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Peter the little bitch wakes up in the hospital. Nathan is on hand to tell him that Peter jumped, and Nathan climbed up a fire escape or something to catch him. Later, their mother shows up to tell Peter that their father killed himself, and that Peter was always her favourite child. Once he's sprung, Peter goes straight back out to the tall building he can find, and when his brother shows up, he confronts him about their father's suicide (Nathan knew), and begs Nathan to tell him that he flew. Nathan's like, "We both flew," and Peter's like, "Whatever," and then Nathan kind of points at him, and we pull back to see that Peter's kind of hovering over the roof of the building. Eh. Milo Ventimiglia is so miscast in this part, I can't really care about him. Niki wakes up in her crime scene, unable to remember anything that happened. When Micah calls her to come get him, she grabs her video camera and takes off, but she can't help pulling over on the way to review the tape. Unfortunately, the image fuzzes out at the moment we can hear the killing start. Then the phone rings again, and Niki is told Micah called her four hours ago. She finally gets him, and when they return to the house to get a few things before lamming it, she discovers that her split-off reflection, or whatever (Ikin?), cleaned everything up, left her the keys to a classic convertible with the corpses in the trunk, and even provided a map to a good spot where Niki can bury them in a shallow grave. When she gets there, though, she sees someone's left their corpses there before. Some other cheerleader takes credit for Claire's hot save; at home, her evil dad tells her they'll start looking into finding her biological parents, and we also see that he stole the suicide attempt tape from Claire's nerdy videographer. Mohinder comes home to find someone sketchy messing around in the guise of an exterminator. There's a scuffle out in the hall, and a conveniently passing pixie-haired cutie appears to help settle things in Mohinder's favour. She tells him she was friends with his dad, and an assload of exposition ensues about the elder Suresh's research, but I have to say I couldn't really concentrate on it because I was sure the exterminator was a red herring to make Mohinder trust the pixie, the real agent! Let's see if I end up being right. Across the country, we finally meet Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg woo!), a beat cop and family man who keeps failing the detectives' exam even though he can hear people's thoughts -- a talent he uses to find a girl presumed abducted from a crime scene he's guarding. The girls' parents were murdered in a totally grisly way: the mother is pinned sideways to the stair railing, and the father is frozen solid, the top of his head cut off and his brain removed. The lady detectives blame Sylar (oh yeah -- there was also a short conversation between Dad Suresh and Sylar on the former's answering machine, in which Sylar was all "You made me a killer," blah blah), until they get suspicious of Matt, thinking he staged the crime scene to make himself a hero (hee) and get a promotion out of it, but he blames the crime on Sylar, and they're all, "No one knows about him!" and he's like, "I heard you," and then the detective played by Clea DuVall arrests him. And FINALLY, Hiro is super-psyched to be in New York, but then freaked out when he spots a comic book that depicts his whole storyline, starting from back in "Genesis." He follows the address in the back of the book to the artist, junkie Isaac. But when he gets there, he finds that Isaac has been frozen solid, the top of his head cut off and his brain removed, and then the cops burst in. A translator calls back to Japan to talk to Hiro's co-worker, who says he hasn't seen Hiro in five weeks. Hiro's all like, "No, it's October 2," and the cops show him a newspaper (trumpeting Nathan's election victory) dated November 8, and then the apocalypse happens, and Hiro freaks out and teleports back to Japan, the day he left. I love Hiro. Anyway, Erin will fill in the gaps in the recap. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously on Heroes: There was a lot of exposition, a bit of teleportation, a tad of precognition, several seconds of levitation, and very little illumination. And Hiro is awesome.
Okay, the "previously on Heroes" announcement guy's voice is super annoying. I want to kill him. Several times. With Anthrax-coated Nerf bat.
Tonight's episode begins with another shot of the rooftop and the chapter title, just like last week. We're at Chapter Two, apparently, and its title is "Don't Look Back." Suresh is voice-overing that we all imagine ourselves to be agents of our own destinies, but do we really have any choice in how or when we rise or fall? Or is it up to a force larger than us? Man, he asks a lot of questions. Peter's on the roof again, getting ready to fly/die. He jumps off the ledge as Suresh wonders if it's evolution that takes our hand or science that points the way. I have no idea what he's yammering on about. All I know is, we get to see Nathan fly up and catch his brother again and it's such an awesome shot that I get goosebumps all over again. Also? An airborne Adrian Pasdar is just too hilarious for words. In the good way. He looks so surprised and peeved, all at the same time.
