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Yay, my first episode to recap is extremely Peter-light! Peter tells Hiro and Ando the "save the cheerleader" message, and about his encounter with FutureHiro. Hiro is excited to learn that he will one day have a sword. Peter and Isaac figure out that Isaac's paintings fit together like a comic book (you don't say!), but that a panel is missing; Simone has it. Back in Las Vegas, the High Roller takes Hiro and Ando to a backroom poker game, ordering them to cheat the other players. Ando sees that one of the players has a gun under the table pointed at him, and they take off to the john to freak out about it, but while they are in there, someone shows up (we'll come back to that), kills everyone outside to death, bro, and tip-taps out of there before Hiro and Ando can emerge. Hiro gets the guilts that he didn't save the people who apparently intended to kill him and his friend, but Ando tells him that when he gets better at bending time and space, he can come back for a do-over. D.L. tells Niki that although he planned the big heist for which he's been imprisoned, he got cold feet and bailed out; he doesn't know who framed him, except that it was a woman. Oh my God, you guys, who could it be?! Niki believes him, and they have a nice evening together, after which D.L. tells her her he heard her sneak out in the middle of the night. Oh my God, you guys, where could she have gone?! After a lovely breakfast at home -- at which D.L. tells Micah that no prison can hold him -- D.L. takes Niki with him to some hideout to investigate his enframening. It's the poker backroom, and it's littered with torn-apart bodies. Niki tells D.L. how much it resembles her own garage crime scene, tearfully confessing that she did it, but he doesn't believe her. Later, Niki and ikiN have a chat in which ikiN tells her what we've already figured out: ikiN pulled off the whole damn heist, and now wants Niki to get the money and take off with Micah before D.L. can put the pieces together and take Micah himself. Niki recovers the money from the attic, but when she's hopped back down with it into the bedroom, D.L. is totally there! ikiN takes over to smash him across the face with the briefcase full of cash, but when she turns her back on him, he disappears...into the wall! Superhero fight! It gets a bit less cool when Micah walks in on his superparents totally trying to kill each other, but the fight comes to a swift end when D.L. reaches through ikiN's skin to squeeze her guts, and then leaves her for dead. Mohinder leaves New York, but not before getting all smooched up by Pixie. Bennet sets up a meet-and-greet between Claire and her bio-parents. She tries to get them to admit that they have superpowers, but all she gets from them are family histories of regular, non-super diseases. However, Mrs. Bennet tells Claire, after they've left, that when she was a baby, the Bennets tried to track down Claire's bio-parents, without success, because they thought she might have some chromosomal damage; when Claire presses her for more information, Mrs. Bennet just says that Claire had a cough. While Bennet is fully spying on the conversation, he gets a call from...Pixie! Called it. She passes on her intel about the flying Petrelli, FutureHiro, and precognitive junkie Isaac, as well as the "save the cheerleader" message. Bennet tells Pixie to "bring in the precog" -- so just as Isaac is revealing his painting of gut-squozen Niki/ikiN, complete with a tattoo he had painted and then painted over (sloppy, Isaac. Reeeeeal sloppy), Pixie shows up at his door, claiming to be a big fan. Dun! Want more? The full recap starts right below!
And now, Heroes continues. We pan up from Isaac's floorpocalypse and past a bunch of shit in his studio as Mohinder tries to be all ponderous and deep, taking way too damn long to get to his point -- that morality, for the supers, is sort of meaningless, and that the real choice is "survive or perish." Isaac and Peter are Sister Wendying it up in front of the painting of the decapitated cheerleader and generally just repeating the end of the last episode. Hiro and Ando ask what cheerleader they're supposed to save, but Peter tells them he and Isaac don't know. Isaac's all, "Tell him about the guy from the future!," and Peter crabs back, "He is the guy from the future!" Peter exposits to PresentHiro that he was visited by the Ghost of Hiro Future, who speaks unaccented English and carries a sword, and who told Peter to save the cheerleader. And I know this is all going to be explained once the timeline unkinks and everything, but Claire's whole job seems to be cheating death; can I please assume that she is capable of saving herself and that there may be a totally other cheerleader in jeopardy? Anyway, Ando repeats Peter's tale to Hiro, who looks impressed. Peter tells them to get to New York, and hangs up. Hiro, smugly: "I had a sword." That is a pretty cool prop, and you'll look pretty bad-ass as long as you just carry it and don't do anything with it that would give you away as a total poseur. I'm convinced that's what's happening with most of the douchebags I see downtown with yoga mats.
Back in the studio, Peter suggests arranging Isaac's paintings to try to glean some clue of who and where the depicted people are; he decides that the paintings fit together "like the panels of a comic book," and points out that there's a painting missing. Isaac says that he painted one that size "weeks ago," but that Simone took it to sell. Conveniently, he doesn't remember what he had painted (because: high), but in that case I don't know how he can remember that the painting exists, what size it is, and who has it. Of course, I don't know from junkie logic. As Peter picks up the phone to call Simone, Isaac needles him, "Tell him a guy from the future said you needed it. She should love that." "Needles him." HA!
