Matt Parkman is watching
What They Say:
Set years after the events of the original Heroes series, people with powers, now called “Evos” are now known to the entire world. However, their existence has led to conflict with the rest of humanity and resulted in a terror incident at Primatech headquarters. A year after the incident, Noah Bennet finds himself caught up in the mystery behind the truth of the event and an organization called Renatus that may involve the fate of the entire world.
The Review:
Content (warning as portions of this review may contain spoilers):
Heroes finally returns to the present this week, and it’s finally time to get some payoff to some of the show’s more recent revelations. Said payoff is pretty good and in typical fashion for this series, also helps to shake things up quite a bit going forward. However, while there’s quite a bit of strong material this time around, the show’s also a bit more unfocused than usual in regards to balancing stories.
Let’s start off with the Tommy stuff, which while major, didn’t quite get the level of focus I thought it would. After returning from his trip with Emily to Paris, he attempts to patch things up with his mom and finds out the truth. Meanwhile, Luke continues to travel with Malina and slowly opens up to her with both of these stories coming together when Joanne strolls back into town looking to kill Tommy and chaos ensues. Truth be told, her character’s been irking me for a while now so I was sort of relieved when it looked like there’d be progress in getting past her blind hatred of Evos, only to be more frustrated when that big confrontation scene ended in Casper’s death.
Like with Quentin, it feels like he got killed off too early for what else could have been done with him, but unlike that case there’s presumably no cosmic retcon to save him. Speaking of which, the event does at least cause Tommy’s time travel powers to awaken and eventually results in that Quentin reset paying off as he leads Tommy straight into Erica’s hands. It looks like the show’s going to opt for luring Tommy over to her side, which I guess could be interesting, but since it doesn’t always have the best execution with these kinds of cliches, I’m hoping we get more to it.
The other big plot this week is the Carlos stuff surprisingly and it’s actually pretty good. Seems he actually wasn’t stabbed in the back last week, and instead it’s part of the plan to make the fake capture seem more believable. Once Carlos gets inside the manor, though, we find out that all the Evos there have been brainwashed, including Jose and the priest. With that kind of setup, it’s not hard to figure out who’s running the place and indeed it turns out to Matt Parkman, who I guess really is officially a villain now since it was a little difficult to tell exactly where his alliances were during the June 13th stuff. As a viewer of the old series, it’s certainly a little weird seeing how different his character is now, but the show’s certainly done a good job of demonstrating how frightening his powers can be when used in full as he kills off Jake and forces Carlos to relive some of his most traumatic war memories in what’s probably one the show’s best-directed sequences to date. Not too sure where things are going to be headed next with that but given the Carlos stuff felt the most out of place up till this point, it’s nice to see it finally pulling its own weight.
With how big these two things are it’s not too surprising that there’s only one other side plot this week involving Taylor but it’s pretty noteworthy. She’s seemingly kidnapped by Erica’s henchmen in the beginning but, in fact, it’s actually part of a group working with Renae who is the latest on a list of characters to not actually be dead (there probably was an explanation, but it’s currently escaping me). Anyway, he wants to recruit Taylor to help in rescuing the leader of their organization, Micha. Certainly wasn’t expecting to see him return from the old series and for his little underground movement to actually go somewhere but it’s pretty neat, and it should be cool to see the older version of him when the time comes.
In spite of all these big reveals, though, the episode a little unfocused compared to usual. Mainly in that there’s a little too much put on the two biggest events this week and the juggling back and forth between them doesn’t work quite as effectively as it does when the show has more on its plate (which I guess feels like a bit of an odd complaint in hindsight). It’s certainly not crippling to anything that happens this week, though, and I can at least say I’m invested in all the separate plot threads going on right now. Let’s just hope that sticks.
In Summary:
The return to present events leads to some major ones as we get a couple of major revelations in regards to certain characters as well as a couple of key meetings that are bound to shake things up going forward. Sadly the material here isn’t balanced as well as I’d have liked and Casper’s death feels a bit cheap, but the episode’s strengths are enough to still make it a solid one even if the latter thing makes me wonder how future events will go down on that end. The show’s doing a pretty good job of keeping everything interesting, though, and with that I’m curious to see what awaits in next week’s mid-season finale.
Grade: B+