Suresh says something about God intervening and saving us or something, and we see Peter lose his grasp on Nathan's hand again, and then we're in a hospital room and Peter's coming awake with a gasp as Nathan's hand grips his shoulder. Peter has no idea where he is or what's happened. Nathan's moderately pleased to hear this, as it means that Peter's possibly forgotten about that whole flying thing he pulled off. A flying senator is NOT good for the polls. Nathan reminds his brother that he jumped and Peter doesn't believe it. "You tried to kill yourself," whispers Nathan. "You were a little wound up yesterday. Just bein' you." Well, that's lovely. You know you can fly, but you're making your already fucked-up brother believe he's suicidal AND a pain in your ass. I am SO voting for you!
Peter isn't buying the suicide story. He tells Nathan what really happened. "You flew," he says. "You flew up and you caught me." Nathan laughs nervously and Adrian Pasdar terrifies us all with his attempt at a smile. The man's teeth should be registered as lethal weapons, y'all. Nathan tries to convince his brother that he fell twenty-five feet to a fire escape and Nathan climbed up and carried him down. "The rest is just crazy talk," says Nathan. What is this, 1954? "That's crazy talk!" Who talks like that? Red Buttons? Judy Holliday?
Hm. In case you missed it the first time around, we get a second showing of Claire and the Burning Tunnel of Train from last week's episode. The shot of Claire running out of the train turns into a picture on the front page of the local paper, and we see Claire reading it and chewing on her finger. It's pretty obvious that last week's episode was the pilot and this week's was shot much later because Claire's hair looks far more beauty pageant-y than it did last week. She calls out to her dad and asks if she can talk to him about something. Her dad, who just happens to be creepy Bad Glasses Man, walks over with juice and asks if she's pregnant. Instead of immediately calling her father a perv and walking out, Claire just good-naturedly says she isn't, and her father says that he already knows what she wants to talk to him about. This conversation is already freaking me out. If my father walked over to me with a pitcher of orange juice and balls-out asked me if I was pregnant, I probably would have passed out. But BGM isn't my father and Claire isn't me and let's get through this as fast as possible, shall we? "It's about wanting to know who you really are," says BGM. "Your mother told me you were asking about your birth parents."
Claire thinks it's time she knew who they were and BGM wants to know why she suddenly needs to know now. "I'm just wondering, that's all," she says. "You know, what they're like, what they can do--" BGM looks at her with surprise. "What they can do?" Claire quickly covers with "hobbies" and "skills" and her father just tells her that he thinks this is an adult decision, and even though walking through fire can certainly age a person, Claire is nowhere near adulthood yet. He says that it's going to be very complex and he'd rather she try to keep things light and fun and stupid for as long as she can. Too late, dad. She's already tossed herself off a sixty-foot structure and lived to tell about it. There's precious little that's light and fun about her life right now.
He tells her to stick to fun stuff like cheerleading and Claire says that cheerleading is hard and treacherous work. Like espionage, only with pompoms instead of guns. He kind of laughs and then kisses her on the cheek and tells her to remain a girl for just a little longer. Because then he can make out with her and promise her a future full of therapy! Because really? He's totally grossing me out. Maybe it's just because I know he's not really her father and he's also kind of creepy and therefore, he must want to molest her. I can't help it. He skeeves me out. No offense against Jack Coleman -- he's awesome. Hell, I'm a die-hard Dynasty fan and he was one of my faves. But... still. Totally skeevy. "Trust me," he says skeevily. "I actually know a few things." Claire gets totally skeeved out by him and runs away with her egg sandwich as he glowers at the juice on the counter and ponders if licking the outside of the glass would be just as fun as licking the side of his fake-daughter's face. Or, you know, he just looks down at the burning train picture in the paper. But he's THINKING about the face-licking!
Brooklyn. Suresh enters his father's apartment, and it's not one room as I originally thought in the pilot. In fact, it's a gargantuan apartment, and unless Suresh is supplementing his cab driver income with a nice, tidy, smack-selling business, I don't see how he can afford it. I mean, I've only just started looking for an apartment in New York and it's stunning what you CAN'T get for $1700 a month. So, whatever, Suresh enters his gargantuan cheap-ass Brooklyn apartment and starts to settle in. That's when he sees some guy's butt hanging out from beneath his desk. And, no, it's not naked. It's clothed in a janitorial jumpsuit and appears to be attached to a man who's mucking with the baseboards. Suresh creeps forward in an attempt to crack the guy over the skull with a decorative plaster elephant, but his target leaps up and hurriedly explains that he's the exterminator. He even brandishes one of those old fashioned exterminator tanks as proof. Suresh looks down and sees that something's pulled out from the wall and there's a toolkit on the floor with an electronic device on top, thereby making this "bug eliminator" look more like a "bug planter."
