What aunt_zelda Thinks: 'Trust and Blood'
That’s it, I’m officially opting out of this round of Knight vs. Anarchy. *sighs* Just can’t do it. Not only does the crossover I started contain one-and-a-half pairings I’ve never written before, I just couldn’t get it working. What with WAZT, personal writings, sonnets that are due, and lines that I have to have memorized, I just can’t do it. *headdesk* I earned five points for my team last round, I hope that makes up for this.
Got a new Dresden File on Sunday. Sixth one, Blood Rites, which is a little slower on the uptake than previous ones, but that’s cool with me because it’s still hilarious in the right places. It’s as if Jim Butcher realized that after five books he thought to himself “Oh, I can take a bit of a breather, they’re good and hooked now! I don’t need to make aunt_zelda late for her classes or keep her up late with my ridiculously suspenceful writing this time!’
On PAGE EIGHT (I kid you not!) I muttered "boys, stop flirting!" I hate knowing that Thomas and Harry are (spoiler alert!) half-brothers, because if they weren't I'd ship them with a fiery passion. Or just mild enthusiasm. (Harry/Marcone all the way, baby.)
Also got my copy of Repo! the Genetic Opera yesterday! Huzzah! Can't wait for the soundtrack to catch up! *dances* Tried to take a nap, then 'woke up' and watched some special features and some of the commentary.
Despite being in a supremely good mood on Monday, I was a little irritable towards the end of the day. I blame the weird dream where my teeth were falling out. That has NEVER happened to me, and I KNOW they're supposed to be bad luck, so I'm quaking in my boots over here. But most of the dream was pretty good: I was in a weird city on this subway, and a friend of mine from RL kept telling me I was being waaaaay too nice, giving up my seats to other people and all. Then I started loosing teeth all over the place, and he helped me pick them up off the carpet on the staircase in the station.
Today I was so-so. VERY tired, but I managed to get through the day and now I’m home, I’ve taken a shower and worked for an hour on my Physics project, and now I’m typing with the cat sitting on my lap. Life is good again.
This WAZT might sound a little odd, because I had trouble recapping last night. Not only that, I felt that this episode … wasn’t as great as last week. Not bad, actually good, especially compared to what we got last volume, but not blow-your-socks-off-till-Friday either. Bits of it felt kinda bad. Masi Oka’s Hiro-accent is GONE, and it shows. I found the flash-forwards really awkward and a little useless. It would have been better to have the scene on the hill last, going with the flashbacks. Not that I’m not psyched about the current set-up - Claire getting text messages from Hana Geitleman please please please someone telling her to fight back, Peter and the gang on the run, Sylar on a quest to find the (spoiler alert!) Jon Glover, Nathan going deeper into hell, and Tracey getting drugged up in a van - but the flash-forwards weren’t all that great. Maybe Lost has spoiled me, maybe this was a truly fantastic episode, but it’s not my favorite, not by a long shot, and I felt like a lot of time was wasted here and there.
Truth and Blood:
Previously, on Heroes: People were captured! I freaked because of the Presidential conference! Claire called her grandma 'Angel.' Sylar was badass and hot! Nathan glowered in evil orange light!
Peter got the nitrogen power! Rut-row! Claire's dad is the co-pilot! The pretty music is gone! Mohinder and Peter hold hands!
43 hours later ... Nathan waits by his phone in 'building 26.' AKA Base of Evil, Mutant-Catching Operations. He recaps for someone via the phone.
We cut to the crashed plane, and Hiro running, then falling face first off of a cliff. Hee. Matt and Mohinder grab him and hide from the evil guys. Hiro tells Matt that he is powerless. Mohinder wants to run. Matt says that the commandos aren’t gonna be taken down by just powers. Hiro wants to save people. Matt gets white-eyed. Utto!
Peter and Claire run together. HRG runs out and grabs his daughter, pointing a gun at Peter. Claire demands to know what he's doing. HRG reluctantly lets Peter go in exchange for Claire staying with him. She says that people are gonna find out, what with there being a CRASHED PLANE and all, but HRG says that nobody's gonna know a thing. [Interesting that he knew before Nathan … the chain of command is really confuzzling here.] A missile blows up the wreckage. Why do I get the feeling that Charles Whitmore is somehow involved?
TV reception isn't all that great tonight. Keeps breaking out with static randomly all over the screen for a bout two or three seconds. VERY annoying. When it doesn't happen, it's cool, though.
Nathan has a wall of fan-photos ... I mean, pics of the heroes and villains. Maybe it’s the beginnings of that fabled Petrelli Family tree?
At the crash-site, Nathan and the Hunter argue. Hunter wants to shoot to kill. Nathan wants to keep them as prisoners. Claire is in custody. Looks bad.
