Episode Report Card Erin: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well.
By Erin | Season 1 | Episode 18 | Aired on 03.04.2007
And now for my most favorite scene of the episode.
Nathan is escorted into the hotel kitchen by one of Linderman's guards. They go to a busy area, filled with chefs, and a gray-haired man in an apron who's furiously chopping vegetables with surgeon-like precision. Nathan walks over. "Mr. Linderman?" Linderman stops and turns and it's... MALCOLM MCDOWELL. Like, I was spoiled for this, and I still went, "HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO AWESOME IT'S MALCOLM FUCKING MCDOWELL!" when I saw him. He's just such a perfect casting choice it's unbelievable. McDowell just brings the big bad, y'all. Even when sitting still, the man's still dangerous. But he's also delightfully twinkly and silly and I cannot TELL you how psyched I am that he's Linderman.
"Do you enjoy... vegetables, Mr. Petrelli?" asks Linderman in his first line of dialogue. Awesome. The kitchen clears out as Nathan says, "I've been known to eat zucchini when the mood strikes." Oh, now they're not even TRYING to hide the pandering to the HoYay contingency. Linderman picks up a piece of pastry, and Nathan comments that he could probably hire someone to do that shit for him, but Linderman says he likes to cook; it's his form of meditation. "One aims for perfection in one's life," he says, "but one doesn't find it very often. For me, this is about as close as it gets." He lifts up his creation and it's... an individual pot pie. "Voila! A pot pie. Wholesome, warm, healthy. That's, of course, if you can live without the cream sauce. Personally, I can't. I mean, what's the point?" Hee hee hee hee hee. I love this whole scene so much I want to have sex with it and still respect it in the morning.
Linderman goes to put his pot pies in the oven as Nathan looks around to see if they're really alone. Linderman continues yammering about food and even though it's totally enjoyable and I've watched it now five times, it doesn't really have anything to do with this scene, so I'm going to jump ahead to the part where Linderman asks Nathan if he's happy. "Not especially," says Nathan. "I guess I have a few issues that plague me." "Oh, dear," says Linderman with a barely-disguised sneer. "I'm sorry to hear that. You see, I think there comes a time in a man's life where he has to ask himself whether he wants a life of happiness or a life of meaning." Nathan says he'd like to have both. Linderman chuckles and says that can't be done because those are two very different paths. "I mean, to be truly happy, a man must live absolutely in the present, and with no thought of what's gone before, and no thought of what lies ahead. But... a life of meaning, a man is condemned to wallow in the past, and obsess about the future." Nathan stares at him as Linderman says that he guesses Nathan's done quite a bit of obsessing about his own future these last few days. And that's when Nathan reaches into his pocket and pulls out the gun.