The bug planter finally gets that Suresh isn't falling for his routine and he goes to attack him with the exterminator tank. A scrapple ensues. (That's the Heroes version of, "And then they fight.") The bug planter kicks Suresh across the room and pulls out his gun. But instead of killing Suresh, the guy just walks out. Suresh runs after him, but the guy's already knocked into some miniscule girl in the hallway. Suresh and the guy fight some more until the pixie picks up the gun and points it at them both. The bug planter tries to tell her he's the exterminator, but the fact that he's wearing a gun holster seems to indicate otherwise. The bug planter grabs Suresh and flings him at the pixie. He runs off and Suresh thanks Pixie for saving his life. "Mohinder Suresh," he says, holding out his hand. "The professor's son?" says Pixie, taking it.
It's time for Hiro's repeat. He's on the train, concentrating hard, and the thing we know, he's in Times Square. He runs through the streets, laughing and yelling. "Yata! Hurro New York!" "Whassup!" "Brittany Spears!" Oh, man. I love him so much. Hiro passes a newsstand and the smile fades from his face as he sees a comic entitled 9th Wonders. On the cover of the comic is none other than Hiro himself, in Times Square, exclaiming, "I did it!" Looks like Isaac's been envisioning the future again. Hiro grabs the comic and starts to page through it until the owner of the newsstand goes, "Hey, pal. This ain't a library." What, did Hiro transport himself back to 1938? Seriously. What's with the Cagney-speak from everyone tonight? Hiro hands the guy some Yen and then runs off just as the guy realizes what he's done.
He speeds around and finally ducks in to an old fashioned movie theatre ticket booth. It is honestly right out of the forties. Hiro pulls out the comic and starts to read. Every panel is from his life. The clock, the office, the friend chastising him about Star Trek, the "super Hiro" comment; it's all there. Hiro speeds to the back of the book and sees not only a picture of the author, Isaac Mendez, but an ADDRESS for him. I'm not a big comics fan, but I devour several different graphic novels on a regular basis and, after a thorough glance through my inventory, not a single ONE of the books in my collection has a personal address for the creator. That's just... well, it's basically a plot device shoved into a comic, and that annoys me. Sorry, but it does.
We flit off to catch up with Isaac, who's coming back from a little trip to Dragonville. Simone's there, enabling him. Erm, I mean, "helping him." He tells her that he saw a bright light that wiped out the whole city, like a nuclear blast. She tells him it was a dream, but he doesn't think so. He says he shot up last night because he had to and he painted what he saw. He asks her if she sees it and she says she does. He tells her they have to go to the FBI or the CIA or whomever will listen to them and she just tells him that he's a drug addict and he can't paint the future. She says that she's watching her father die and she won't watch him die too. "You have to make a choice: me or this," she says. The camera swoops up and we see that Isaac committed his vision to a large blank space on the floor instead of a canvas.
Odessa, Texas. Claire's standing in front of a jockstrap who's talking about big muscles or something. She's pretending to be a vapid cheerleader douchebag. A fellow cheerleader who actually IS a vapid douchebag is vying for the jockstrap's attentions, but Claire's much cuter. Nerdeo ruins the fun when he runs up and asks to talk to Claire for a minute. Claire's cheerleader rival steps up and asks Nerdeo if it's true that he got an erection in the boy's locker room. He just gives her a "Fuck you very much" look and returns to talking to Claire. I like him already. He tries to tell Claire that he urgently needs to talk to her, but she's too busy being popular to deal with him right now. The principal walks up right then as the credits start rolling and tells Claire and her friend that the sheriff wants to have a word with them.
Oh my god, you guys. The credits. The credits just told me that Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman along with Shankar are doing the music for this show. I just saw the credits. How did I miss that before? What do you MEAN you don't know who Wendy and Lisa are? WENDY AND LISA. You know. Prince and the Revolution? Okay, if you don't know who Prince and the Revolution are, I'm going to have to come over there and bitch-slap you with a baboon's ass. And then make you drink a milkshake made of yak droppings and key lime because WENDY AND LISA AND PRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION.
Yes, I'm old. Shut up.
