Episode Report Card Couch Baron: A | 496 USERS: B YOU GRADE IT The Way We Were
By Couch Baron | Season 1 | Episode 17 | Aired on 2007.02.26
And another cross-fade leads us to Bennet and Claire driving down the same road as Bennet and Claude did years ago. Well, at least we know Bennet isn't likely to shoot her. Claire asks where she's going, and Bennet tells her he doesn't know. Claire already has tears in her eyes, and I don't think I'm going to embarrass myself too much if I say that she's not the only one. She asks if she'll see him, or her mother, or Lyle again, but again, he doesn't know. He tells her he wanted to protect her, and she nods. "You're my dad." Oh, God. Bennet's crying too as he tells her he tried to be the best dad he could, and Claire manages a quick smile through her tears as she says she knows. She looks out the window...
... and yet another cross-fade takes us to three years ago, where a younger-looking, crimped-haired Claire asks, "Let's see?" Bennet, who's cutely if incongruously wearing a rugby shirt, puts on a pair of glasses. Claire: "Those are grandpa glasses." Bennet then tries on an even dorkier pair, and if Claire weren't helping him here, Erin calling him Bad Glasses Man back at the beginning of the season would have been even more fitting. Claire asks if she's going to need glasses too. If you keep walking through nuclear fires, hon, you just might. Bennet considers whether he wants to do this, and then tells Claire he and Sandra were wondering when they were going to have this conversation. Interesting that Bennet goes ahead and does it while Sandra isn't around, no? Maybe she's got a Haitian hangover and can't remember her own name at the moment. Bennet tells Claire that she's adopted, but while they don't know who her biological parents are, he and Sandra are her real family. Claire, confused and scared, asks how that can be if she's adopted, but Bennet responds that what makes them her real family is not where she comes from, but how much they love her. "And we love you very much. I love you very much." So Bennet was no longer making the effort to distance himself from Claire here -- he would never have treated her this tenderly and forged this new bond if he were trying not to be too attached. Claire considers his words for a long moment, and then reaches for another of the many pairs of glasses on the table and tells Bennet to try them on. He does, and asks Claire how he looks, and the answer is, "Like my dad." Behold the birth of HRG, folks.