we get to Hana Gitelman, but for now I think it's important to note that as far as consistency is concerned, the "bonus material" attached to "Heroes" is no more accurate than any other media tie-in.

I honestly don't know where the time's gone...

* "Poor Unfortunate Souls" by the Jonas Brothers is just the cutest Disney remake I've ever heard. Teen rock meets Ursula. I love it!

* Yoko Shimomura has outdone herself with the box set soundtrack of "Kingdom Hearts" (available only in Japan - thanks, Jonathan!). The added tracks for KH2 are wonderful, but what really impressed me was "Lord of the Castle", the new final boss track for "Chain of Memories"; when the orchestra kicks in around 1:40, it easily matches "Darkness of the Unknown" for energy and rhythm.

* I'm in the middle of "Final Fantasy II" (the Dawn of Souls remake) and ye Gods, I hate this gameplay system so very, very much. But the story's quite good.

* Just a few words about the series finale of Rome: on some level, it was perhaps the episode most strongly bound by historical context - we know what happens at Actium, we know what it means for the losing side of the war. That might account for the largely anticlimactic feeling I got by the time it was over; for all that Purefoy and Marshall delivered Emmy-level performances, there's no real surprise. Also, I'm not sure why Vorenus' fate was conveyed so ambiguously (we don't see him die, but Pullo later says he did, but Pullo's lying to Octavian anyway, etc.). And I'm also displeased with the fact that, looking back, Timon's subplot ended two weeks ago. It's not that I really wanted to see him again, but I think I'd been waiting for a more thorough degree of closure (because "Let's go to Jerusalem!" is never a sentence that leads to "Happily ever after"). And finally, much love to Polly Walker for batting it out of the goddamned ballpark, acting-wise: forget Simon Woods, that penultimate scene at the triumph was all her.

* Starcrossed was a 15-minute film by James Burkhammer that raised quite a few eyebrows, though I'm not too clear on why. Yes, it tackles the incest taboo head-on, but it's hardly the first film to do so... and unlike "Harry and Max", which at least admits that seducing your brother has perks but will screw your head up something horrid, "Starcrossed" plays it as the standard Romeo-and-Juliet plot: Connor falls in love with his older brother Darren, "teh sexxx" is had, they're discovered, and they decide to cash in their chips and kill themselves. See, it's missing something. Whenever I think of the quintessential suicide pact storyline, it's not "Romeo and Juliet" that comes to mind but "Thelma and Louise", because the latter added something to the formula: when the situation becomes untenable, you can at least try to run. Because, IMO, if you feel so strongly about someone or something that you're willing to defy social conventions, you're not going to give up easily. It's when you can run no further that you drive off a cliff. "Starcrossed", by contrast, has Darren and Connor giving up without much of a fight, and what the film suggests is that the story couldn't have ended any other way - even though Burkhammer never puts a negative slant on the relationship to begin with. So it's a bit garbled, and the acting's only so-so, and the plot is utterly, thoroughly standard, so I don't see what the big deal is.

* Heroes retrospective catch-up to follow soon (hopefully).

1. This isn't one of the more engaging episodes, as it deals almost entirely with subplots that aren't going anywhere. The lead in the Sylar mystery fizzles, as does Matt's newly-found marital bliss; DL spends all his screen time spouting platitudes at Micah, whose view of the situation is shockingly simplistic (isn't he supposed to be a supergenius?); Niki and Tina have some more meaningless psychobabble, at the end of which Jessica emerges and chases Tina away (forever?). There's a lot of padding here.

2. It's unfortunate that Simone was killed off, not so much for her sake but because it always seemed like there was more to Charles Deveaux than we saw, and she was in the perfect position to investigate that. It would've given her something to do other than recite some awful dialogue about saving the world. But that road's pretty much closed now.

3. This is the first time we've seen the extended Petrelli family dynamic, and it's just as deliciously twisted as I'd expected. These people are constantly manipulating and betraying each other, each of them secure in the belief that they're doing the right thing. But Nathan... hoo boy. It occurs to me that at some fairly recent point, the writers suddenly realized Nathan was becoming really unlikeable, so suddenly everyone from his mother to Hiro (a perfect stranger, really) recognizes Nathan's enormous depth of feeling and caring just by looking at him. And... no. Disowning your brother because he might embarrass you in front of a reporter isn't the sort of thing that connotes emotion, at least not the kind you want an approved character expressing.