Care for a bit more flashback? Alrighty then. Let's spend a moment with Niki, whose name I spelled "Nikki" during the last recap because IMDb is stupid and drunk and possibly sleeping with someone's husband and totally got the name wrong. Slut. Speaking of sluts, Niki's just waking up in her porn bed, rubbing her sore jaw. She hears her son leave a message on the answering machine, imploring her to come pick him up. She sees the dead guy with the glass in his neck and the other dead guy on the floor. She runs over and grabs the blinking video camera off its tripod and that's when she sees her mirror image (I'm going to start calling her "ikiN" -- thanks, Wing!) across the room, covered in blood and looking fairly pleased with herself. She does the "shhhh" gesture over her lips again, and Niki runs off, thoroughly freaked out. She locks the Garage of Porn and drives off in her flat black Pacer.
She calls her son from the road and says she's only five minutes away and she'll be there in no time. She looks over at the video camera and finally pulls it open to watch what's on it. We get a replay of Niki starting to unbutton her pants and Greaso smacking her around. Unfortunately, the second ikiN takes over, the screen goes black, so we don't get to see what happens. We do, however, get to HEAR what happens, and it sounds totally gruesome. ikiN is apparently very powerful and comes fully-loaded with some whup-ass. Niki's phone rings and suddenly, she's dressed in a totally different outfit and holding the phone in her hand instead of the camera. She looks down at the phone like, the whuh? She gets out of the car and we see that she's in an empty parking lot out by the airport. She answers the phone and it's Micah, pissed that she hasn't shown up yet, even though she said she'd be there five minutes ago. Four hours have passed since she last talked with her son. What the HELL has she been DOING? She peels out and goes to pick up her son.
Big Hair and Micah are waiting outside for her and Big Hair's totally cheesed off. Niki just runs to hug him and tells him to go to the car. Big Hair asks what's going on and Niki tells her about the thugs and how they're dead on the floor of her garage and how she has no idea how they got that way. She thinks she might have something to do with it but she's not sure. Big Hair thinks it might be "D.L." and that he's doing this because he still loves her. Niki says that D.L. wouldn't risk coming back because the cops are after him. I know who "D.L." is, but I'm not going to tell you, because that would be a spoiler and what fun would that be? Big Hair tells Niki to call the police, but, really, is that the best idea? She borrowed money from a mobster, killed his thugs and somehow the police are going to be able to help her? I think not. Niki agrees with me. She says she's gotta cover her tracks and then she's gotta run. She gets into the car and she and Micah head off to do some track-covering.
Brooklyn. Suresh is beneath the desk, checking out the bug planter's handiwork as Pixie watches. She can't believe someone would want to bug "Papa" Suresh's apartment. Suresh is all, uh, what's with the "papa"? Pixie's all, I am stupid and fucked up his name all the time and aren't I cute because I called your daddy "papa"? No. No, you are not. And I kind of agree with Wing on this: she's totally the real bad guy and the bug planter was just a red herring. Why else wouldn't he have killed Suresh when he had the chance? I mean, other than it didn't suit the plot at the time?
Suresh finds a bug in the electrical plate and shows it to Pixie, telling her about Bad Glasses Man in his father's apartment in Madras. She thinks he should just ask his dad about all this and Suresh is all, but, um, he's dead. Don't you know that? I can't tell if Pixie's a really bad actress or if the actress PLAYING her is just a really bad actress. [" She was in Brick, too, and I felt the same way. Her acting style is...I don't know, 'airy.' -- Joe R] Either way, she's not having any effect on me whatsoever. I don't know why I care when there's a whole lotta Mohinder over there to look at. Pixie blah blahs about making extra food and bringing it over to Papa Suresh and how he'd tell her about his theories and his map. Yes, because the man was being chased down for his research but somehow telling it all to his little pixie neighbor is totally harmless, huh?
Suresh says that Pixie was closer to his father than he ever was. She says that she had no idea anything was wrong and that she knocked a couple of times, but Papa Suresh wasn't around. She had a first edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species that she wanted to show him. Pixie goes on to say that Papa Suresh told her he was being watched and she just thought he was eccentric. She asks if Suresh thinks they're being watched now and he just answers that "they" could have killed him if they'd wanted to and, for the time being, he's more valuable to them alive. He says that he needs Pixie to tell him everything she remembers about the map and his father's theories.
Odessa. The cheerleaders are gathered together in what looks like a Greek amphitheatre. The hell? The sheriff walks up and says that they need to know who saved the guy from the train fire yesterday. No one steps forward. The fire chief says that of all the girls, the one closest to the description of the girl who performed the save is Claire. Everyone looks at her and the sheriff asks where she went after practice yesterday. Before Claire can answer, her vapid douchebag friend from before steps forward and declares that SHE'S the one who saved the man from the fire. The fire chief looks at her like she has flames coming out of her ass because, of course, he was actually THERE and he doesn't recall seeing her. Claire just snarls a bit in her general direction. That's right, Claire. Not so much fun having the powers if you can't SHOW THEM OFF, now is it? The fire chief congratulates her and declares her an honorary fireman and all the cheerleaders crowd around her and squee. Claire asks the sheriff how the man from the fire is doing and he says he's got some pretty bad burns, but he's alive and happy to be so.