In Odessa, Claire and Sandra are making an assload of cupcakes; Sandra has Mr. Muggles in one arm as she frosts cupcakes with the other, prattling on about some other dog hag who wants to breed Mr. Muggles with her poodle, resulting in a "pomepoo" or a "pooranian": "Mr. Muggles doesn't want anything to do with a breed that has 'poo' in its name." Mr. Muggles is like, "I don't care what the bitch is called -- Mr. Muggles got a nut to bust, yo!" With Sandra's back turned, Claire takes the muffin tin out of the oven with her bare hands; we get a shot of her burned, and then quickly healing, hands that lasts just long enough on screen for Calphalon to launch a lawsuit against NBC. Sandra, still frosting, tells Claire they may have left the cupcakes in too long: "Smells like something's burning!" Claire brightly tells her that they look fine. YEAH they do! Damn suggestive TV. But seriously, Claire? That's just gratuitous. The girl doesn't know how this power even works; what if she only gets a certain number of heals over the course of her life? Then let's say some girl stabs her in the gut in the bathroom at school (you guys, it happens all the time), and because she thought she'd show off for no one's benefit instead of grabbing a damn oven mitt, Claire's down an ovary. Claire and Sandra banter about some incident at the dog park, where Sandra "thought that big dog was going to chew [Claire's] hand off, which would have put an end to [her] cheerleading career." And, okay, see: again, is Claire accident-prone, or did she show up at the dog park with bologna on her palm just to fuck around? Anyway, Claire says that the canine attack "looked worse than it was," and that her cheerleading career is "scissor-kicking off the field as we speak," but that she's still helping with the bake sale anyway. I don't know if that was a throwaway line, or a set-up for some future moment where the other supers figure out that the endangered cheerleader is in Odessa and then get there and Claire is all, "What? I'm on yearbook now," so just in case it's the latter, now you know.
Bennett (the dude Erin's been calling Bad Glasses Man, but I can't because I think his glasses are kind of rad -- but then, I love frames that look like they belong at the CIA during the Cold War) comes in at this point, and Claire offers to sell him a cupcake. Sandra exposits that he was on the phone for an hour, and asks whom he was talking to. Bennett sighs heavily, and then announces that Claire's biological parents want to meet her -- tomorrow. Claire is shocked, and Sandra is pissed, because evidently he didn't talk to her about it first (well, you know, he is evil), and starts complaining that they can't just drop everything for them, but Bennett patiently tells Sandra that he didn't say yes: he leaves the choice to Claire. Sandra looks stricken. "I'm ready," Claire tells Bennett confidently. Claire: they're going to feel bad they didn't keep you. Try to get a pony off them.
In Las Vegas, Niki wakes up with a start, as only people on TV and in movies do. She leaves Micah sleeping in his bed and walks into the kitchen. She looks outside, confirming that the cop car is still parked in front of the house. She opens a door (I think it's her room, but it's dark), and as she stands in the doorway, D.L. appears behind her and tells her she looks beautiful. (Eh.) Without turning around, Niki asks D.L. how he got inside. He doesn't answer, and she starts to lunge away from him, but he grabs her around the waist and pulls her to him. She threatens that if she screams, the cops will be inside in two seconds. D.L.: "Then I hope you don't scream." This is the line that ends the cold open? Not "You could try, but I could squeeze your windpipe from the inside in one"? Whoops -- spoiler!
After the commercial, Niki and D.L. are standing in the living room. He takes her hand and comments that she's not wearing her wedding ring. By way of answer, she tells him she thinks he had better leave. She gives him shit for coming to the house and possibly confusing Micah, to which D.L. counters that "Micah needs his father." I'm not so sure about that; by my count, Micah already has two parents without D.L. ["Besides which, Micah is probably the least confused person in that family at any given time." -- Sars] "This is still my home," D.L. tells Niki. They both start at a loud and insistent knock at the door. "I'm not going anywhere," purrs D.L. "You can either believe me or not. I'm going to check on our boy. Get the door." I know he's a jailbird and all, but..."please"?
Niki opens the door to an extremely green-looking cop. And by that I mean he looks young and untested, and not actually green in the manner of the Incredible Hulk. UNFORTUNATELY. Officer Green says they thought they heard something in the house, and asks if everything's all right. Niki dreamily says that she was talking with her son. Officer Green says that if she needs anything, they're right out front. Niki gives him some medium-intensity mad eyes, and he sort of twigs and quietly tells her, "If you want us to come inside, just nod your head." Niki's eyes ratchet up one mad notch, and then she blinks and faux-relaxes, assuring him that she's just tired, a silly woman, blonde, et cetera. Taking her at her word, for now, the cop takes off.
