Episode 15 - Trust and Blood
11 February 2009
Review
Synopsis: The heroes make a run for it with Nathan and Danko in hot pursuit. Matt paints Daphne being shot and he, Hiro and Mohinder return to the crash site. Daphne finds Ando who tells her where to go. They arrive but Daphne is killed. Peter finds Tracy and they arrange a meeting with Nathan to try and put a stop to this. Peter can now absorb one power at a time and after touching Nathan flies away as he betrays them and recaptures Tracy. Claire heads home to Costa Verde but gets a text from an anonymous rebel saying they will fight back. Sylar finds a family to torture to try and get more information out of the captured agent. The son Luke Campbell turns out to have powers and is slightly twisted like Sylar. Luke takes Sylar to see his father.
The Good: It’s sadly business as usual for Heroes with this second episode of volume four. There are some good ideas, some good action and some good acting, but the lack of detail, depth and planning really hurts.
Still, the fugitives storyline provides a more logical and easy to understand plot than seasons two or earlier season three provided. We can understand that Nathan and Noah want to protect the world from people with powers and our heroes want to keep their freedom. It’s easy to understand the emotions involved in that struggle and it provides a logical framework for future episodes as the war escalates. This episode is also far simpler and more focussed than many of the confusing messes we have sat through in earlier episodes.
The explanation that Peter can only absorb one power at a time (replacing the previous one) is pure plot device but at least explains his behaviour in the previous episode. And at least he is clearly cast now as the leader of the rebels, a firm believer in freedom over containment. And although not clearly articulated Nathan seems like a conflicted central antagonist. There is lots of depth to be explored if the writers choose to. Is he pushing containment to further his own career? Does he genuinely believe people with powers are a threat and if so how will he deal with the hypocrisy inherent in his own ability? Noah will be similarly conflicted and it is good to see him show some loyalty toward Peter after what he has done to protect Claire.
The best part of this episode is Sylar. While hugely overrated and poorly written as a serial killer for much of these three seasons, he really does command the stage here. Perhaps that’s because we get a deeper glimpse into the bitter childhood memories which motivate him to be so brutal (see Best Moment). He stalks around his house of torture with a confident swagger and really does come across as genuinely threatening and dangerous. Unlike most of the characters in Heroes there is a genuine feeling that he is unpredictable and could kill someone who looks at him the wrong way. His dynamic with Luke Campbell is very intriguing. Seeing him interact with a younger version of himself (who may turn out to be a relation) allows us a glimpse into what humanity remains in him. Luke plays his role well, looking conflicted and guilty about what he can do and only giving us a glimpse into the joy he takes at hurting others. “You should see what happens around pacemakers” he says with a grin.
It’s good to see Hiro still showing his deep moral conviction. Twice he insists he will send people money to reimburse them for help they have given him. It also provides a couple of moments of welcome comic relief.
The Bad: There is a lot of detail which is just not good.
Nathan’s phone call which accompanies the narrative seems completely unnecessary. A long anonymous phone call would seem to be a setup for a big surprising reveal but Angela is exactly who you would assume he was talking to. And his narration manages to ruin the only genuinely consequential scene in the whole episode. I have long complained about Heroes lack of good action scenes and here Daphne is murdered and we get a lame look back through Nathan’s eyes. I just don’t understand how a decision like that could be made. Parkman then forces one of the gunmen to shoot the rest of his unit. It’s a dramatic and bloody gun fight and all the drama is successfully sucked out of it.
Daphne’s death is so bizarre. I almost have to conclude that she will come back somehow because her death is the most unbelievable afterthought. Not only does it happen so quickly and dryly but then later Matt isn’t even in tears or distraught. He is already stiff jawed and talking plastically about revenge. “I want them to pay” he says while none of the others seem remotely bothered by her death. If she really has been killed off then it is such a waste. Even if reasons outside of the show meant she had to leave, there is so much emotion you could draw out of her death and it is breezed past here with unreal flippancy.
Of course Matt was only present to see her death because he painted it. I still hate this reliance on being told the future to drive stories forward. Nathan has chosen to shut the heroes down, Peter chooses to resist, Sylar chooses to seek out his father. We can understand and relate to those decisions. Why can’t Matt and Hiro make decisions about their own lives? Why does “fate” have to tell them where to go? Not only does it feel like lazy writing but this fatalism makes the characters look really stupid. Ando is happy because he remembers that he kills Hiro in the future and therefore he must still be alive in the present. So he is just accepting that that is going to happen? No of course not, he spent the earlier part of the season pleading to Hiro that he would never do that. So one would assume that the future can change right? After all we saw a future where Daphne and Knox were still alive (304) and that can’t come true now right?
The Danko and Nathan tension has been completely rushed. We don’t know anything about how this operation was organised or how humans reacted to learning that people with powers exist. Yet Danko is immediately a generic bad guy here referring to the heroes as rabid dogs. His political posturing is also pretty useless because there is little chance he is actually going to kill any of the show’s established stars. There is a hint that his character will be developed and show that he has a history of taking things too far. But it still seems ridiculous that a man working for the President would threaten to blow Claire’s brains out in front of a bunch of witnesses. Even if she were a criminal that would be murder and he would be arrested but she is not even being detained which makes this look like an unacceptably unprofessional thing for him to do. It just feels like typical Heroes overwriting a character by screaming to the cheap seats “He’s a bad guy, don’t like him, he is going to get killed soon, won’t that be great?!” I also like the idea of an air strike being the solution to how to cover up the crash site. Between that and the large military presence on the ground I would assume the news would get out pretty easily.
Mohinder remains completely forgiven I see despite aiding the bad guys in the earlier part of the season.
The Unknown: Noah claims this operation is much more complicated than Claire can imagine. How so? Does Sylar now have the powers of Eric Doyle or was that just a dramatic hand gesture? Who is texting Claire? Is it just Peter?
It’s been pointed out since “Dual” (313) that no explanation was given for how Daphne travelled backwards and forwards through time. Ando supercharged her so much that she moved backwards in time. But how exactly did she then run forward in time? Did she run really slowly? So while that is on my mind how exactly does she run across the sea? She would have to have done to get to Japan.
Best Moment: Sylar is about to torture Mary Campbell and she asks what she ever did to him. With a smile and utter confidence he claims “Nothing. Wrong place, wrong time, I could have been a flood or a tornado – it’s really no difference actually.” It’s a clever line because it shows how he justifies his actions to himself. He isn’t a man making these decisions, he’s a force of nature. He sees himself as a creation of the world, it’s not his fault he kills, it’s everyone else’s.
Epilogue: Again Heroes just can’t resist becoming a bad action movie. “This is not your fight” Mohinder tells Hiro. “We do what it takes to survive, things we can’t even imagine” says Peter. Why say that? They don’t know anything about the operation to round them up. For all they know it could be dropped by the President for being too costly or whatever. The writers just can’t resist rushing as fast as possible to set up a supposedly dramatic situation without building in the detail and character development to truly make it compelling. But at least this is better than the Arthur Petrelli nonsense we had to suffer through.
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