4. Hiro and Ando meet DL and Micah. It's not an especially interesting team-up, because it lacks a crucial element in these meetings: recognition. When Peter and Isaac met, it was with the explicit revelation that they were both "different". Here, the meeting is almost absurdly contrived (they all just happen to be on the same road out of Vegas), both Hiro and DL use their powers, and yet they all walk away none the wiser. In which case, what's the point?

5. Matt playing Ghost Whisperer for Ted and Karen is a perfect example of what's wrong with his character: his basic function is reading thoughts and repeating them aloud. But we as viewers are usually privy to those thoughts anyway, thanks to the magic of voiceover technology. So most of the time he's just reciting what we already know for the benefit of other characters. Telepathy, here, is interpreted as a thoroughly passive ability, and that comes into play in terms of how his subplot is handled: all this domestic melodrama with Janice that goes on and on stems in part from Matt having a passive power, and therefore needing to cope with situations in a way that allows for passivity. It's just not very interesting.

6. Micah is, I believe, the first child of two Heroes who exhibits abilities of his own. As we'll see later, he's not alone, but at the time it was a nice (if somewhat predictable) twist. I also love that he's shown as knowing a lot more than we might have given him credit for, but if that's the case, why was he being such a silly twit before, when he called his father a "bad guy" and insisted on saving his mother like he's the goddamned Batman?

The latter half of this week has been utter hell, so it's two episodes for the price of one today. :) "Passing Sentences" (hopefully) to follow tomorrow morning.

Hiros

1. One of the glitches that has plagued "Heroes" from the start is inconsistencies between cliffhanger endings and the episode prologues the following week. Here, for example, Peter's first words to Future Hiro are very different from what he says at the end of "Collision". And in this case, it's a pretty significant difference, because here he makes the connection that a person might have stopped time whereas in the previous episode, he's more concerned about how time could have stopped in the first place.

2. Okay, let's talk about "Save The Cheerleader, Save The World". Part of the cliche with time travel is that any message from the future will be sufficiently garbled that you don't instantly know what's going to happen, even though it's in the future's best interest that swift and decisive action be taken. Here, though, there may actually be a reason for the enigmatic nature of Future Hiro's message... if we're willing to play a bit of future-reconstruction.

So assume, for the moment, that Peter never went back to Isaac. He doesn't find out about Claire, doesn't go to Texas to save her, and therefore Sylar kills her and steals her power, making him virtually unstoppable. No one but Isaac would know, and he'd be in no position to do anything about it. So it's very likely Future Hiro isn't being deliberately vague - they (meaning Hiro and whoever else survives in the future) never found out who the girl in the paintings was to begin with.

What's less clear (at this point, anyway) is how Claire factors into the greater problem of New York's destruction. But we'll have to look at that again after the season's over.

3. Another example of being a little too subtle - Peter's encounter with Future Hiro allows him to copy Hiro's chronokinesis, but we won't see any evidence of this for a good long while. In fact, this is something that hasn't been stressed enough: Peter's mimicking is unconscious. He doesn't necessarily know when he's doing it, or even when there's another superpowered person in the room.

4. Nathan's in excellent form this episode. First we have his little demonstration of power, which was just "Okay, he's tensing up, what's he gonna HOLY JESUS OH MY GOD AWESOME!!!" Extra points for shirtlessness. Then he meets Hiro in a collision of extremes - the latter has completely embraced his powers and his heroic "destiny", while the former is in denial and just wants to pretend everything's normal. It's hard to gauge whether Nathan's humoring Hiro or accepting the man's claims at face value (also a possibility, given his own experience). And finally, Pasdar pulls out this slimy, sleazy grin when he turns the tables on Linderman's henchwoman... wow. Very much a politician's smile.

5. Obligatory "Aww, Hiro's So Cute!" moment - the waffles. :)

6. It's unfortunate that the "Heroes" version of telepathy is a passive power, since it's really limited Matt's storyline; there's something not kosher about using his wife's thoughts to "fix" his marriage, but then again, he's only trying to make her happy. Now, if he'd been manipulating her thoughts, that'd be a whole different shade of grey. But Matt's function doesn't seem to extend beyond "hearing thoughts", and it's just not very kinetic as the axis of his storyline, especially when you consider this episode ends the way the last one did, with Matt passing out on a dirty floor.

