Episode Report Card Couch Baron: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Crash And Burn
By Couch Baron | Season 3 | Episode 15 | Aired on 02.09.2009
New characters Mary and Luke Campbell, a mother and teenaged son, walk down the street as the mother uses the fact of the cops around Taxidermist Gray's house to make an amazingly tortured segue into the fact that Luke apparently has been getting into fights at school. She asks why he hit the particular kid in question, and the disgust is seeping out of her voice to the degree that I'm afraid my TV's going to start leaking, so Luke responds, "He called you a whore." Well, you did ask. They go inside, and Mary hears the TV. Thinking she left it on, she heads into the living room, but is startled to see a man sitting in the chair in front of it. She stage-whispers to Luke to call the police, and then sidles forth, grabs a fireplace poker, and whirls to bash the guy over the head with it, because that's preferable to merely GOING BACK OUT THE DOOR UNTIL THE POLICE ARRIVE, MY GOD. But all this is so we can get the reveal that the man in the chair is actually the commando that Sylar menaced last week. I thought he was dead, but it turns out he's gagged and covered in blood, with a screwdriver jammed through each hand to the chair arm below. I'd imagine if she whacked him in the head, it would actually be a welcome change in the pain at this point. Sylar appears and amusingly uses the remote to turn off the TV, and Mary spins and swings the poker at him, but he merely waves it away and sends the both of them into chairs with matching ugly upholstery. Sylar tells the Campbells he and "Special Agent Simmons" have been waiting for them, as he rips the duct tape off the guy's mouth and lauds him for being well-trained. "He hardly flinched at all when he lost a finger or two." Simmons asks if Sylar's going to torture him in front of them, and that line receives a very obvious response, which Sylar tries to inject with more import by dragging it out for a thousand years: "No. I'm gonna torture them in front of you." Mary and Luke cower in fear, and Sylar's Theme Ticking sends us into a commercial break.
Crash site. Daphne and Ando superzip up to the wreckage of the plane, or perhaps I should say "wreckage" considering it doesn't look any different post-missile, and Ando thanks Daphne for what she's doing. Daphne: "Don't thank me yet." Well, not to spoil anyone, but he's running out of time. They observe Claire, and Ando worries about Hiro, but Daphne points out that Ando's supposed to kill Hiro in the future, so he can't be dead. Okay, first off, Hiro saw that back in the first episode of the last chapter, so chances are it's no longer the case. I mean, the world Peter saw in the future changed, so why not the one Hiro saw? But that aside, isn't it kind of twisted that they're using what they see as the inevitability of that event for solace now? But rather than ponder questions of timeline and existence, Daphne superzips away, and I can't say I blame her.