After not getting credit for the fire save, Claire leaves the other cheerleaders behind and heads across the football field. Nerdeo catches up with her and says they need to talk. Claire's rambling on about how they're going to make the vapid douchebag cheerleader grand marshal of the parade and Claire sounds pretty pissed off about it which... yeah. Make up your mind, Claire. Either you WANT the credit or you DON'T. You can't have it both ways. Nerdeo tells Claire that her suicide videotape has disappeared from his backpack. "It's gone!" "Whaddya mean it's gone?!" she spits back. WHAM! Her jockstrap boyfriend slams into her and she drops like a sack full of kittens. Unfortunately, she has also twisted her head completely around until she's pulling a total Linda Blair. Nerdeo's shaking his head all, oh no no no no no! Claire sees this and quickly twists her head back around before anyone notices. The jockstrap goes right to her, concerned. Claire just gets up and pluckily insists that she's okay and she kind of scratches her head like, ouch! That smarts! Hee.
Meanwhile, Niki and Micah return home to get rid of some evidence. Micah wants to know what's going on and she just tells him to pack up his stuff while she takes care of some things in the garage. She unlocks the garage door and opens it up and the whole place is not only devoid of any dead bodies, it's totally and completely clean. The Den of Porn has been eradicated, as has any sign of blood. A set of keys dangles from the light switch in the middle of the room. Niki goes over to it and sees ikiN in the mirror across the way. She smirks smugly at Niki and looks off in the distance behind Niki. Niki turns and sees a cherry red convertible across the street. She takes the keys and shuts the garage door.
At the car, she sticks the key in the ignition and sees that it fits. In the glove compartment is a set of registration papers in Niki's name. A heart-shaped sticky note is on the back telling her to look in the trunk and follow the map she finds there. Niki gets out and opens the truck, only to find the two dead thugs inside, drawing flies. A map sits on top of them. Niki grabs it before she throws up and immediately closes the trunk.
Peter's Hospital Room of Sad Sack Failed Fliers. Peter's sitting in bed, drawing a stick figure reenactment of his and Nathan's fateful flight. It's a very good likeness of the both of them. Except Peter's stick figure has an unexplainable hourglass shape over his torso that makes utterly no sense to me. Is he wearing a turtleneck? Does he have gout? And why is there a string hanging down from the upper right corner of the page? If you're going to take the time to DRAW a stick figure reenactment, I'd appreciate a little more attention to detail, is all I'm saying.
Mama Petrelli appears in the doorway and Peter hides his crappy drawing. She immediately starts into him about the roof thing. She sits on the bed and tells her son that his father committed suicide. Peter's stunned. "You said he had a heart attack." "I lied," she says. "For his reputation. His heart was fine." She also lied about the other heart attacks her husband had; they were all suicide attempts. "When he was twenty-three," she says, "he was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. He couldn't help it. It was just who he was." Peter asks why they never told him about this and she says they kept it from him because the disorder can have a genetic link and they didn't want to worry him.
"But you're telling me now," he says. "It can start with delusions of grandeur," she says. "Thinking you're invincible or indestructible. They are irrational thoughts that then turn suicidal." Anyone else think that Papa Petrelli had himself a little disorder of the heroic kind? Mama Petrelli says that it's time to take a hard look at his life and determine if changes need to be made. "Because there's something else I never told you," she says, leaning forward to hold his hand. "You were always my favorite. I cannot lose you." Peter kind of smiles at her lovingly and wonders why parents always choose the exact wrong moment to tell you shit like "you were always my favorite."
Hiro pays a visit to Isaac Mendez's apartment. Right. Because finding your way around New York City is super-easy for someone who's just TELEPORTED FROM JAPAN and has NEVER BEEN THERE BEFORE. For fuck's sake, I've been there ten times and I STILL got totally turned around when I came out of the Canal Street stop last weekend. I walked two blocks and was like, "This does NOT look like SoHo!" I was too embarrassed to pull out a map, so I just... went to a bar and pretended to look in a magazine while I secretly checked out the map. And then I had another drink just to congratulate myself for not winding up in Battery Park. BECAUSE NEW YORK ISN'T EASY, PEOPLE.
Excuse me.
