Episode 19 - Shades of Gray
27 July 2009
Review
Synopsis: Nathan and Rebel help Matt disconnect the bomb. Nathan goes to the President to get Danko removed. Danko goes to see Tracy and Angela to try and work out if Nathan has an ability. Eventually Danko wins out. Claire decides to help Eric Doyle but may come to regret it. Sylar finds his father dying of cancer. His father tells him that life is meaningless unless you look for greater challenges. Once he sees Sylar’s healing power he tries to take it but can’t. Finally Hiro and Ando arrive back in America looking to save Matt Parkman but all they find is a baby.
The Good: The renewed discipline and focus remains and leads to some more enjoyable moments. The absence of Hiro, Ando, Mohinder, Matt and Peter from much of this is commendable restraint.
Sylar is king once more and John Glover does a terrific job playing the role of Samson Gray. He inhabits the role and makes it believable by sounding genuinely old, wise and bitter. The twist that he has cancer is a very understandable reason to stay Sylar’s hand and force them into a conversation. The contrast between the two men makes for some enjoyable conversation. Sylar’s warped morality is on full display “You used to be a killer, now look at you you’re pathetic.” More than that, Sylar is looking for something which Samson believes doesn’t exist. “Life never gives you what you want” he says from his unsatisfied perspective.
In the end Sylar does get what he wants. He gets the answers to how he came into being and a glimpse of what he might become. Then he gets to mete out his own justice by leaving his father to die alone. Before that Samson tries to take Sylar’s healing ability from him. It’s nice to connect that moment (when Sylar took the power in 301) to Sylar’s continued progression as a character. Because of the immortality granted to him he sees himself as different from his father. And Samson reveals that the hunger will always burn in them by visibly lighting up at the prospect of becoming healthy again. Suddenly the cynicism has gone and he is as wide eyed and naïve as Sylar – “I’ll get it right this time!”
Claire too deals with her daddy-issues. She ends up having to choose whether to help someone who needs it but doesn’t necessarily deserve it. Just like her father she is left having to exist in a morally grey area and make tough choices. Perhaps she will forgive him after all. It’s solid follow up on her family breaking apart (316). It was nice that the obvious was acknowledged about her presence in the comic book store. It was also good to see that Eric hadn’t really changed after all because that would have been another implausibly fast personality change.
Finally we have Danko supplanting Nathan and beginning a ruthless crackdown on the search for people with abilities. It should make for an action orientated end to the season and might yet give us a clear good-bad divide to provide a reason for the heroes to all work together.
In amongst the details though Danko remains somewhat admirable. He says that people with abilities scare him. That makes sense since a large number of his men have been killed in action (315), some brutally (314). And he exposes Nathan as a liar with double standards. The fact that Danko has good reason for his ruthless behaviour does give him the potential to turn into a really good bad guy (but he isn’t there yet, see The Bad).
Tracy also points out that Nathan betrayed her for his own benefit (314). That is true; her power was unlikely to hurt many people day to day. He could have told her to lie low. And it was good that Danko brought out the video of her as it was becoming strange that none of the prisoners had yet “outed” Nathan. Angela seemed to revel in her scene with Danko. She is the one character with some genuine mystery left to her personality and that is a credit to her performance as much as the writing. So many scenes in Heroes feel plastic, two people having a “deep” conversation in a blank room or space. Seeing her eating and drinking and enjoying life made that scene seem so much more real.
The Bad: Claire’s story didn’t have enough time to develop into anything very interesting.
The Danko-Nathan power struggle has some irritating plot holes though. Danko refers to “his” team which begs the question of who all these nameless people at computer screens are. This organisation was sanctioned by the President and has been using real world legislation to conduct its business. So one has to conclude that “his” team are civil servants who used to work in other branches of the security services or homeland security. If so they don’t have any right to disobey Nathan’s orders if they want to keep their job. Danko looks like an idiot for suggesting that they wouldn’t cooperate without him.
Worse than that though is their collusion in Danko’s plan to blow up Matt Parkman. Presumably his explosives would have killed Nathan and some of the police sent after him, so lets throw them in. We are being asked to believe that a dozen people would sit quietly by while Danko commits a forged terrorist attack? That is against every law imaginable. Once Nathan returns he should just tell the President what Danko did and have done with him. I’m assuming he didn’t tell the President that because Danko couldn’t resume command if he did.
These logic holes undermine the reality of the story being told. The real problem underlying Danko though is that I don’t believe he will succeed. Heroes has made its villains (bar Sylar) so unsuccessful so far, that a viewer would have to conclude that Danko will fail come season finale time. That lack of consequence to his actions is what undermines his ability to be a really effective villain. That and the fact that he has a point. Seeing him and Sylar face off could be interesting but again I don’t see a situation where Danko dies so their confrontation is not the greatest of cliff-hangers.
The Unknown: The implication of that meeting is that Sylar learnt from his father that the meaning of life is to find a great challenge. Assuming that is what Sylar took from it then presumably Sylar will now become the chief weapon of those with abilities as they bring down Danko’s organisation. I don’t have a problem with the challenge being Sylar’s new raison d’etre but that seems an odd headline coming out of the confrontation with his father. Was Sylar’s search for answers merely a way to keep him out of the action before he turns on Danko’s men and kills them all? If so it just seems shallow. The first half of the season made an incredibly botched attempt to humanise Sylar. Then that got tossed away and he was back to being a ruthless killer. Now he has been on a journey both with Luke and his father. So it would be nice if something more significant came out of that journey than just “looking for challenges”.
Baby Matt Parkman? Samson whistled while using his powers, what was that about? Are the genetic inheritances of the heroes really random as Angela claims? What did happen in Angola (first mentioned in 315).
Best Moment: The dialogue between Sylar and his father was excellent at times. You get the real sense that Samson has been through all that Sylar has and the power has brought him loneliness. He encourages Sylar to take up a hobby “Something to occupy the hands, stop the mind from thinking so much.” It seems like such appropriate advice for Sylar, in many ways.
Epilogue: That vital sense of consequence is still missing. Let me give you an example. In a show called Heroes you do expect the good guys to win. In season one most viewers probably didn’t expect New York to be destroyed. But the entire season was built around the iconic image which Isaac painted of the city in flames (101). We got to see New York in the future through Hiro’s eyes having been destroyed (120). And all the conflict in the season built to the final battle between Sylar and Peter over who exactly was responsible for going nuclear. The consequences of failure were clear. So even if New York wasn’t likely to be destroyed, viewers knew it was a big deal and that the characters lives would change as they saved the day.
But now in season three we get Washington painted as being in flames (317) and two episodes later it doesn’t come true. Not to mention that earlier this season (304) Peter saw a world gone wrong which is now clearly not going to come true. Heroes has lost the ability to make us care about these unlikely cataclysms. Because since the end of season one these threats have been overcome with too much ease or too many implausible occurrences.
This episode isn’t bad. It has a lot of enjoyable aspects to it but I remain deeply cynical. I can’t help but see it as building on unstable foundations.
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