Niki closes the door and turns around to see D.L. well into her personal space. She purposefully stomps over to close Micah's bedroom door (I think -- did I mention it's fucking dark, and that there isn't a room in Niki's house that hasn't been decorated with mirrors?), and then orders D.L. to tell her what happened. He launches right in, saying that he planned the job. "I know that you planned the job," she crabs. "'Baby, it's gonna solve all our problems.'" Worst D.L. impression ever. D.L. defensively says that the job would have netted them $2 million -- "enough to get us out of Vegas." How the hell far did you intend to go, dude? It's Vegas, not Alcatraz. "Money that you stole from Linderman," Niki exposits. D.L. says...something mumbly, but the gist is that Linderman would not have been pleased at the loss and would have killed all three members of the Hawkins/Sanders family, so D.L. pussed out. ("Stepped out" is how he puts it, to look like less of a puss.) But then someone else "stepped in," knowing the whole plan, and killed D.L.'s crew. "And made off with all the money?" Niki asks. "You have no idea who that is?" As soon as D.L. says, "I know it was a woman," everyone had better know how the storyline plays out, and anyone who didn't, I will assume that you either have never watched TV before or suffered a head injury at 8:40 the night this aired, because otherwise, you just make me sad. Giving credence to the "brain tumour" theory she will bust out later, Niki's like, "'Woman'?" D.L. knows a guy who cleans money, and who just cleaned $2 million for someone; he's going to see this dude tomorrow and find out more about his quarry. It's hard to tell whether Niki believes this tale or not, because Ali Larter is kind of a bitchface at all times.
In Texas, Claire is walking home with Zach, apparently having told him what we already know about her upcoming parental meet-and-greet. "How am I supposed to ask someone if they're [sic] a freak when they're probably just going to lie about it like I do?" Claire asks rhetorically. Zach suggests that she ask her faux-rents what happens when they cut themselves: "Or you could just cut them and find out." You know, meetings like this are so fraught with tension even when no one's a freak that cutting them might be a decent icebreaker. Claire chuckles that, if she did, they'd probably just take it as evidence that she's bitter that they "gave [her] away." Zach good-naturedly opines that although she can be "a little bitchy," Claire isn't bitter -- "about the adoption thing," at least. Claire agrees that she isn't: "I'm curious about it, and it's a little weird and maybe a little sad, but I'm not mad. I mean, I love my parents." Zach muses that Claire's life would be different if her biological parents had raised her. Claire stops in the driveway and asks Zach, very seriously, "What if they can do what I can do? What if they're like me?" Zach says he hopes they can't; he likes that Claire's uniqueness makes her special. Looking pleased, Claire asks, "Are you flirting with me?" Zach scoffs, "No! Believe me, no." Zach, you fool, that was your in! Just think about the wild times you could have with Claire! I feel pretty confident that she would like it rough. ["I, meanwhile, feel pretty confident that Zach does not swing Claire's way, but maybe that's just me." -- Sars] Anyway, Claire looks a little sad to have been so decisively shut down, but Zach doesn't notice as he barrels ahead, asking whether she plans to "come out" to her non-bio-parents. Claire dramatic-ironies that her dad is "a really simple guy. He'd never be able to wrap his mind around something like that." Well, sure -- he has a guy whose job it is to wrap his mind around things.
In their rental, Hiro is miming swordplay -- complete with light-saber sound effects -- as Ando worriedly asks what happens if they get to New York and it explodes. Hiro declares that if they get to New York, it won't explode; it's a "heroic journey." "It's your heroic journey," Ando pouts. Hiro stresses that it's their heroic journey, and that you don't have to have superpowers to be a hero. The way he says it is much less condescending than the way it reads, I swear. Anyway, Ando seems to accept that, and starts the car, asking why FutureHiro didn't deliver his message to PresentHiro and Ando, as opposed to that little bitch Peter. Hiro offers an explanation involving a rift in the space-time continuum. "You're talking out of your ass," says Ando -- correctly, from what we've seen. Ando starts to back the car up, but a gigantic SUV pulls up behind them, blocking them in. The poor man's David Koechner-looking High Roller is sitting in the passenger seat, and taps the brim of his hat. Ando yelps at Hiro to teleport them somewhere, but the guy is immediately at Hiro's window, tapping politely and assuring them that he just wants to talk. Hiro lowers his window a tiny bit. Ando insists that they didn't cheat, but Koechnot says he knows they did; he just doesn't know how: "Now it's time for a little payback." Snakes On A Poker Table!
The Bennett doorbell rings, and a painfully high-strung Sandra hurries to answer, calling to Claire that her guests have arrived. Bennett appears in the foreground of the shot, glancing from the introductions at the door back to Claire, who smiles reassuringly. We pull back even further to see that Zach is still there; as he gathers his things, he offers to shove Claire's faux-rents into something on his way out. "Ha ha," smiles Claire, and he splits with a couple of pink bakery boxes of cupcakes. Those poor bastards are going to get their frosting all smeared. He needs this!