7. Another bit you can only appreciate in hindsight: Peter's right when he says that Isaac's paintings are like panels in a comic book, telling a sequential narrative... but he's arranged them in the incorrect order. This will become clearer when the events actually take place.

8. This is the first time Peter consciously calls on someone else's power, and really, it says a lot about how completely this show hooked me that when I first saw his eyes go white, I was in pure geek-out mode.

---

Better Halves

1. Did I mention that I'm ignoring Mohinder's opening/closing monologues? Because I am. Yawn. Really.

2. This episode is almost completely Niki-centric, and introduces DL to the cast. Unfortunately, it's full of the same muddled writing: where's the terror Niki felt last episode when the police told her DL was in the vicinity? Is this tame, loving figure the person everyone except Micah was terrified of? If DL escaped from prison, as he said, that means there was a trial and conviction, but there was no money and no witnesses. How could he have lost? Why doesn't Niki remember anything Jessica does while Jessica is aware, at all times, of what's going on? Why does Jessica hate DL? Why is Jessica the only Hero to wear the Godsend mark on her shoulder? None of these questions are answered, and not because of delaying tactics - rather, it's pretty obvious Loeb and the other writers working on Niki just didn't consider those questions to begin with.

3. Only Claire and Hiro have subplots in this episode, but I don't have much to say about them. I suppose I could be charitable and say this is one instance where Niki does affect another protagonist: Jessica's actions form the first crack in Hiro's self-confidence, and that will come into play later with Charlie. But it's a little too indirect for my tastes.

4. Oh, and Eden works for Mr. Bennet. Big shock - I was half-expecting her to be Sylar. Here's something I never figured out: while on the phone with Eden, Mr. Bennet picks up a pair of cracked glasses. Whose are they? Chandra Suresh's?

5. I'm not clear on the significance of Sandra's revelation at the end of the episode, and what Claire might have learned from it. That her healing factor was active since she was a baby? That the people she just met couldn't have been her birth parents because... well, what? Thoughts, anyone?

1. Another point of criticism with regards to Niki is that her storyline doesn't really intersect with any others. This episode's encounter with Nathan nonwithstanding, the Hawkins-Sanders family is off in their own world, with no tangible involvement in or contribution to the major plotlines (Sylar, the destruction of New York). If Niki, Micah and DL were to be suddenly erased, nothing would change.

Now, self-contained subplots are perfectly legitimate in an ongoing narrative... unless you make a point of stressing that everyone's connected. And with the exception of these three, everyone we've seen so far is connected in one way or another. It's like a game: Link Peter and Ted? Peter was Simone's lover, Simone's ex-boyfriend is Isaac, Isaac works for the Company, and they had acquired Ted at some point in the past. Link Candice and Hiro? Hiro's mission was to save Claire, a figure of great interest to the Haitian, whose replacement in the Company is Candice. Niki and her family just aren't part of that tapestry.

2. It's funny how re-viewing older episodes can suddenly provide a context with which to understand later plot twists that I might not have interpreted correctly the first time around. Mohinder's abrupt change of heart and subsequent retreat to India had, at the time, annoyed me greatly because it seemed he was just being shunted aside for lack of any appealing direction for his character. And yet, "Collision" establishes (fairly early in the series) that Mohinder can't maintain his convictions in his father's theories without proof, and he's not getting any at this point. On top of that, his decision to just drop everything and leave comes on the heels of one emotional blow after another - being dismissed as a madman by Nathan, frustrated with Peter and the unresponsive Isaac, and, of course, being confronted (for the first time) with the reality of his father's demise. One possible downside to the cliffhanger endings is that time gets a bit wonky, because the next episode picks up from the same moment the last one left off, while a week has passed in real time. Four episodes in, Chandra Suresh has only been dead for a few days, a week at most. In that light, Mohinder's confusion is perfectly understandable.

