HEROES Recap – Chapter II: Don’t Look Back

It kills me NOT to read Julie’s recap of last night’s episode of Heroes. But alas I fell a bit behind on my TV watching last night and haven’t seen it yet. Ok, ok, I give myself until 10am until I break down and read her recap, but I’ll try my best to hold out until tonight.

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Title: Chapter II Don’t Look Back
Original Airdate: 10/2/2006

Peter awakens with a start in a hospital bed, Nathan by his side. “What happened?” Nathan tells him he jumped off the roof of a 15 story building, tried to kill himself. Peter disagrees, says Nathan flew up and caught him. Nope, Nathan says, he jumped 25 feet onto a fire escape, where Nathan retrieved him. “The rest is just crazy talk,” Nathan says, with a seriousness in his eyes that shows he’s trying to convince himself as much as Peter.

Claire looks over the newspaper reading “Mysterious Good Samaritan Saves Man”. She asks her Dad if she can talk to him about something. He goes for the easy teen pregnancy joke before saying he guesses it’s about her birth parents. He’s right — she wants to know “who they are, what they can do…like hobbies and skills.” Skills like walking through fire. He blows her off while at the same time saying he doesn’t want her to be in such a hurry to grow up. It’s sweet, but creepy.

Mohinder arrives at his dad’s former apartment. Spotting a guy inside fiddling with something under a desk, he grabs an elephant statue as a weapon. It could be more threatening, though I suppose the trunk has some stabbing potential. At first the guy plays it off, but then draws a gun on Mohinder and runs out. On the hench/handyman’s way out, he runs into a woman in the hall. They have a brief altercation before he hightails it out of there, leaving Mohinder to flirt with the cute gamine lass, Eden (Nora Zehetner, who you might recognize from the indie flick Brick). When he tells her his name, she recognizes him as the professor’s son. And the plot thickens…

Hiro is pretty psyched to be Times Square. He enthusiastically greets the passersby, before spotting a “9th wonder” comic book with a drawing of him on the front saying “I Did It”. He cheekily hands over some yen before jetting away to read it. In very Twilight Zone fashion, the comic book describes all the events of his life over the past couple days: his conversations with friends, his eventual teleportation. Maybe it’s because, as Hiro finds when he flips to the comic book’s back cover, it was written, illustrated, and published by one oddly prescient Isaac Mendez (address included).

Isaac, meanwhile, is telling Simone things he saw happening last night during his heroin high. He thought she’d believe him, she thought he’d regain his sense when he sobered up. Guess who was wrong? She tells him he has to choose: her, or “this” (which I assume means drugs and drug-induced dementia). Tough call.

Hot jock (total Ken doll, complete with football) flirts with Claire while her wannabe friend Jackie tries to horn in on the action. Claire’s former videographer, Zach, tries to grab her for a conversation, but she blows him off. However, authoritative school employee interrupts, saying the sheriff and some firemen would like to have a word with Claire and Jackie. I wonder if someone recognized a certain HS cheerleader uniform?

Niki, having just brutally hacked up two dudes who were assaulting her (or maybe her evil twin did it, but let’s not squabble over technicalities), ditches the corpses and locks them up in the garage behind her. Leaving by car, she calls her son, saying she’ll be there to get him in 5 minutes. While on the way, the video camera on the front seat sounds its siren call to her. What could be on it? Her curiosity gets the better of her, and she stops in the middle of the road to watch it. It’s all normal up until oily evil guy starts hitting her, then the screen goes to static and the only sounds are pained screams and rending bones.

Suddenly Niki’s phone rings. When she looks down, it’s in her hand, and the camera’s still on the seat. She’s somewhere else, in a parking lot, wearing a different shirt. Her son asks where she’s been — it’s been four hours. When she picks him up, Niki tells her friend the guys are dead and she doesn’t know what happened. Once their boss finds out they’re dead, she’s in big trouble. Niki decides to cover her tracks and run.

Back at Mohinder’s apartment, he’s under the desk futzing with the phone line. Eden asks why anyone would want to tap “Papa Suresh’s phone.” Aww. Is that like Papa Smurf? I wonder if he was all blue with a white beard and red cap. He mentions that his father’s dead, and Eden’s shocked — she had no idea. Bummer, because they were buddies who used to eat and chat about his theories and map. After some more flirting (oh, OKAY, I guess it could just be conversation if you don’t want to read sexual tension into everything), he asks what his father told her about his theories and the map. I’ve got my fingers crossed that it was about super-intelligent unicorns taking over the planet.

The sheriff has rounded up the cheerleading squad, looking for his heroine. Claire gets pinpointed at first, before her attention-grabbing friend volunteers that it was her. Jackie becomes, like, an honorary sheriff because of her good deed. Awesome! Gimme an S! Gimme an H! Gimme an…Claire doesn’t care. She asks the sheriff how the survivor is doing, and is clearly pleased that he made it through okay.

Later, as Claire crosses the football field, Zach finally tracks her down, telling her he lost the tape. While she’s distracted by that unpleasant news, she gets sacked and her neck gets cracked. She fixes it before anyone but Zach notices, but it’s another close call.

Niki rolls up at home with Micah, who’s none too pleased that he’s been told to pack up because they’re going “on vacation.” While he heads inside to grab stuff, Niki opens the garage door. Guess what: no dead guys. Something tells me they didn’t just walk off zombie-style. That “something” is Niki’s knowing reflection and the fact that the keys to a sweet red convertible are prominently dangling within Niki’s reach. She heads over to the car. No surprise that the keys fit, but yes surprise that there’s a registration slip in the glove compartment with a note reading “In the trunk. Follow the map.” The trunk, indeed, has two gross dead bodies and one blood-soaked map. Niki’s alter ego may be evil, but at least she’s organized. She’s the Martha Stewart of evil twins!

