Heroes season 3 episode 17 review

This week’s Heroes, Cold Wars starts a minute or so before the last one ended, so they can reuse some footage they shot for that story but couldn’t fit in, I guess. Bickering between Parkman, Peter and Mohinder has already started even before they capture Noah and take him to a motel to extract some information from him. They still don’t explain how they put something in his drink, but they did, it seems.

Previously, the show got hooked up on telling a whole back story to Sylar that just didn’t contribute much to the relevant events, and true to form, in this story they jump through the same pointless hoops once more.

As Parkman probes Noah’s mind we get snapshots of how he was recruited to work for Nathan and ‘the Hunter’ Danko. What’s really confusing about this is that it takes more than half the show for this to actually reveal something that we didn’t actually know or could not have easily guessed. While I’ve moaned about them not sticking with characters and progressing them, this wasn’t what I had in mind. We stick with the three stooges as they argue about torturing Noah, but it takes an inordinate amount of time before the investment provides any type of return.

But there is a benefit to this pedantic pacing; there is no time to have Hiro and Ando being terminally stupid, or for Sylar and Microwave-boy to rehash any more Magneto and Pyro scenes from X-Men 2.

A bad sign for me is when things start to become unintentionally funny. It’s getting to the point where, when they mention Costa Verde, it comes out like Macho Grande in Airplane!, as in “Over Costa Verde? No, I’ll never get over Costa Verde!”

This is becoming more hilarious than the scripted humour, which has hit rock bottom with Hiro and Ando when they do appear. But back to Costa Verde, the land of painfully delayed revelations.

Eventually, the first disclosure comes while Peter has flown to Noah’s secret lock-up to get his guns and money, when Parkman realises that Mohinder hasn’t told him about meeting Noah prior to the abductions, and being aware they would happen.

Parkman and super-strength Mohinder have an entirely one sided-fight while Noah escapes only to be caught by a returning Peter. The SWAT teams are on their way as they saw Peter in the lock-up; they must leave now!

Except they don’t; they hang around to be caught like they’re completely devoid of any intelligence even when combined. To slow them down further, Noah reveals to them that, although she looked dead, and everyone thought she was dead, that cute Daphne is actually alive! She was apparently too cute to kill, even if her power is completely over the top. Hero numbers are predicted to climb back to an all time high, before a season ending cull, I predict. Everyone who is dead will come back, and some will come back twice!

And, almost everything else we get given here is entirely predictable. Noah and Denko don’t get on, Noah has his own agenda, Angela is manipulating people from afar, Nathan is dumber than a bag of spanners. Sheesh – we know all this!

The SWAT guys arrive and catch Mohinder when he uses his Mak’tar Stealth Haze, by running in front of them to be shot full of tranquilisers. Parkman also gets caught because presumably he can’t be bothered to make them shoot each other, but Peter turns up and zooms away with him. They go to Isaac Mendez’s old studio, so that Parkman can paint pictures of city-wide destruction; it’s identical to the good ol’ days of season one. How do you stop an exploding man?

At this point I started to chuckle the nervous laugh of a man who has the winning lottery numbers, but didn’t get time to buy a ticket. Please, no more. I accept season one was entertaining, but trying to rework the same plot already doesn’t suggest that the writers think the attention span of the viewers is miniscule.

It also encourages me to think that Tim Kring is sat in corner looking at a blank wall hoping his eyes will go white and he’ll come around and find a brilliant script in his lap.

If, indeed, that does transpire, possibly because Bryan Fuller writes it and puts it there, I fear that the guillotine will have already come down on the Heroes once and for all.

Check out our review of episode 16 here.