So, yeah, Hiro the Wonder Navigator knocks on Isaac's door and, as is always the way in TV shows like this, the door is wide open. Hiro enters, all, "Meestuh Eeezaaak Meeendeeez?" Hee. Hiro walks around, looking for Isaac. He sees several paintings, one of which has an odd S-shaped curve on it. Get used to that shape, kids; I think we're going to see a lot of it. Hiro keeps snooping around, seeing another comic panel with his face on it on a drafting table. Then he comes across a trail of blood, which he follows. He sees a gun, which he picks up. Yes, because that's the SMART thing to do. "Meeeestuh Eeeessssaaaak?" he trembles, still following the blood. Suddenly, he stops. He stops because he sees Isaac's body on the floor. And the top of his skull has been sliced off and his brain has been removed. You heard me. Someone ran a saw around his skull, unscrewed it like a jar, and removed his entire brain. He looks like a broken Pez dispenser. A cop busts in at that moment and orders Hiro to drop his weapon. He does. Cops surround him and Hiro immediately puts his hands up in the air. And then promptly passes out. Hee hee hee. I seriously want to make him my pet.
Outside a comfortable-looking house somewhere in California, Officer Matt Parkman (a.k.a. "Agent Eric Weiss," "Agent Sean," "Boyfriend Sean," "Boyfriend Weiss") is directing traffic around the crime scene of a serial killer who's killed two people and abducted a little girl. He's disgruntled because he wants to be in on the action and traffic cop isn't really all that hot of a gig. A couple of black cars pull up and a woman with red hair gets out. Matt and his buddy speculate as to if she's FBI or CIA, but they can't get a read on her. The buddy mentions test scores being posted today and tells Matt that not everybody's a test-taker. Matt, apparently, fails the detective test a lot. Just then, Matt hears a little girl's voice in his head begging someone not to hurt her. He looks around, thinking the girl must be nearby, but she's not. He kind of shakes his head to clear it of the voice, but he keeps hearing it. This is either the first time Matt's started to hear voices in his head, or the first time he's ever heard this particular voice in his head. Either way, Matt looks totally surprised at what he's hearing and he starts to follow the voice. As he does, he hears other voices coming at him from the people around him. He looks kind of freaked. He runs toward the house.
Once inside, he tries to get a bead on the girl's voice. He looks up at the staircase and sees a woman pinned flat against the banister like she's a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game. Only with about fifty knives holding her up instead of thumbtacks. She's about five feet off the floor too. How the hell did she get up there? Matt keeps looking around and he passes the dark haired woman from before and Clea DuVall of Carnivále fame. Clea has a theory. "This is Barstow all over again. This is Sylar." Sound familiar? The dark-haired detective, Bitchy McFussyPants, doesn't think it's Sylar at all. Clea's all, uh, sure. This woman's five feet off the ground and looks like a human piñata and her husband's in the other room, frozen solid, with his skull sliced open and his brain removed. In mid-bite, nonetheless. Clea wants to find out how all this happened. Bitchy McFussyPants says that the little girl is their first priority right now. Bitchy McFussyPants is going to be bad for business, I can tell.
Matt continues to hear the voice in his head while he moves around. He passes the women and they're both like, uh, dude? What the hell do you think you're doing? "You are NOT supposed to be in here," says Bitchy McFussyPants. Matt just make the "shhhhh" gesture emphatically in her direction and moves toward the cupboard beneath the stairs. The voice becomes clearer, and he opens the door to find a little girl, cowering beneath a table. He tells her she's going to be okay. "Sylar hurt my mom and dad," the little girl says silently. "Please don't hurt me." Matt hears it all. Clea watches with concern. Anyone think that mayhaps Clea has a bit of the "hero" in her as well?
Brooklyn. Suresh is spilling his professorial guts to Pixie. My closed captioning is royally fucked up (it keeps adding extra characters into words so that "please don't hurt me" reads as "pol#$@do2@ don9988 hyeyert m***23!"), so I may not do as well as I'd like with some of Suresh's science-speak, but I'll give it the old college try. He says that his father was working on a mathematical theorem using human genomes and DNA migration patterns. "He thought he could find a way to identify these people, the ones who are special." Suresh never believed his father; it's the reason they grew apart. The phone rings and the answering machine picks up, but no one leaves a message. Pixie goes over and sees that there are messages on the machine. She hits "play" and the messages start. Suddenly, she looks at a glass terrarium beneath a lamp and goes, "Oh my god, Mohinder!" Suresh is all, yes? Right here! She's all, no! The other Mohinder! The lizard Mohinder! Nice. Mohinder's father named a lizard after him. They both get down on the floor to look for the reptile while the messages play.
