Episode Report Card Couch Baron: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT ...And I Don't Care
By Couch Baron | Season 3 | Episode 24 | Aired on 04.20.2009
A guy in a police uniform who looks like he came off the top of Central Casting's list for "Older Irish-American Beat Cop" shows up at Sylar's door and asks in a Noo Yawk accent if he's that agent, and Sylar replies, "So it seems." Heh. The cop hands over some boxes, saying they contain stuff relating to "the unsolved murder of Virginia Gray," and starts to ask why a Fed would want them. He gets Sylar's front door closed in his face as an answer, which suggests to me that he recently kissed the Blarney Stone. Inside, Sylar opens the box and finds the bloody blouse or shawl or whatever that his stepmother was wearing when she got the business end of those scissors, which he smells a couple of times, and it would have been both funny and just if he'd gotten a few moths up that honker of his for his trouble. I'd wager this is not what Danko had in mind when he counseled Sylar to find an anchor, though. Sylar moves on to the scissors, and after a couple of red-streaked black-and-white flashbacks to Virginia's death, he picks up a snow globe (why they had one in the box is beyond me) and throws it into the wall...
...and then, Virginia picks it up, saying it was her favorite. We're still in color, though, so you know something's up, and then Sylar looks at a bigger one that houses a replica of the Statue Of Liberty and muses that he bought it for her. She tells him she remembers, and look, the way the scene is filmed doesn't really support it, but I'm not going to bother pretending I don't know the twist here -- Sylar is actually shifting back and forth and having a conversation between him and his representation of his stepmother, sort of a shapeshifter's twist on a chat with a hallucination, and I can't claim any measure of objectivity here because I think Sylar's been a total waste for ages and his need to dramatically verbalize everything bugs me to no end, but I still think this is a really dumb and irritating idea here, especially because hearing serial killers whine to their mothers about how they never felt they fit in isn't really anything I'd describe as compelling. He continues his unintentional hilarity by calling his father "pathetic," and says he took the shapeshifting power because he didn't want to become him, but he's still lost, and "she" brings up the "special" word again before there's a knock on the door and Sylar morphs back into himself. Seeming a little disoriented, he looks around, but then answers the door to find Danko, who tells him they've tracked Rebel down, and suggests that if he's done doing his impression of Norman Bates As A Shapeshifter, he might like to come join him.