Back in the land of dark and mumbles, D.L. is like, "How are we going to do this?" "We don't," Niki tells him. "You're couching me?" D.L. asks incredulously. Hey, at least she's getting out bedding for him. If it were me, anyone who interrupted my sleep would have gotten a kick to the crotch by now -- and if it had been someone who'd ever lived in the house, I'd be like, "You know where the linens are. If you sweat and drool on my bare couch, I'll cut you." Niki's pissed that D.L. left her for six months, but he protests that he didn't want to. She tells him that it wouldn't have happened if not for his crazy caper, before which they were "making it." "Thirty grand a year, doing construction," D.L. spits. Hey, she did the best she could! How much cement do you expect her to be able to lift with those bandy little arms. But also, isn't Las Vegas, like, permanently under construction everywhere? If D.L. couldn't make more than $30,000 doing construction there, maybe he should have learned to deal blackjack. Niki complains that $30,000 wasn't enough for D.L., who counters "that business doesn't fly when you have a family." (a) What? (b) Why didn't he suggest that she also get a job before turning to a criminal alternative when, CLEARLY, he has no aptitude for it? Anyway, Niki stomps forward and meaningfully announces, "When you left, I became another person." Ha! Rejected ways of phrasing that sentiment include "When you split, so did I"; "Whatever you suffered, that goes double for me"; "Having you gone has given me a lot of time to reflect"; and "One might say that your experience of being imprisoned was mirrored by mine." D.L. says he doesn't care that Niki "took off [her] clothes on the internet" (and, seriously. Who hasn't?): "Look, you did what you had to do." Survive or perish, GET IT?! Niki wearily tells D.L. that he can stay there tonight, but that he has to leave in the morning. "If that's what you want," he replies. He moves to kiss her, but she turns her face away.
Cut back and forth for twenty minutes between Niki, sad in bed, and D.L., frustrated on the couch. She eventually gets up to put her wedding ring back on (while he contemplates his), and then finally gets up and tells him to come to bed. Conjugal visit, y'all, what what?
Koechnot has brought Hiro and Ando to a backroom poker game, where Ando is playing with Koechnot, some grimy hipster in a red Adidas tracksuit, and a terrifying, yellow-haired troll of a Vegas cliché who seriously never got the memo about sunscreen. We determine via subtitle that Hiro wants to get back to the quest, but that Koechnot is making Ando play until he (and Hiro) can win back all the money Koechnot lost to them. Ando tells Hiro to give the other players good cards, "but not too good." Leathertroll orders Ando back to the table, dealing a new hand while making lazily offensive inquiries about Ando's "system": "Some ancient Oriental voodoo?" Ando calmly replies that he has no system: "Japanese people very lucky." Leathertroll threatens, "Japanese people better run out of luck soon. I'm starting to think I'm getting hustled." Koechnot assures him that it's just a friendly game, and Ando agrees: "No hustle. Only good fortune." Whereupon, of course, Hiro stops time, sorts out everyone's hands, and starts it up again. Ando spreads his cards to find a 10-high straight flush. This isn't Celebrity Poker Showdown, so I'll just say that play continues, Ando makes a suspiciously high bet, and Hiro -- in shock -- knocks over a cart of something and falls in the clatter. His head pops up from under the table: "Sorry! Beg pardon!" Ando ducks down with him for a second -- to help Hiro pick up what he knocked over, I think -- and sees that Leathertroll has a gun under the table, pointed straight at him. He stands up and says that he and Hiro "must use bathroom." "Now?" whines Tracksuit. "We're in the middle of a hand." Ando says he's drunk too much beer. "You guys go to the bathroom together?" squints Leathertroll. Ando: "Yes. It is how we roll."
Ando shoves Hiro into the filthy can, Hiro protesting that he doesn't have to pee. Hiro, just try. You can probably go a little, and then you won't have to try to find a rest area later. Ando tells Hiro about the gun. From the other side of the door, we can hear one of the dudes asking, "Hey, who invited her?" Ando is telling Hiro to get them out of there when they hear scary sounds outside, like some online stripper's bad-ass alter ego is tearing the shit out of Hiro and Ando's adversaries. They stare at their side of the bathroom door a moment, and then Hiro squeezes his eyes shut, trying to stop time so that he can save their poker buddies from almost certain death. Time does not stop, however, and presently, someone's head gets smashed into the door hard enough to crack it and let blood ooze through to the other side. In the ensuing quiet, Ando shushes Hiro, and we can hear the uninvited woman tip-tapping off on her high heels. Transfixed by the oozing blood, Hiro sadly says, "I couldn't save them. I just hid in here. A hero doesn't hide." "He does if he wants to live," says the ever-practical Ando, directing Hiro toward the bathroom window. Survive or perish. Remember? Mohinder narrated it, so it must be important.
After the ads, Niki and D.L. are waking up. They exchange some unimportant banter, and then he tells her she should get some sleep: "You didn't get much last night." Mistaking his meaning, she points out that she got as much as he did, to which he replies, "I heard you getting up, trying to be all quiet." Uh oh. Niki knows what this means, and she sits up, asking D.L., "I did? When?" She looks at the reflection of the bed in the mirrored closet doors, where she, of course, sees herself on D.L.'s left side, and ikiN snuggled up on his right. D.L. sits up, too, asking what's wrong, so that we can see how the mirror looks to him, and that ikiN isn't in it. Before she can (try to) explain, Micah shows up at the bedroom door and races into his father's embrace. Aw. That kid is too cute to deserve two such crappy parents.
