Oh, Heroes, Heroes, Heroes, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
No, on second thought, forget that. I don’t have time to count the ways. It would take too damn long.
So. Hiro and Ando go to the future. And we get awesome glimpses of the crew, portents of danger to come, and the slightly sinking feeling that there ain’t no way the writing crew can pull this off in three more episodes.
But that’s OK. I have faith. I believe in them. They haven’t steered me wrong yet, after all.
My favorite bit of the evening? Probably the reveal of Nathan’s true nature, which just blew. Me. Away.
Bennet now acting as a mole in his own department? Awesome. The transformation of Matt Parkman? Amazing. Peter so at home and at ease with his powers? (Especially during his showdown with Sylar… Ooh, goosebumps!)
Of course, this is a time travel story, so there are some glitches. For example, this future is, apparently, the one in which everything went wrong. The one in which Peter et al did not “save the cheerleader” and, hence, the world. Consequently, shouldn’t Claire-bear be, oh, slightly dead?
And since Future Hiro got capped at the end of the episode, that means he never gets the chance to travel back to the subway and tell Peter to “save the cheerleader, save the world” in the first place. Which means that we’re now caught in a time loop. Paradox. None of this can/should be happening.
But…
Such is my love for Heroes (you look beautiful in this light, dear, and no — that dress doesn’t make you look fat; it just accentuates your curves) that I will justify all of this.
Ahem.
So, time is like a river, right? The changes wrought by saving the cheerleader just haven’t “caught up” to the future yet. It’s like tossing a stone in the water — the ripples take time to fan out. The dystopia we saw last night is still extant because 1) the ripples haven’t fanned to there yet, and 2) other events have conspired to make it possible. Much like poor Desmond on Lost, we’ve learned that the universe course-corrects. Claire dying was an important component of the dystopia, but not a critical one, it seems. Originally, it appeared that Sylar was the exploding man who destroyed New York, with Claire’s powers in tow. Now it was Peter, without Claire’s powers. Same events, different people involved.
As to Future Hiro: Well, I guess it’s possible that he didn’t actually die from Matt’s bullets last night. Suresh could have patched him up a little bit after he passed out and maybe FH survived long enough to recover, and then time-travel back to his meeting with Peter.
Then again, maybe it’s just more of the ripple effect. Now that Original Formula Hiro has successfully traveled in time, he may be immune to those ripples. So before the ripples from the future catch up with the present, he still has time to go back to a world in which FH warned Peter. As long as he acts quickly, he’ll be able to avoid the Peter/Sylar apocalypse and, hopefully, prevent the dystopia and FH from ever coming into being in the first place.
Now my head hurts. Just slightly.
Oh, and what was up with Suresh’s on-again, off-again beard? In some scenes, it looked like heavy stubble and in others it was a full beard. Have we found his mutant power at last?