HEROES Recap: The Hard Way

Title: “The Hard Way”
Original Air Date: 5/7/2007
GMMR Recapper: Julie 

After a couple interesting, twisty-turny episodes, we get a pretty uneventful one, that feels like it’s just gearing up for the season finale. Just two more eps to go, people!

Back from the future, comic book in hand, Hiro and Ando head to Isaac’s, unaware that he’ll no longer be able to fill in the blanks in his book, seeing as he’s, you know, dead. Sylar has already taken advantage of his newly acquired talent to paint his future, but it’s one that kind of freaks him out. He sees himself as the exploding man, a revelation that you’d think he’d take lightly given his penchant for brain theft, but he’s actually disturbed. He doesn’t want to kill the innocent, just those from whom he can enjoy some personal gain. What a moralistic guy.

Sylar calls Suresh, hoping for help, but Suresh rightly tells him: “You’re a murderer. You don’t get the luxury of regret.” He refuses to help. Suresh, however, has no qualms about partnering up with Thompson. Okay, he has SOME qualms: he decides that it’ll be a partnership that’s unilaterally beneficial to him. Thompson tells him what he knows, and helps Suresh find Sylar. Thompson agrees, but somehow manages to get Suresh to work for him, searching for a cure to a virus that is killing a little girl hero, Molly Walker, who can find people anywhere in the world (when she’s healthy). Suresh learns it’s the same virus that killed his sister Shanti, and figures that his antibody-abundant blood will fix her up in a jiffy.

Meanwhile, Claire’s packing up her things for her trip to Paris, at her dad and grandmother’s urging. Peter, on the other hand, thinks she shouldn’t leave. She needs to stick around so she can help save the world. She can help stop him when he eventually goes nuclear and blows up NYC. Like Ted? wonders Claire — which gives Peter hope, ’cause he’d never heard of anyone else who could do that.

Back in Vegas, DL and Jessica are quarreling about how she let Micah go with Linderman. Niki manages to convince Jessica that she ought to take care of her (their?) son, so DL and Jessica phase into Linderman’s basement of antiquities to do a little recon. They manage to discover that Linderman has been tracking their lives since they were kids and knows all about their history. Creepy. Also creepy: Candice, playing Niki, definitely failing to convince Micah she’s really his mom.

May I just say how much ass Ali Larter is kicking in this role? Her performances as Niki, Jessica, and Candice-as-Niki are all quite different and quite awesome.

At any rate, Micah tries to escape whilw “his mom” is in the shower, but Candice essentially traps him by making everywhere he goes lead him back to the hotel room they’re in. Knowing the jig is up, Candice shows Micah who she really is, and saying she doesn’t want to hurt him, but if he doesn’t cooperate, she might have to.

To help quell his concerns about his impending kaboom, Sylar heads home for a visit with his mother — his sweet, clearly deluded, snow-globe-loving mother who thinks her little “Gabriel” is special and can do no wrong. Like all children who grow up under the weight of unreasonable expectations (or, ok, not like most, who don’t grow up to be psychopathic murderers), Sylar feels a lot of pressure to be his own unique and awesome snowflake. He tries to get his mom to tell him she’ll love him just as he is, but that fails, so he shows her his powers, one of which is apparently freezing (that’s a new one, right?).

Using a faucet sprayer, he turns the apartment into a snow globe, to his mother’s initial delight. That delight abruptly turns to horror when he loses control and injures her with a rogue globe. She now thinks her son is some kind of freak, and tells him to leave, brandishing a hefty pair of scissors. “You’re not Gabriel. You’re damned.” In what will come as a surprise to no one, they tussle with the scissors, and mom ends up stabbed in the heart.

Oh, and did I mention Hiro and Ando went to Isaac’s, found him dead, spotted and evaded Sylar, followed him to his mother’s, and have been watching the whole gruesome scene? Hiro knows he has to kill Sylar, but he’s having a tough time of it. “Future Hiro killed so much, he forgot it should be hard.” Hard or not, Hiro chooses that moment to freeze Sylar and his mom, intent on using his sword to kill Sylar before he gets a chance to blow up the city. He’s poised, blade at Sylar’s throat, but he can’t do it. In a moment, he wishes he had, when Sylar unfreezes and freezes his blade instead. Hiro high-tails it out of there with Ando in tow. They’ll have to find another time to kill the brute.

Back at the Petrelli Ranch, Peter has successfully convinced Claire that she should stick around to help save the world (or NYC at least) should he happen to go boom. Based on some predictions from his drawings, he and Claire wait for Ted in a plaza outside the Evil Hero Tracker HQ. Happily, Bennett, Matt, and Ted show up. Father and daughter are reunited (yay) but Peter starts drawing power from his proximity to Ted, his hands glowing with glame. He’s already told Claire to kill him if he starts to lose it, and she rebuffed him. (“My destiny is not to shoot you. The universe cannot be that lame.”) But will she have to do it? Tune in next week!

So, what did you all think? I thought it was pretty slow, but it did leave some open questions. Is Molly the same girl from the pilot, the one who Matt heard from beneath the stairs? Who really will go nuclear: Ted, Sylar, or Peter? What does Linderman want Micah for? How many more powers does Sylar have that we don’t know about?

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.