In Brooklyn, Eden is playing with Li'l Mohinder -- the iguana, pervs -- as Regular Mohinder packs and tells her what we already know happened during Mohinder's time with Peter; Mohinder is apparently dismissing Peter as a loon. Eden exposits that Mohinder intends to return to India with his father's ashes (though she calls him "Papa Suresh" again, like, you're in your twenties; even Punky Brewster wasn't that twee). Mohinder cluelessly thanks Eden for everything she did for him (spied on him) and his father (probably nothing, other than invent a backstory), and Eden flirtatiously tells him she's sure he'll be back: "You're not done here. That's why I'm not even going to say goodbye." He does, though, and goes to peck her on the cheek, but she turns and makes out with him. Mohinder reluctantly makes for the door, looking back as Eden tells him she'll see him later. Things I knew about Mohinder before this scene: he is credulous. Things I learned about Mohinder from this scene: unless Nora Zehetner was kissing him while standing on a box, he is short.
D.L. and Micah enjoy some father-son time, bonding over a shared love of comic books (including 9th Wonders, natch). They kid and giggle until Leonard Roberts suddenly turns on a fucking dime and gets all serious, D.L. gravely telling Micah how sorry he is for "not being around." He asks how Niki is doing, and whether Micah is "looking after her" in D.L.'s absence. Micah -- like a biracial pre-teen Saffy -- wearily sighs that he's trying, and then asks how D.L. got out of prison. "Between you and me: I walked out," D.L. tells him. "How'd you do it?" Micah asks. "Ain't no jail can hold your old man," says D.L. "I got a secret." "Like Superman?" asks Micah. "Just like Superman," D.L. replies. On any other show, that would just be bravado, but...you know. Now it's just a matter of waiting the rest of the hour for him to do something fucking COOL.
Niki interrupts the moment to bring out more coffee, whereupon we see that Micah and D.L. are chilling beside the pool. Okay, fuck D.L.: $30,000 a year was obviously PLENTY if their asses have a pool! Jerks. Micah scampers off to bring D.L. more of his comic books, and Niki snits that it's going to "crush" Micah when D.L. runs again. "There won't be any more running," D.L. informs her. "Not after today." He seems to believe that once he knows who framed him, all the charges against him will be dropped -- including escaping from prison, I guess -- and furthermore, he wants to "hunker down" in the back seat of Niki's car when she drives him over to money-cleaning HQ so that he doesn't get made by a cop. "And you want me to take that risk?" Niki marvels. D.L. says he wants her to be there to hear he was set up, because nothing bolsters the unlikely claims of innocence offered by a fugitive from justice like the corroboration of a money launderer. D.L. says he can tell that Niki is starting to believe him, but that once he's gone, she'll doubt him, and he doesn't want her to doubt him ever again. Stare-off!
Summit of Adoptive Awkwardness! Claire's putative biological parents are studying her face, divvying up her features between them, while she sits perched on the very edge of the couch opposite them, flanked by the Bennetts. "I wonder what else of yours I have," Claire remarks. The faux-rents don't reply. In fact, no one says anything for an uncomfortably long time, causing Bennett to sit up on the couch and look pointedly at Sandra until she starts offering everyone refreshments; once she's run through all the available beverage options, she moves on to the cupcakes: "Just made 'em last night, the two of us -- sort of a thing we do!" She leans into Claire at this, her insecurity spraying all over the room. The faux-rents, after a moment, both accept the offer of lemonade, and then Sandra goes, "Claire...?" in this expectant way that, every time I've watched this scene (which is now several times), seems like she's prodding Claire to go get it. But actually, she's asking if Claire wants some lemonade, which Claire declines. After another awkward pause, the Bennetts go to the kitchen. Faux-Dad nicely asks Claire what he and Faux-Mom can tell her about themselves. Claire is like, "Did you ever wake up in the middle of an autopsy and get a good look at your own guts? And if so, was there evidence there of ulcerative colitis or gout?"
Niki pulls her car up to some random location; getting up and confirming that the coast is clear, she taps D.L., who hops up out of the back seat. They go down a flight of stairs and end up at a door with one of those security locks like you see on the kitchen at McDonald's, so you know whoever works out of this place is hardcore. D.L. tries the door, but no dice; they look up the stairs at the sound of sirens, and when we cut back to D.L., he's opened the door. "Wasn't that locked?" Niki asks. "Guess not," D.L. replies as they head inside. Holy shit, you guys, D.L. could totally get into the kitchen at McDonald's! FREE MILKSHAKES!!!!!!!1!
Inside: surprise! Except, not: it's the shady backroom where Ando and Hiro were cheating at poker, and it's now littered with corpses. D.L. gets an eyeful before Niki has come into the room, and tries to spare her by ordering her back to the car. It doesn't work, however, and we get her perspective -- quick cuts of bad guys' dismembered limbs and stuff.