(It's interesting to note, though, that his father had the exact same methodology: as we'll see later on, Chandra discards the timid Gabriel Gray when he doesn't get immediate results, despite the fact that he's actually found what he's looking for.)

Still keeping with this theme, we have Hiro and Ando. At the time, I felt that Hiro ditching Ando was a bit contrived (especially with that "Partners Are No Good" guy monologuing about it). And here we are, months earlier, watching Ando scheme and whine and manipulate Hiro into one pointless diversion after another, getting them both in a lot of trouble. If Ando hadn't been around, Hiro would have made much more progress. Of course, if Ando hadn't been around, Hiro would have ultimately failed to get the Magic Sword, so Ando isn't a strictly negative character.

3. No matter how many times I see white eyes as a sign of oracular vision, it never fails to creep me out.

4. I'm sorry, but switching cards at a poker table after your opponent has already seen his hand is sheer idiocy. What, you couldn't stop time before the hand was dealt?

5. Back to Nathan again: he admits to Niki that he's happily married, and then he cheats on his wife. It's that same sort of dissonance we see in his relationship with Peter: there's a significant chasm between what Nathan says (and, ostensibly, feels) and what he does. I wonder, at times, if we're not meant to see him as a villainous figure despite his positive attributes.

6. That said, the seduction scene? Sizzling.

7. And here's the payoff to the rape storyline, as Claire - initially content to keep quiet so as not to draw attention to herself - takes action to prevent Brody from forcing himself on another girl (after finding out that she's not his only victim). What does she do? She tricks him into giving her a ride and drives his car into a wall at a hundred miles per hour.

You know, I've read stories where women avenge themselves on their rapists; I've read stories where women forgive their rapists as a way of healing themselves; I don't think I've ever seen a scenario where a woman sacrifices herself to kill her rapist. It's not as clear-cut as that, since we know Claire can recover, but all the same, it's an extension of self-destructive tendencies that result in a positively chilling moment.

This is what I meant by the rape being justified, as it has led to this wonderfully ambivalent scene; on the one hand, Claire isn't doing this for her own sake, she's trying to protect someone else; on the other hand, she's 17 and has basically just attempted murder. Not only that, but she's utterly calm as she springs her trap, even as Brody tells her she can't do anything to stop him. Her casual reply - "I can do this" - sent chills up my spine.

8. This episode concludes the first arc of "Heroes", leading in to the infamous "Save The Cheerleader, Save The World". I'll discuss pacing at a later date, but it's probably important to note that this show's meticulous structure is not unlike that of today's comics and their modular format of story arc followed by story arc.

One Small Leap

1. Part of the reason Niki's subplot is so unpopular is because it's a bit muddled from the very beginning. In this episode, for example, we're supposed to believe UberMom Niki let her son sleep in the backseat of a car that contained two corpses, which she then buried in the middle of the desert where her son could wake up at any moment. We also have a later scene where Niki brings Micah over to DL's mother, has a spat with her over DL's guilt or innocence, and Niki concludes this discussion by saying she wants Paulette out of Micah's life. Er... then why bring him to Grandma's house in the first place? Oh yeah, you can totally tell Jeph Loeb's the mastermind behind this character.

2. For all that "Heroes" had its shit together at a relatively early stage, Sylar was clearly a work in progress. The actor playing Sylar here - while heavily shadowed - has a visible white beard; he was clearly meant to be much older. The "Forgive Me I Have Sinned" bit is also a bit inconsistent with Sylar's characterization later, when he sees himself as evolution in action and therefore has no remorse.

3. Oh look, it's Janice. *beat* Bye, Janice. Whatever.

4. The rape scene. We have to talk about the rape scene. First off, it's pretty unsettling that Hayden Panettiere was 17 when this scene was filmed. Also, she's Kairi, which is a whole new level of brr. But beyond that, I want to evaluate this scene in terms of necessity, because there's no shortage of women in superhero fiction being sexually assaulted and/or brutalized for cheap drama or titillation, and that's not the sort of thing that's easily forgiven. I mean, I'd like to give "Heroes" the benefit of the doubt when it comes to feminist concerns, but since the writers have openly stated that they killed Simone because they didn't know what to do with her (evidently the options were "get her pregnant" or "turn her evil", while poor Tawny Cypress was telling everyone that she saw her character as the Lois Lane of the Heroverse), you have to wonder.