We hear a recorded message from Nathan asking for his vote. Hee. Nice crossover. Pixie and Suresh crawl around until they meet cute in the middle of the apartment and Sendhil Ramamurthy pretends to be attracted to her. It's really hard work for him. Because she's a really bad actress. Suddenly, a super-creepy voice comes over the answering machine. "Hello, Chandra," it says. "Why won't you talk to me? You can't leave me like this." (And, no, I'm not sure of the spelling -- did I mention the whack-ass captioning?) We hear Papa Suresh pick up and say, "Hello, Mr. Sylar? I've asked you not to call here anymore." Sylar says he can't control the hunger anymore and he doesn't want to. "You made me this way," he says. "I made you a murderer?" says Papa Suresh. "You helped me discover my potential," says Sylar. "You wanted to see what I could do as much as I did. And now? You want it to stop." "It's over," says Papa Suresh. "Goodbye." We hear a dial tone. "I found a tape of a conversation my father had with a man named Sylar," says Suresh to Pixie. "A man he believed was Patient Zero--"
WHAM! The sound of books falling to the floor across the room makes both of them spin around. Luckily, it's just Mohinder the Lizard, begging for some attention. Aw. I totally want a lizard now. He and Hiro can share a cage! Pixie picks up Mohinder and puts him back into his terrarium. Suresh sees something on the bottom of the cage and asks what it is. Pixie picks it up and observes that it's a portable hard drive. Suresh plugs it into his computer and some complex codes start spilling across the screen. "My god," says Suresh. "He actually did it. He came up with a way to find them." He turns to Pixie. "You wondered why someone would want to kill my father? The reason for his death? It's this. I'm going to finish what my father started." As the code crawls across the screen, that S-curved symbol from Isaac's apartment can be seen with in it. Yeah, it's that Dharma shit all over again. Ten bucks says someone out there starts keeping a running tab of how many times it appears and where during each episode. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Agent SeanMatt's standing out by the pool, wondering if he can listen in on the confessionals at his church with his new talent, when Bitchy McFussyPants walks up and demands to know how he knew about the little girl. He says he heard the girl whispering. "House full of cops and you're outside and you just happened to hear her whispering?" grits Clea. Pretty much, dude. He checks his watch and says that he's supposed to be meeting his wife at a counseling session because they're having problems. Bitchy sneers at him and her thoughts say, "This guy's worthless." Matt looks at her like, did I just hear you right? She tells Clea, out loud, to cut Matt loose, and walks off. He starts to leave, but Clea stops him. She brings up the fact that Matt's taken the detective exam three times and failed three times. She's all, you really think you're detective material? And he's all, shit YEAH bitch!
She grills him about how failing the tests makes him feel, and he says he's disappointed and angry, and she wonders if he's angry enough to set himself up for a royal flush in the achievements department. He's all, what, you think I set this whole thing up to make myself LOOK GOOD? "I didn't kill these people, Sylar did!" Clea looks at him like, THE HELL? Her thoughts go, "How did he know that name?" Then she asks him out loud how he knows that name. "I heard it," he says. "From you." He looks totally surprised by this realization. "Like you heard the girl whisper," her innermost thoughts snit. "Yeah," he says, answering her thoughts. Clea doesn't seem to realize that he's actually talking to her thoughts and not to her verbal responses because she says, "Then hear this one, Parkman: you're under arrest." She cuffs him as we head to commercial.
Vegas. Niki drives and drives along the bloodstained map route. She comes to a stop at a dead end in the middle of nowhere. She turns and parks the car and sees a shovel stuck into the ground in the distance. As Micah sleeps, Niki starts to dig. She quickly discovers that there's already a dead body in the ground. Good lord. How many people has ikiN killed? Speaking of killing, Bad Glasses Man is just creepily hanging out in his study, creepily looking into his creepy portable DVD player. Claire enters, and he calls her "ClaireBear," and I think I'm going to hurl. He tells her that he called the adoption agency and that they were going to try and get in touch with her birth parents. Claire's surprised that he went ahead and did that for her. "I thought you said that was an adult decision," she says. "Well, you seemed pretty adult this morning when you told me you wanted to do it," he says. See? That's a totally innocent sentence that sounds TOTALLY WRONG when he says it. "You seemed pretty adult this morning when you told me you wanted to do it?" GROSS. I'm fairly certain that the creators don't INTEND for BGM to come across as a child molester, but they're inadvertently guaranteeing that he does.