Odessa: Faux-Dad says that he and Faux-Mom aren't together anymore. The story goes that when she found out that she was pregnant, Faux-Dad wanted to keep the baby, and Faux-Mom didn't. "You probably think I'm a bad person for giving you up," fishes Faux-Mom. We can barely hear Claire deny that assumption as we pull back and through a set of venetian blinds to some pantry or something where Bennett is totally spying on the conversation. He turns around as Sandra gingerly lets herself in, complaining that the meeting is so awkward that she has "lip sweat." Hee! "Should you be eavesdropping?" she asks Bennett. "Yes," he replies matter-of-factly. Double hee! "Oh, I guess," Sandra agrees, with a sort of verbal shrug. I kind of love Bennett. His brand of evil is so reassuringly jocular. He reminds me of Johnny Johnson from NewsRadio.
Cut back to Claire, who's wringing her hands in the great room as she asks the faux-rents, "Is there anything I should know? Like, medically? Anything weird, out of the ordinary?" Like, say, something about why a Mystic Tan might not take so well to Claire's skin, leaving her neck orange and blotchy? "Well...there is something," offers Faux-Mom. Claire tenses for a shocking revelation, and deflates a little when it turns out only to be that Faux-Mom has diabetes. Yawn! "All you've got to worry about from my side is a history of cancer and heart disease," chuckles Faux-Dad. Yes, those are both good for a giggle.
Cut back to the hidey-hole: Bennett's cell phone rings, busting him on his Spy Daddy routine. "Sorry!" he calls to the room at large, while a mortified Sandra hides her face and then waves through the blinds. They both move away from the window as Bennett answers the call, exchanges greetings, and sends Sandra off by telling her that "it's work." When she's left, Bennett closes the door behind her and tells his caller, "Then stop him."
"I've tried," replies Eden, who's mooning around in front of Suresh's giant map, in Brooklyn. Called it! Called it back when she first showed up. Not that it would take, like, a Ricky Jay to see through the con she pulled, but still, I like to get credit for these things. It's the same reason that, during every episode of Battlestar Galactica, I feel the need to predict who's going to be unmasked as a Cylon. And since I think at this point I've guessed every member of the cast and some pieces of on-set furniture, I am bound to be proved right eventually. Anyway: Bennett tells Eden to try harder to keep Mohinder from going back to India, she demurs, and in the pause in their conversation, Bennett picks up and studies a pair of what are evidently his glasses; there's a crack in the right lens. He asks Eden what she's found out, and she updates him on Peter (no confirmation that he actually can fly), adding that he claimed to have had "an encounter with someone who can stop time." "Really?" says Bennett appreciatively. "That's cool." Hee! He's so...dad. He tickles me. Eden tells Bennett that the time traveler told Peter to "save the cheerleader" -- a bit of intel that, naturally, freezes Bennett long enough for Eden to prod, "Are you still there?" Bennett hoarsely thanks her for the update. Eden asks what she should do with the "precog," and Bennett instructs, "Bring him in," before hanging up.
After the break, Niki and D.L. are back home. D.L.'s fortifying himself with a little Dutch courage as he paces, asking Niki if she's "ever seen anything like that before." What he probably didn't expect was for her to reply that she has: "In the garage." She exposits the incident with Linderman's men, from the pilot, concluding, "I have gone over it a thousand times in my head. I didn't see anything. Anyone. I was the only person there. It was me!" D.L. tries to calm her down, taking her face in his hands and assuring her that she couldn't have done it. "What if I did?!" she squeaks. "What if I got up in the middle of the night and I went --" "Baby, you are being played!" D.L. insists, saying that whoever set him up is now doing the same to Niki. She looks desperate to believe that D.L. could be right, but they are interrupted by Micah, calling off-screen for his backpack. Niki tells him she'll help him in a second, and when he's wandered off, she tells D.L. that they have to go to the police. "They'll never believe us," he replies. "The only way I can clear my name is to find the person who did this myself."
Niki takes a minute to put on a happy face for Micah, and awkwardly stomps into the living room (girl, either learn to walk in heels, or ask Wardrobe for some Chuck Taylors, damn), where she quickly locates Micah's backpack. Taking it to him, she gets a big fat look at ikiN, smirking from a decorative mirror. This seems to pull Niki up short...
...but when we cut back to Niki, she's no longer standing at the mirror; she's sitting on the couch, having taken off the long-sleeved hooded henley she was wearing before, and looking confused. She gets up and goes to Micah's room; he's stuffing things into the backpack she just had in her hand. Niki somewhat scarily demands to know where he got it, and he's like, "You just walked in here and gave it to me, Frances Farmer." Niki's like, "Huh?" Micah tells her that she was just in there, telling him to pack some clothes, because they were going to "Grandma's." Niki stares. Micah asks if she's okay, and she says she's not feeling well and needs to lie down. Under a blanket made of thorazine. And some lithium sheets.