So was it necessary? With some reservations, I have to say yes. The dominant aspect of Claire's personality at this point in the series is her self-destructive inclinations - she throws herself into hazardous situations in the mistaken belief that she can't be hurt. And that's only half-true: she can recover from physical injuries, but her emotional traumas aren't so easily healed. That's a distinction few writers ever think about, because Wolverine or Deadpool can bounce back from pretty much anything and emerge just as he was before. What Brody does to Claire here changes her, just as future incidents will change her, long after the physical testaments to those incidents are erased. It's still rape, and I'm not completely okay with it, but at least it wasn't gratuitous.

5. Let's move on to lighter areas of discourse: damn, Milo cleans up good. The press conference is also significant because I think it's really the first time we get a sense of how twisted Nathan's perspective is. It's partly Adrian Pasdar's charisma coming through, but what makes Nathan so intriguing is that he doesn't seem to be aware of the distinction between loving and hurting someone (ie: if you choose one, you have to at least try to avoid the other). He loves Peter, but does that stop him from using his little brother as political capital just because it's convenient? Hell no. He's not even sorry. He doesn't even understand that he did a Very Bad Thing. And he'll betray Peter repeatedly, never once even pausing to consider that their relationship might change as a result. It's a pattern we'll see again with Heidi and Meredith, but we'll get to them later. Either Nathan's so adept at denial and repression that he can't comprehend the simple truth of "actions have consequences", or he's totally amoral and thinks he can both have and eat his cake.

6. One area where "Heroes" has absolutely excelled is the use of cliffhangers; every episode tops the one before it. I mean, "Don't Look Back" ended with New York going boom, this episode has Claire waking up in mid-autopsy. It's a shocking, disturbing moment that leaves you on the edge of your seat.

Don't Look Back

Not much to say about this one...

1. Matt and Eden join the cast. There's something about Greg Grunberg that makes him instantly accessible and sympathetic no matter what role he's playing; Nora Zehetner, by contrast, telegraphs Eden's duplicity a mile away. I get the feeling Zehetner might not have been totally comfortable in the role at first, though she certainly grew into it later.

2. Lots of surprising guest-stars this episode: I liked Clea DuVall in "Girl, Interrupted", but the real surprise of the evening was Stacy Haiduk, who I'd last seen as Lana Lang in the toxic "Adventures of Superboy" live-action series from the '80s. In fairness to Haiduk, she's hardly the blandest Lana to ever darken our screen - that honor belongs to current mannequin-on-the-move Kristin Kreuk, whose upper lip moves only slightly more frequently than the western coast of the United States. It also took me a few minutes to peg where I'd seen Matt Lanter (Brody) before: he was a participant in "Manhunt", the male version of "America's Next Top Model" (which was astonishingly even more vapid and ridiculous than its template).

3. One Degree of Separation: Cristine Rose (Angela Petrelli) played Prue Halliwell's boss in "Charmed", where Zachary Quinto (Sylar) guest-starred as a warlock out to kill the Halliwell cat (yes, you can tell that was a later-season episode, can't you?).

4. There's such a thing as being too subtle: Peter's stick-figure drawing was meant to be the big red alert that he'd just used Isaac's powers (while hopped up on morphine, natch), but it's such an understated moment that when he references it in a later episode, I had completely forgotten about it.

5. Angela's visit with Peter is a bit odd, for two reasons. First, this is one of the very few times we hear anything about the Petrelli patriarch, a character who to this day remains shrouded in mystery; second, the implication is that Peter might be suffering from an inherited mental illness (which could be an interesting turn for a primary character), but this plot point is never raised again.

6. Claire is the only one who asks what happened to the man she saved from the fire last episode. It's little touches like that which made her stand out to begin with, and certainly helped shape her into an admirable heroine as time went by.

7. Adrian Pasdar and Milo Ventimiglia have amazing chemistry together - I've seen actual brothers who were less convincing on-screen.