Tracey is freaking out, Peter tries to help her. He talks her into coming with him, which is nice because it shows that his empathy-powers are coming back in more ways than one. Yay, Super-Empath!
The Trio find a trailer and Matt leaps inside after Usutu. The two guys hang back. Mohinder has figured out that a trance is guiding Matt and wants to let him do his own thin. Wise move, Bug-Man. Matt starts drawing, Usutu tells 'Pac Man' to focus; Mohinder gets clothes. Hiro says he'll take the address and send money later, and also takes clothes. He holds up a shirt that says ‘Rednecks make better lovers’ and then discards it. LOL. LOL. LOL. ROFL.
Ando is on the phone, trying to purchase a plane ticket to Arkansas. I can’t tell what town, and for a second I thought the subtitle read ‘Redneckville.’ Frustrated that the people on the phone have never heard of the place, Ando yells "Arkansas! Clinton!" hilariously. Hee hee hee …
Daphne shows up. "Hiro told me about your ‘super-sekkrit hideout.’" Daphne ILU. I can hear the quotation marks in your voice! “We have GPS trackers.” Beat. “Of course you do,” Daphne says. LOL! They team up to go find their men. YAY! That little exchange right there was oodles more enjoyable than anything the Petrellis did in V3, with the exception of Claire’s femslashy scenes with Elle.
Mohinder urges Hiro to turn himself in, since him-not-having powers makes his chances of being set free much better. Mohinder, I love that you still have faith in people, after all you’ve been through. Mohinder wants Hiro to save himself while he still can. Naaaaaw, Mohinder! You’re not alone! Sylar is being hunted too! Find him! He can protect you! And if you two shack up willingly, us fangirls will protect you as well! (Mr. Kring, my threat from last year still stands: if Mohinder and Sylar don’t team up in this volume, your shins are going to have a chat with my rather formidable boots.)
"When did you learn to draw?" Mohinder demands. Hee … no, wait, HA HA HA! He sounded so pissed off that Matt can suddenly draw! (Somebody wanted to do some Titanic cosplay and put on a shiny necklace …)
Matt drew some people in India (INDIA! MOLLY IS IN INDIA! I THINK! GO THERE NOW ON THE OFF-CHANCE THAT SHE IS!) and Daphne getting shot in the arm at the crash site. This is really hard to recap tonight.
A mother and her son - who got sent to jail for hitting a guy for calling his mom a whore - find the agent strapped to a chair. With screwdrivers. Sylar's gonna torture the mom and son in front of the agent, as he wasn't forthcoming when he lost fingers. WOW. *reels* This show is gettin' DARK, baby! (When does the-guy-playing-Sylar’s-father-whose-name-I-daren’t-say-lest-I-spoil-you-good-fangirls show up?)
Daphne and Ando zip into Arkansas. Yay.
"Hang on, you're supposed to kill Hiro in the future, right? So he can't be dead." Hee! The line quickly becomes not so funny as Daphne speculates in a sad little voice that Matt must be ok too. She zips off to look for her poor, incompetent boyfriend. Ando reassures himself that Hiro is alive … because he'll kill him in the future. Don’t they understand that THAT future no longer exists anymore? Just like the FYG-verse and the universe Caitlin was lost in before it? The circumstances leading up to those futures have been averted, ergo those futures are erased. Now, in a parallel world maybe, but not in this timeline, mmmkay?
Peter and Tracey take down a pair of guards. Peter can only hang on to one power at a time. That kinda sucks, but at least they don’t seem to wear off. He wants to go back and find Nathan. Tracey says she knows how Nathan thinks, because she’s just like him. [Baby, by the end of this episode, even you won’t be on the same page as him.]
HRG says he's made arrangements to keep Claire and the family safe. Claire is really mad. Really really mad. I like it. She practically disowns both of her fathers, taunting Nathan, who's lookin' rather sweaty in a bad way. Poor boy. Oh wait, he's turning in his own kind, SERVES HIM RIGHT IT'S BLOODY HUMID DOWN THERE!
HRG wants Nathan to put a leash on his Hunter. The fangirls - who’ve been too distracted by the sheer awesomeness that is this volume thus far - giggle and grab their keyboards.
Daphne zips in and grabs Claire. Yay!
Nathan wants Claire controlled, HRG snaps back that he wonders what the Hunter would do if he found out what Nathan is. Ooooo, burn! I think … HRG isn’t as crazy as usual. He still wants to keep his family - mainly Claire - safe, and to hell with the consequences. He shouldn’t have let Claire meet all those heroes and villains, though. Now she has more-than-passing-acquaintances to brood over. Where’s the Haitian when you need him?
Flash forward? (The hell? Stop with the thinly-veiled allusions to Lost right this second, Heroes! You were better than Lost once, you can do it again!) Nathan, very sweaty, says he couldn't have known what would happen on 'that hillside.'
