Let’s just lay it on the line right here, baby: this was the best episode of the season to date…and then some.
Claire’s such a teenager, particularly the way she totally shrugged off her father’s highly valid point that her troubles didn’t really begin in earnest until she and Flyboy pulled their stunt with the head cheerleader, but, really, her melodramatic speech to her winged beau could only have been uttered by someone in their teens. After their encounter, you knew he was going to have a tête-à-tête with HRG; I appreciated the throwaway line from Flyboy about how he didn’t have super strength and wasn’t going to be able to hold HRG for long, along with the incredibly crappy way they landed, which also rang true.
(Sidebar: Right before Claire got snaked by Bob, I discovered just how much of a music geek I am. I’m sitting there, watching a squadron of high school cheerleaders doing a routine, and yet the thing that was first and foremost on my mind was, “Damn, that song they’re doing cheering to is catchy! Who sings that?” How embarrassing.)
I actually rather liked Flyboy this episode…which is definitely a change, since my opinion of him has pretty much ranged from indifference to annoyance…but the scene with him swooping in and knocking the hell out of Elle was pretty awesome, and his delivery of the line, “Hi, Mrs. Butler, it’s…good to, uh, see you again,” was perfect. For that matter, I also liked that small conversation between him and HRG about cars.
So Elle’s Bob’s daughter? No shock there…and no electrical-powers pun intended, either. “He’s adorable! Can I keep him?” God, I love Kristen Bell. Way to work that straw, baby.
HRG once again came through as a guy who, for as dark as his soul might be, really and truly does love his daughter. I loved the way he growled, “No-one’s taking my little girl,” though it ended up being superseded as my favorite line of the episode at the precise moment he looked into the camera and sneered, “Stings like a bitch, doesn’t it?” Hey, it’s nothing compared to taking a bullet in the eye from Mohinder Surersh! Whether you figured HRG was gonna get a transfusion from Claire or not (as I must admit that I did), it didn’t change the sunset beauty of how that whole death sequence played out; Bob’s expression was more pained than I would’ve expected, but the look on Mohinder’s face was just right. Just because you know you’re doing the right thing doesn’t mean it’s easy to live with the repercussions…especially when, in this case, the guy you’ve just killed is now back from the dead and has rarely been known to keep a cool head when it comes to extracting revenge.
Hiro going back in time to try and save his dad? Not too surprising. I mean, really, has anything ever happened that Hiro didn’t try to go back and fix? For such a sci-fi nerd, he really doesn’t seem to grasp how much trouble he’s potentially causing by mucking with the space-time continuum so often. George Takei seemed like he was about a hairsbreadth away from telling Hiro, “With great power comes great responsibility,” on several different occasions, but it was still a nice moment in the end, when Hiro asked his pops to tell Mom “hi.” It also wasn’t terribly surprising to find that Adam had been Mr. Nakamura’s killer, but maybe we were just supposed to appreciate Hiro’s shock at the revelation.
So after all the mental issues Molly’s suffered through over the past few episodes, what does Matt do? Test his newly enhanced mental abilities by forcing her to eat cereal. Once he used them to make his boss change his mind, I realized that, yeah, this might explain why he was so dark in that alternate future we saw back in Season 1. I was a little surprised that he actually got a fair amount of answers out of Mama Petrelli (along with that great line, “Our generation mortgaged our souls to protect yours!”), but I’m as curious as I’m sure everyone else is to find out who this mystery woman from the picture is…though by episode’s end, we did at least know that her name was Victoria Pratt. That was a very subtle thing at the end, with the post-it quietly but noticeably now on the photo above her face, but it means that Matt crossed the line, and all bets are off.