8. Hiro's trip to the future, and what he sees there, is the first seasonal subplot to be introduced. One question the show hasn't really dealt with yet is the issue of free will vs. predestination - is the future set in stone or can it be changed? Everything Isaac painted (and will paint) comes true, which seems to suggest his death is inevitable (as others pointed out, the gun Hiro finds is the same gun Isaac will eventually use to shoot Simone). But "Save The Cheerleader, Save The World" implies that Claire wasn't saved the first time around.

To pass the time until April 23 (scrunching up my face really hard didn't work), I'll be re-watching "Heroes" from the top every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and making some observations along the way. Today: Genesis. Since this was the pilot, I'm going to be a little more forgiving of inconsistencies.

1. Okay, the very first scene sets up a plot hole that hasn't been resolved yet: how did Peter acquire his prophetic dreams? They're obviously not an extension of his natural ability - so far, every Hero has had just one power, even if they can use that power to achieve multiple effects (ie: Hiro, the Haitian). But as we learn here (and will see again in episode 10), Peter was having these dreams long before he could have copied them from Isaac, Charles Deveaux, or anyone else we've seen on-screen. My guess is he picked it up from his father, but there's no real evidence to support that.

2. Mohinder's accent was much thicker in this episode - Sendhil Ramamurthy was clearly making an effort to sound Indian, but that's pretty much gone now. Too stereotypical?

3. The first appearance of Mr. Bennet shows how Tim Kring and company approached the issue of generic expectations - given the context of his two scenes here, one might be forgiven for dismissing Mr. Bennet as yet another "shadowy malefactor" in the vein of the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Malcolm Janus and so on. And those expectations were subverted: he's only a pawn, and not an evil pawn at that, and he had nothing to do with Chandra Suresh's murder - had no desire to see the Professor dead at all, in fact.

4. While "Heroes" may suffer the occasional glitch, Niki's first scene serves as an excellent example of how well-coordinated and well-planned this series is. In hindsight, I realize that this scene actually introduces us to Jessica, not Niki. Jessica's the one doing the stripping - it's only after she walks past the mirror that Niki emerges. It's a very subtle moment, because you have no reason to suspect anything's wrong; Ali Larter plays the personality shift as befits a woman who just ran a stint of online porn and now must take her young son to school. In fact, if you review this episode knowing about the Niki/Jessica schism, it becomes a lot more complex in terms of who's doing what: which of them, for example, threatened Micah's principal? Which of them loaned money from Linderman?

5. Claire's growth as a character is astonishing; power-related angst aside, she's pretty much the typical self-absorbed cheerleader here, who thinks talking to an outcast in front of people is an appropriate reward for loyalty. I do wish, though, that we could've learned more about how she ended up confiding in Zach to begin with; it doesn't seem like something she'd think up on her own.

6. "Yoguruto?" Hee. :)

7. And here's another unanswered question: did Nathan know he could fly before he saved Peter at the end of the episode? If he didn't, the discovery doesn't seem to freak him out much; if he did, he would've reacted more strongly to Peter's claim that he could fly. Of course, there's a measure of artifice here because the interaction between Nathan and Peter was part of the reversal Kring used to mislead the audience - we expect Peter (the dreamer) to be right and Nathan (the skeptic) to be wrong, and that's not exactly what happens. But it serves as a very effective climax to the episode.

And here's a thought that occurred to me today: Quesada, Millar and many of the current inhabitants of Marvel's talent (cess)pool grew up at a time when "Bastards Are Cool" was the dominant philosophy in superhero comics.

Is it any wonder, then, that when these kids came to power, they effectively forced the Marvel Universe into a position where The Bastards win?

(The irony, of course, being that by the time they got to act out their adolescent fantasies, we'd all moved on - The Bastard is nothing more than a cliche now.)

Actual conversation today:

LCS Guy: Di, you're not going to believe what they just did - Captain America is dead.

Me: Really? Huh. Well, when's he coming back?

Yeah, that's pretty much the sum total of my investment in this particular plot twist. Don't get me wrong, I trust Brubaker knows what he's doing, I'm just not inclined to play along as if I didn't remember Foggy Nelson and how Marvel swore up and down that he was dead too, "for reals".

Here's food for thought, though: by killing the one character who represents idealism and heroism for Marvel, the current regime has finally proven - once and for all - how far off-course they've gone, how skewed their perception is, and how they're utterly determined to make the Marvel Universe a place that's just not fun to visit anymore.

