Heroes season 3 episode 7 review

In the last few Heroes episodes I’ve become disenchanted with the show, its general direction and disposable characters. But I’m hoping that episode 6 was a low point, and ‘Eris Quod Sum’ (Latin for “you will be what I am”) is actually a turning point from which point the show can reinvent itself.

To meet those objectives, it helped immensely that early in the proceedings Claire’s brother turned up, and so did Elle, accounting for two of the many ‘missing’. Elle unexpectedly brings with her an interesting problem, which made me actually think showrunner Tim Kring had always planned a plot component that he’s about to hatch. That piece of the puzzle is that all the heroes with synthetic powers have issues with their power, although I’ve not noticed that Nathan has an issue, yet. Claire can’t feel pain and Elle is overloading. Was Niki Sander’s multiple personalities a side-effect to her powers? Interesting…

Having revealed Arthur Patrelli’s power last week, taking the powers of others, this week we get to see what a nice and bad person he can be in short order.

First he takes Maya’s power away, making her and briefly Mohinda happy. And then he kills Parkman’s dad for talking out of turn, showing he’s got no time for those who aren’t supporting him in this venture. Arthur had just told Daphne to kill Parkman, so it wasn’t like Maury Parkman didn’t have anything to speak up about. That’s one de-powered, and one dead already.

But that’s just a kick off. Angela Petrelli gets into Sylar’s mind and convinces him to go after Peter. Is this a power she’s exhibited before? It’s good timing, because Peter is heading to be experimented on by Mohinda at the Pinehearst lab. He’s there because of an offer Arthur made that he couldn’t refuse, allowing him to work on the synthetic power formula. This leads to a super-power dust up between Arthur, Mohinda and Sylar in which powerless-Peter escapes.

In the meanwhile Daphne, with the really cute nose, goes over to kill cuddly Parkman, but she can’t do it as she’s a sucker for donut-enhanced ex-police. As he predicts they also send along another super, fear-powered Knox, to make sure Parkman is really dead.

He kills the cute nose and the portly plod…Oh no…two more bite the dust.

Except, as was telegraphed big time, he didn’t. Parkman just made him think it went down that way. Gosh: supers using their powers intelligently, what next?

At this point all plot lines are converging on Pinehearst, with almost every character either there already or heading in that direction. Then things went a somewhat awry, in what had been a good episode by season three standards.

They’d just managed to bring Sylar to the good side, when after a short conversation with Arthur he’s bad again. How easy is he to influence? I’m not sure, because he fires Peter out of a window, but the fall doesn’t kill him strangely, even though he has no powers now. I suspect Sylar is not as bad as Arthur thinks.

Peter lands right in front of Elle and Claire, at which point Elle concludes this must be the place, and Claire figures that maybe she left something in the oven at home.

In the meanwhile we find that Daphne isn’t really Parkman’s buddy, she’s still working for Arthur….damn it! And she’s got that cute nose too. Have I mentioned that?

Don’t get me onto what Hiro and Ando get up to this week, but it’s not consequential, yet. It appears to be a repeat of what happens to Parkman in episodes 2 and 3.

This hasn’t turned Heroes around, but it was much better than last week and in the first 20 minutes it all fitted together in a way it hasn’t done for a while. It’s still not ‘fixed’, but it demonstrated that it might not be entirely borked as I’d begun to think.

Mr Kring needs to next think about how to ground some of his characters’ lives a bit more. As was pointed out to me by my son, in the first season all the characters had jobs, and earned a living. Now none of them have any means to get resources, except Nathan Peterlli who is a Congressmen – that curiously nobody notices has been missing with Tracy for days. I liked them more when they had bills to pay and school to attend.

I hope this is a turning point, but it might well be a false dawn to this season.

Check out our review of episode 6 here.