Peter’s doing some drawings in his hospital bed. He gets a visit from his mom, who wants to know what he was doing on the roof. “You’ll just have to trust me.” Peter tells her. Yeah, about as far as I can throw you. His mom drops the bomb on him that his father didn’t die of a heart attack, he committed suicide. He was depressed all his life, and they didn’t want to tell the children because it’s an inherited condition. It can start with delusions of grandeur (sound familiar, flyboy?) that turn suicidal. He’s got to get his life together, she says. She can’t lose him.

Hiro buzzes the door to Isaac’s place. No answer, but when he knocks the door swings open and he heads inside. He finds an unfinished comic panel of himself, and, oh, a trail of blood leading to a gun (which he picks up) and a corpse (which he gapes at). Oddly enough, the corpse doesn’t look shot; it looks sort of Lucy-Liu-in-Kill-Bill, as if the top of its head was severed off, and the brain was jacked. No time to dwell on that grossness, though, because the police arrive. Hiro takes one last look at the corpse and keels over in a faint.

Now, AT LAST, Greg/Sean/Weiss!!! Okay, “Matt Parkman”, if I must. He’s a cop at the scene of a crime, where a serial killer has abducted a little girl. He and his partner are loitering outside when suddenly a voice echoes in his head: a little girl, repeating “please don’t hurt me” in a terrified tone. Matt follows the voice inside the house, where we’re treated to the horrifying image of a dead woman stabbed with numerous implements and tied up against a staircase. As Matt wanders around, two investigators come by, wondering whether it was the work of a particular psycho, Silar. The father’s dead in a chair “frozen solid, skull sawed off” and the daughter nowhere to be found. Matt listens to the voice, tracking it to a hidden room under the staircase, where he finds the little girl as the surprised investigators look on.

Mohinder shows Eden his father’s map, explaining his father’s theory that a mathematical equation could determine and reveal the location of these genetically enhanced superpeople. Mo thought his father was loco, and they grew apart. Bet he likes the theory better now that he can use it as foreplay. Bow chicka wow wow.

The phone rings and the answering machine picks up, which reminds them to check for Papa Suresh’s messages (say that five times fast). Eden also chooses that moment to realize his pet lizard has escaped his cage (not a euphemism). The two lovebirds search for it on the floor before hearing a chilling message that Mo’s dad DID pick up, recorded on the machine. The caller, who Papa Suresh identifies as Silar, says he can’t control “the hunger”, what Suresh made him. “You wanted to see what I could do as much as I did. And now you want it to stop.” Suresh hangs up. Mo exposits to Eden that his father believed Silar was patient zero, when suddenly there’s a noise. Mini-Mohinder! As Eden, friend to reptiles, replaces him in his cage, she discovers a portable hard drive therein. They access it, and to Mohinder’s surprise and elation, it contains the equation for finding all the *special* people out there.

Back at the crime scene, Matt gets the third degree from the investigators, who find it a little too convenient how he found the little girl. One of them decides he’s worthless and ditches him, but the other keeps grilling him about how he’s angry he keeps flunking the detective exam — maybe angry enough to take it out on someone. Matt rebuts that he didn’t kill anyone, Silar killed them. That super-secret info is enough to set Investigator Clea off, and she cuffs him.

Niki drives along an empty road at night, following the map. She gets to a dead end, where she pulls over. There’s a shovel in the ground. Niki covers Micah with a blanket and gets to digging. Almost immediately, to her horror, she unearths a skull.

“Claire-bear” arrives home and greets her dad, who says he spoke to someone at the adoption agency and they’ll try to contact her birth parents, but it might take a while. He hopes a long while, since wants to keep protecting her from the world. “You can’t protect me forever,” Claire tells him. “Yeah, and it breaks my heart,” he replies. After she leaves, what was sweet again turns creepy when he busts out the tape of Claire rocking the superpowers. “It really does break my heart,” he repeats to himself. Well, Claire would break your face if she found out how evil you are, you scummy sketchy daddy.

Peter’s atop a roof when Nathan finds him. “Did you know about Dad’s depression? Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Peter grills his brother. Good old Pete, self-involved as ever. He says he was so sure it happened, but now he’s just crazy. He stands on the edge of the building, begging Nathan to say he flew, urging him to admit what really happened. As he teeters on the edge, Nathan gives it up: they both flew. Nathan caught Peter, but he was too heavy, and right before they hit the ground Peter flew.

Peter isn’t pacified, though — he thinks Nathan’s just telling him what he wants to hear. He angrily advances towards Nathan, who has no response — he simply points at the several feet of air below the ground where Pete is levitating. Cool! They hug. That’s a relief. Peter would be really annoying if he didn’t have any powers.

Police, meanwhile, have been interrogating Hiro, but without much success due to his limited English. Finally an interpreter arrives. Hiro eagerly tells him he teleported there. Like Star Trek! Live long and prosper! If they just call his friend in Tokyo, he’ll clear everything up. Umm…not exactly, since according to his friend Hiro disappeared 5 weeks ago. Hiro looks up at his watch: “October 2.” The police tell him, no, it’s November 8 — and they’ve got the newspaper (showing Nathan’s election victory) to prove it. Suddenly, there’s a loud cracking, booming noise. They all turn to the window, and the city is exploding, with billowing plumes of smoke. Hiro shuts his eyes tightly, and when he opens them, he’s back in the subway car. Whoa.

Next week: More powers. More mysteries. More good times!

Julie is a GMMR recapper extraordinaire, but she also has her own fabulous TV website. Head over to TV and Sympathy to read more from Julie.