While randomly trawling the Internet, I stumbled onto a blogger who's been analyzing Grant Morrison's run on "New X-Men". I can't seem to find the link now, but what got my attention at the time was a side remark he made during a review of one of the earlier issues: he considers Morrison's Magneto to be the great failure of the run, for obvious reasons (out of character, raving lunatic, and so on).

It got me thinking about "New X-Men". I like that after all this time I'm still thinking about "New X-Men", I still feel like there's more to say about it. But anyway, Magneto. It's no secret that "Planet X" depicted the X-Men's nemesis in a very unflattering light - in later interviews, Morrison was quite candid about the fact that Magneto, in his eyes, was a "mad old twat". So one can certainly make the claim that this was just Morrison showing contempt for what he considered to be an archaic staple of the sub-genre.

And yet... I think part of the problem with reading (and understanding) "New X-Men" today is that Morrison based his entire approach on a paradox. On the one hand, his run implicitly asks the reader to sweep aside continuity and the gaudy superheroics of the past - the very first line of issue 114 is "Wolverine, you can probably stop doing that now." But at the same time, if you take everything Morrison did and look at it within the wider context of X-Men history... well, let's have a look.

Cyclops' affair with Emma Frost makes a certain amount of sense on Morrison's merits alone: he's having marital difficulties, he's coping with mental trauma, and Emma offers him a chance to escape and have a little fun. We might not agree with what he does, but we can at least understand why he does it. Of course, it doesn't hurt Morrison's case that Scott Summers has a history of infidelity: he dated Colleen Wing when Jean was presumed dead (Claremont), took off with Lee Forrester when Jean really was dead (Claremont again), married Madelyne (still Claremont) only to leave her for Jean (Simonson?), cheated on Jean with Psylocke (Lobdell/Nicieza), married Jean, and then he took off with his boyfriend Achmed (likeadeuce ;)). So Morrison, intentionally or not, is falling into step with many writers before him who all agree that Cyclops can't seem to keep it in his pants.

Which brings me to Magneto. Let's put aside the destruction of Genosha for a moment, and the fact that he's partly to blame for that (he gathered those mutants and offered them safety, only to get himself crippled by provoking the X-Men). If we take "Planet X" into the larger context of Magneto's history, here is a man who survived the Holocaust, who watched his firstborn daughter burn alive, whose other children despise him, whose grandchildren (real or Wandaspawned) don't even know he exists, who's alienated from his best friend and possibly the only person alive who understands him, whose students betray him (first the New Mutants, then Fabian Cortez, then Exodus).

You take that, and you add the deaths of sixteen million people who put their faith in him, and yes, that's a man on the brink of insanity. That is certainly the portrait of a man who will take power-boosting drugs and become dependent on them, who will leave himself open to Sublime's manipulation, and who will make a last, desperate bid to rule the world because he thinks this is mutantkind's last chance. And the terrible irony is that he's wrong - it's been his last chance all along, his time that was running out, and anything he does at this point is too little, too late; as Ernst tells him, "Nobody likes what you're doing ... it's boring and old-fashioned."

This has been Magneto's fatal flaw since Uncanny X-Men #150: he's so obsessed with his grand plans for world conquest and the utopia that will surely follow that he can never see past it, to ask what comes next. And Morrison capitalizes on that: Magneto wastes so much time infiltrating the Institute and playing the usual mind games with Xavier and the X-Men that, when he finally makes his move, he finds himself faced with a new generation of mutants that asserted itself in the interrim, and they only ever said "Magneto Was Right" when he was dead.

So no, I don't believe Morrison's Magneto was a failure at all. I think it's an image of a broken man, desperately clinging to the only thing that's keeping him going, the thing he wants to hear Xavier say - "you were right and I was wrong". And when he realizes he can never have that, death is the only alternative.

And, in retrospect, I think I prefer that to coming back to life, losing his powers, and blowing up on a SHIELD helicopter as an afterthought. Seems more... fitting, I suppose.

Well, the checklist is out... not nearly as bad as it could have been, given that most of "World War Hulk" consists of miniseries.

I'll be picking up Pak's books (the primary mini and the main Hulk monthly) and possibly the X-Men tie-in by Gage.