Niki staggers into the bedroom, closing the door and leaning against it for a moment before stalking to the mirrored closet door and glaring into it, tearfully demanding to know what's wrong with her. Niki turns and does the classic slide-down-the-wall move, favourite of messed-up chicks for years now, and as she's staring at the bed, ikiN calmly tells Niki to pull herself together. Niki turns, terrified, and sees ikiN sitting to her, cool as the other side of the pillow. Now, here is where the problem with this character really becomes clear: it's not that Ali Larter is a bad actress; it's that she is much better at playing someone who's bad but confident than she is someone freaked-out and fragile. Anyway, Niki tells ikiN she's not real; ikiN counters, "Oh, I am as real as you are." Niki, not looking at ikiN, tries telling herself that she just has a brain tumour: "This is --" "Poor little crazy girl," ikiN teases fondly. God, she even has prettier hair than Niki; choosing expedient solutions in a moral vacuum is like the best blow-out ever. "A hallucination," Niki concludes. "We're a lot of things, Niki," says ikiN, "but we're not crazy."
D.L. comes into Micah's room, asking after Niki. Micah sadly says that she went to lie down. "Yeah, she's had a hard day," offers D.L.
"What do you think D.L. will do when he finds out what we've done?" asks ikiN. "'What we've done'?" Niki repeats.
Micah asks D.L. if he and Niki are going to get back together. D.L. mushmouths some crap about what it's like in relationships when one person goes to jail and the other doesn't believe he was wrongly convicted. Micah's like, "It's a simple question, but NEVER MIND."
ikiN confirms everything we already figured out: "We framed [D.L.]. We killed his crew, stole $2 million. We killed those thugs in the garage, killed those little bitches at the poker game. We've been very busy." "Those men were ripped apart," gasps Niki. ikiN shrugs: "Yeah, well, what can I say?" Niki sniffles that the guys at the poker game didn't do anything to her, to which ikiN replies that leaving witnesses would be sloppy: "I did what had to be done, like I always do." Like a good neighbour, ikiN is theeeeeere!
"Are you getting back together or not?" Micah presses, apparently as unimpressed by D.L.'s wishy-washiness as I am. D.L. says he doesn't know: "I hope so." Sure, what guy doesn't dream of a ménage à trois?
ikiN straightens up to tell Niki what they're going to do now: "You're going to get the money, and you're going to take Micah as far away from D.L. as you can." Niki's not having it: "D.L. can take care of me." What "take care"? You and your shadow have taken five professional bad guys and transformed them into twenty-odd parcels of giblets. You don't think you can "take care" of yourself? ikiN says that D.L. will think Niki is crazy if she tells him the truth, and furthermore, that when he finally catches up with the rest of us and figures out what she did, "he'll take Micah away from us," and the only question will be whether he kills Niki before he leaves. Niki seems to agree that this is probably the case. But it doesn't track: I seriously don't know whether D.L. was a good, honest person innocently working construction before he went to prison, or a criminal seasoned enough to plan a $2 million heist, have "a crew," know all sorts of underworld figures with McDonald's-kitchen-locked hideouts, and be capable of murdering the mother of his child just because he's pissed she made him spend half a year in a prison he totally could have walked out of at any point. Maybe there are also two D.L.s!
"You know how you have a secret?" Micah quietly asks D.L. "Mom has a secret too." She sleeps with a nightlight? She bites her toenails? She has a teenie weenie?
ikiN wraps up Niki's options: let D.L. take off with Micah, or do exactly what ikiN says. Niki considers for a second and then asks, "Where's the money?" "Good choice," smirks ikiN. Perish, non! Survive, oui
After the break, a shell-shocked Hiro and Ando trudge back to their car. Hiro's still bumming hard that he didn't save those little bitches at the poker game; Ando's still reminding him that Hiro himself would have been killed. Hiro pouts some more; Ando wisely tells him, "Every hero is on a journey to find his place in the world. But it's a journey. You don't start at the end. Otherwise, they can't make a movie about it later." God, if only Brandon Routh's Superman had started at the end, I could get back the nine hours I spent watching that shit. "What if I'm on the wrong path?" Hiro yells. "What if I was supposed to save those people?" "You can bend time and space," Ando points out. "Maybe when you can do it better, you can come back here and fix things." "Like a do-over?" asks Hiro, nearly placated. "Exactly," says Ando. "A do-over," says Hiro, allowing himself a smile. "I like that." Hiro is not complicated.
In Odessa, Claire is straightening up the great room when Sandra swoops in and asks where Claire's dad is: "I mean, not your biological father but, you know -- your dad." Aw! Sandra is endearingly flustered in this episode. Claire says that Bennett is "walking out the bio-parents." "Is that what you're calling them -- 'the bio-parents'?" drawls Sandra. "Oh, that's so cold and impersonal. And fitting." Hee! Oh, Sandy. If you would just get rid of your hideous purse dog, we could hang.
Outside the Bennett McMansion, Bennett is indeed walking the faux-rents to their cars, thanking them for coming and saying how much their visit meant to Claire. "When I was her age, I had enough weighing on my head," says Faux-Mom. "I'm glad I could help." They all shake hands, and then Faux-Dad exhales that he thinks that went well. Bennett agrees that it did. "If there's anything else you need..." Faux-Dad trails off ominously. "I'll keep you posted," grins Bennett. I don't want to say that the Fauxs here are the least convincing putative biological parents I've ever seen, but Rooster Hannigan and Lily St. Regis should watch their backs.