He tells her that it'll take a long time to get through the process so that she'll be his little girl for as long as possible. AGAIN, TOTALLY CREEPY. "I'm not done protecting you from the world," he says. Good god. Is Jack Coleman being this skeevy on purpose? Because I am really bothered. Claire says that he's her dad and that he'll never stop being her dad. "I promise I'll be your little girl for as long as I can." Okay. OKAY. Enough. We need to get her away from him as soon as possible because everything about their dialogue is just sick and wrong and not of the lord. "You can't protect me forever," she says. "I know," he says. "And it breaks my heart." I need a Silkwood shower. They say "I love you" to each other and she leaves to scrub herself down with a steel brush. BGM opens his DVD player and we see that he's watching Claire get up from her sixth suicide attempt. "It really does break my heart," he says, his voice even MORE creepy than before. If that's even possible.
On a rooftop across town, Peter's pulling another "Look at me!" stunt. He's sitting on the edge of the roof as Nathan comes through the door. Peter asks if he knew about Papa Petrelli's depression and Nathan says that he did. Peter asks why he didn't tell him about it and Nathan just says that everyone's entitled to their secrets. Nathan's got a head cold or something because he's wiping his nose with a kerchief. I don't really know why. It's just... weird. And it seems like everything's supposed to have significance in this show, so I thought I'd mention it. Maybe even superheroes get the sniffles. Peter stands up and says that he was so sure it happened, but it turns out that he's just going crazy. Nathan steps forward and tries to reason with his brother. "Tell me what happened, Nathan," says Peter in a normal voice. "Tell me you flew. I wanna hear you say that you flew." He steps back on the ledge. "Tell me or I jump again. Good luck on your campaign when I'm splattered all over the ground below." Heh.
Nathan looks nervous. Peter steps back and fakes a fall and Nathan's had enough. "Alright! You want the truth? We both flew, Pete. I caught you and I lost control. You were too heavy. We both started falling to the ground and just before we... just before we hit... you flew." "You lying to me?" Nathan doesn't say anything. "You are!" says Peter, walking towards his brother. "You're trying to tell me what you think I want to hear! You're lying to me AGAIN!" Nathan just looks... up at Peter and points his finger at his feet. Peter is hovering about four feet off the ground. The second Peter sees this, he falters and stumbles to the ground. Nathan looks at him like, uh, believe me now, homie? Peter just flings himself into his brother's arms and they hug while Nathan makes a sweaty-faced grimace and millions of HoYay! enthusiasts rejoice. Peter asks him if he saw him hovering, and Nathan says he did, and then they hug again, and I'm getting the distinct impression that either Peter can just steal other peoples powers or Nathan can give his own power to other people. Hence the sweating.
Sweating doesn't even begin to describe poor Hiro, getting grilled by the police in Isaac's apartment. He tries explaining that he doesn't speak much-o Engrish, but the detective doesn't really care. A detective who speaks Japanese enters and drops a bunch of files on a desk. The English-speaking detective opens up Hiro's wallet and mentions that he's a card-carrying member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society, and Hiro just smiles at him in the sweetest way. Seriously. My pet. And I will love him and kiss him and keep him in a cage! The Japanese detective asks Hiro how he got to New York and Hiro tells him the truth. He teleported. The American detective is all, the fuck? Hiro's all, like Star Trek-uh. The Japanese detective's all, yeah, he says he can bend the space-time continuum. He asks how long ago Hiro "teleported" and he tells them he did it yesterday. He says that if they let him call his buddy back home, he'll clear everything up.
Buddy picks up the phone (I love the Japanese "mush-mush" greeting -- it kills me; it's such a cute way to say hello!), and Hiro tries to explain what's going on. Buddy's all, dude? Where the hell you been? Hiro's all, New York-uh! Teleportosan! Heeeee. The Japanese detective grabs the phone from him and starts asking Buddy questions. Hiro says he was with Buddy yesterday and Buddy surprisingly says that he hasn't seen Hiro for five weeks. There's a "missing" poster on the wall to prove it. The detective tells Hiro what Buddy said and Hiro's sweet little smile disappears. He looks at his watch and it still says October 2nd. He tells the detectives this. The detective shows him today's paper, and not only is it November 8th, but Nathan's picture is on the front page, and he's won the election by a landslide. Hiro's trying to make sense of this when there's a huge explosion heard behind them. Everyone runs to the window and we see that a nuclear bomb seems to have landed in the middle of New York. Hiro squeezes his eyes shut and... winds up back on the train in Tokyo.
"For all his bluster," says Suresh's voice-over, "it is the assigned province of man that he cannot choose his triumph. He can only choose how he will stand when the call of destiny comes. Hoping that he will have the courage to answer."
on Heroes: The Heroes realize they must band together to save the world. Or Claire. Or something like that.