Of course, even that amount of participation is entirely dependent on how the event is structured - if it'll turn into another "Civil War" where critical plot developments are buried in contradictory tie-ins, then screw it. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Kevin Church points the Finger of Blame in an interesting direction.

At first, I was reminded of one of the last pieces contributed by Andrew Wheeler to Ninth Art. But Wheeler's commentary was an expression of disappointment and self-implication, whereas Church... Church is pure rage.

(Gee, I wonder what could have set him off, she asked sarcastically.)

What impressed me, though, is how effectively Church channels that anger. He drops precise, methodical criticism on a lot of problem zones that people (myself included) have clucked their tongues about without suggesting viable alternatives.

I've always believed in the ideas that Church is espousing here - namely, the notion that the readership bears a great deal of responsibility for both the highs and the lows of the Big Two. Also, that a consolidated and organized readership could find itself wielding more power and influence than any executive. There's precedent - readers restored Mark Waid to "Fantastic Four", to name one recent example. Marvel and DC get away with a lot because they're allowed to do so, because Frank Miller and Jim Lee suffer no reprecussions if "All-Star Batman" is both vile in content and insulting in frequency. The feminist backlash doesn't manifest strongly enough to stop an idiot like Michael Turner glorifying Paris Hilton by giving her superpowers. Church is absolutely right: we're getting what we deserve because we don't demand more.

Unfortunately, his article ends by imploring his peers to take action, and that's where he and I part ways, ideologically speaking. I've long since given up on the hope that the readership can or will ever be motivated to exercise their power en masse, because let's face it: dropping books you don't enjoy should be common sense, not something that requires soapboxing. But the comics industry are plagued by those individuals Wheeler calls Zombies, and they provide a basic safety buffer for the companies. If you know 40,000 people will always buy your product come hell or high waters, you'll feel confident enough to do things no sane consumer in any other business would even contemplate, such as price-gouging and duplicitous solicitations that border on fraud and false advertising.

At any rate, it's good to know some people believe change is still possible. Who knows, maybe if people like Church make enough noise, and enough people listen... Okay, cue John Lennon's "Imagine" here.

Still. It'd be nice.

Astonishing X-Men #21 has been delayed from March to May. Astonishing X-Men #22 has been delayed from April to July.

If ever there was a call to justify trade-waiting? This is it. Hell, this is justification for sitting out the entire bloody run until it's completed and collected.

Curiously, other examples include "All-Star Superman", "Authority" and "Age of Bronze"... is there some kind of vast conspiracy against the letter A in the comics industry? Were Dan DiDio and Joe Quesada equally traumatized by an episode of "Sesame Street" where that furry elephant creature tried to teach them the alphabet?

If the weather channel mentions any wild gusts sweeping over the Middle East, that's just me exhaling in relief. The most recent episode of "Supernatural" has finally revealed the Big Secret, and I'm delighted to report that no sharks were jumped.

I have to admit, I was nervous; but this is one time I'm glad to admit I was wrong to expect the worst.

So apparently the latest issue of "Civil War" has ruffled some feathers.

I don't know, maybe it's just my diminishing patience with this sort of phenomenon, but it's by Mark bleeping Millar. If you were expecting something coherent, if you were expecting him to make good on any of his boasts, you've either never had the dubious pleasure of experiencing his work first-hand or you're the type of person who sits in the theatre for hours after the end of "Waiting For Godot", convinced the guy's going to show up sooner or later.

It's Millar, people. Of course it's poorly thought-out and poorly-executed garbage. Criticize as much as you want, but you have no right to feel cheated - you're getting exactly what you paid for.

Brian Vaughan's replacement on "Runaways": Joss Whedon.

I was skeptical. I had good reason to be. But I'm woman enough to admit when I'm wrong, wrong, wrong.

Kudos, Marvel - I really didn't think you had it in you.

I used to love Kyle Baker for "Why I Hate Saturn" and "I Die At Midnight".

Now I love him for those, and for this: http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=14104&PN=1&TPN=9 (scroll down a bit)

To paraphrase the South Park kids, Grandpa Simpson just got served.

And my God, is there any headline he won't glom onto for a little attention?

EDIT: Oops. It's a different Kyle Baker. Oh well. :)