Inside, Claire and Sandra debrief at the kitchen island, Sandra asking whether the meeting went as Claire had hoped. "Not really," says Claire wistfully, and then amends that to say she doesn't know what she was hoping for: "I guess I just wanted them to tell me who I am. They don't know any better than I do." Sandra platitudes that one has to figure out one's identity on one's own. Claire asks Sandra to throw out the cupcakes before Claire eats them all, and when Sandra takes them to the laundry room to chuck them -- perhaps to douse them with bleach just to make sure Claire doesn't fish them out of the garbage later -- she calls back that she has to hand it to Bennett: "This isn't the first time we've tried to find those bio-parents... When you were a baby, we thought you had something wrong with your chromosomes -- some disease." Claire tenses up, listening. "We needed to screen your parents to see if they were carriers." Sandra comes to the doorway, combing Mr. Muggles and saying, "I was scared to death, and they were nowhere to be found." "What kind of disease?" asks Claire. "How did you know there was something wrong with me?" "Nothing was wrong with you, you were fine!" Sandra protests. Sure, Claire had the kind of chromosomal damage that shows up on test results spelling out "RIGHT AS RAIN" in those little black ovals. "Was I doing anything abnormal?" asks Claire. "You had a cough, Claire," says Sandra, as Mr. Muggles licks her lips -- suggesting, perhaps, that Sandra is not Odessa's leading expert in normalcy. "Don't turn hypochondriac on me!" Sandra adds, breezing past. "Your brother's bad enough." You guys, it had been so long since we'd seen Claire's brother that I swear when Sandra said that, I thought for a second that she was referring to the dog. You know that's how she thinks of him. Bennett comes back inside, fondly asking Claire, "Was that as scary for you as it was for me?" Claire gives him a hug, replying, "You're a very brave man, Dad." He kisses the top of her head as they stand together in the kitchen with all their seeeeeeeeeeeeeeecrets.
Niki climbs into the attic, crawls along on her belly, and comes upon a metal briefcase, which she finds to be filled with cash and a pearl-handled revolver. She drags it back the way she came and drops down onto the bedroom floor. She's just picking it up and getting ready to haul ass to Lollapalooza when a voice behind her grits, "All this time..." Yeah, it's D.L. That's not happiness to see her, is it?
After more commercials, Niki is spinning her tale of dual personalities, but -- as predicted by ikiN -- D.L. is having none of it. He grabs the briefcase and says that he's taking Micah: "Goodbye, Niki." Niki pants to catch her breath as the camera pans behind D.L.'s back, and when it glides past his left shoulder and Ali Larter comes back into view, she's turned into ikiN, pretty hair and all. ikiN shakes her head briefly, and then flings D.L. across the room and into a flimsy knick-knack shelf, which shatters. Micah appears in the doorway to ask if everything's okay, and ikiN smoothly tells him that she and D.L. are just moving furniture (heh), adding that he should go to his room. She closes the door and ambles over to the opposite side of the bed to get the briefcase back from D.L.'s grip...but D.L.'s disappeared! D.L. can go invisible?! Well, no -- as ikiN backs toward the wall, D.L.'s hands materialize through it, and he grabs her, because D.L. -- much like Kitty "Shadowcat" Pryde before him -- can phase through solid matter. So now this is a superhero fight. AWESOME. ikiN throws D.L. onto the bed (breaking the frame) and straddles him, the better to situate herself in order to try to choke the life out of him. In the struggle, the camera makes a point of lingering as D.L. either cuts an amazingly symmetrical mark in ikiN's shoulderblade with his nails, or uncovers her tattoo. (Everything's moving too fast for me to tell which it is, but I'm sure Mohinder will be back at some point to explain what it is forty or fifty times.) Just then, of course, Micah comes in, terrified to see his parents fighting or fucking -- frankly, I hope I never walk in on OR overhear my parents doing either -- and just as it starts to look as though ikiN has the advantage, D.L. sticks his right hand into her diaphragm, reaches through her guts, and lets his hand appear again at her throat, where it chokes her. There's not much coming back from that, so D.L. pulls his arm back out of his wife (dirty) and leaves her for dead on the floor. Micah runs toward her, crying, but D.L. scoops him up and takes off.
The tableau of Niki/ikiN lying broken on her bedroom floor cuts to, what else, Isaac's painting of her. He licks his thumb and smudges some paint off the figure's right shoulderblade, revealing Niki's tattoo or cut. Why he would paint it and then paint over it, I am sure I don't know. There's a knock at his door, which he opens to find Eden. This may be her toughest assignment yet. "What's that painting about?" "I don't know, I was high." "When did you last see Peter Petrelli?" "I don't know, I was high." "Where did you get that chair?" "I don't know, I was high. Wait: Pottery Barn."
Over a shot of Niki -- maybe dead, probably not -- Mohinder bore-rates again about good and evil and survival and perish...ment. Gotta say, I'm kind of hoping that boring, sucky Niki perishes, and that ikiN survives to unleash a wave of terror and pretty hair.