On ‘that hillside’ everyone reunites and hugs to happy music. Naturally, this means something bad is gonna go down. And so it does. Daphne gets shot. We see one distinct bullet, but it looks like she MIGHT be dead. I refuse to believe that. Claire takes most of the bullets as the others flee. Matt gets into the heads of the shooters and makes them shoot each other. *shivers*
Sylar pokes a mug at the agent. Hee. Sylar gets REALLY funny. In a terrifying psychological way. I don’t care how stupid his scenes are, I would watch Zachary Quinto do every monologue from Hamlet over and over again and still be captivated. The man can act. The man is funny. The man is creepy. The man is sexy. He can do no wrong, people, no matter how bad the writers shaft him.
Sylar goads the kid into showing a flicker of a power. It looks like he throws a blob of coffee-colored glowering stuff at Sylar that makes his mug spill and fall over. Hee. Sylar says "Small world ... you and I really need to talk." Yeek! Sylar's gotten both to-commercial-cuts. I like it! Next time, have him tackling Mohinder and then have it fade to black!
Crash site - which looks increasingly like the set of an X-File episode - the Hunter almost shoots Claire in the back of his head. (OMG!) Nathan gets mad. You can tell because his drooping hair isn’t as distracting as it has been this episode. (What happened to his beautiful V2 hair?) HRG gets Claire out of there. He mentions Lyle. HRG tells Claire to go back home and live ‘that normal life’ that she wanted in S1 and has been rebelling against in volumes 2 and 3.
"What about Peter ... the others?" Claire says, making me worry for Juliet and Ben and Richard.
I cannot believe that Cold-Eyes the Hunter is Governor Devlin from Oz. I really can’t. (Apparently he also played Juliet’s ucky husband on Lost and the gun-wielding patient on House. Small world, huh?) Nathan tries to get the Hunter to say 'people' instead of 'animals’ in reference to the heroes, but the Pernicious Pertwee just stalks off in his menacing fatigues.
The look on Nathan's face when Tracey says she 'has' Peter is priceless. She wants to trade him to get her old life. Wow. Clever girl, you. It's a plan she hatched with Peter ... or is it? I think Tracey has considered taking advantage of Peter’s puppy-dog-ness to further her own needs.
Sylar gets Luke to melt a poorly disguised metaphor for how the show is never gonna break out the capes and tights. Kid's got some kind of heat-ray/microwave thing going on, like they toned town Ted’s power for your viewing convenience. He's also got a sadistic streak, laughing about what happens when he uses his power around pacemakers. I think that he and Sylar are half-brothers. Sylar keeps coaxing the kid like a better-scripted, better-lit Star Wars scene between the Emperor and Darth Vader/Anakin. Don’t think I missed how the kid’s named ‘Luke.’ Ooooooo ... I just freaked myself out!
Kid sees the agent going for the gun and ... he fries him. Eeeeeeeew! Eeeeeeeew! Sylar, stop looking at the kid like he's your next shiny new toy! Go back to your boyfriend RIGHT THIS MINUTE! I am not joking young man! This is me putting my foot down!
It's now night. Kid wants Sylar to take him with him. The idea is laughable in that I saw it coming a mile away.
"And I let you live. Which is kinda a big deal with me." hahahahaha! Sylar, stop be so funny! You just pulled your mind-fuck powers on a minor and tortured a member of the armed forces! You should not be able to make me giggle!
Kid knows more than he was letting on. Sylar makes a sexy-face. Kid has the keys to what was his mommy's car. Yum. Yum. This is just LOADED with slashy goodness! Highly inappropriate, probably incestual, slashy goodness. Just what the Heroes writer excel at.
Peter and Tracey want to use Nathan as leverage against the government. Wow, that's ... a decent plan for some of the dumbest characters on this show. I approve. It’s gonna crash and burn, but I approve.
Nathan tries to screw with Tracey's mind. She backs down. Peter leaps out with a gun. Sniper lasers light up. Peter grabs Nathan as a human shield and they banter. Peter flies away, the soldiers drag Tracey off, and she screams pretty realistically. The Hunter is still really pissy, perhaps because this show isn't on HBO and he can't swear properly. Aside, Nathan knows that HRG had Peter in his sights, and didn't shoot him. He thanks him. Yeesh. Most dysfunctional relationship EVER, and that includes the fans’ relationship with Lost.
Flash-forward! (I think.) Nathan and his pretty eyelashes talk about how he wanted to contain and protect the heroes from themselves, and how that’s all been blown away now that both sides have tasted blood. He also says that clichéd line about ‘their move is next’ or something like that. This is life, people, you don’t sit back and wait your turn, you cheat and claw your way across the board!
Hiro thanks the driver of a truck for the ride and says he'll send fare later. Lol. He’s so perfect this episode: cute but resolved to hero-tude. Now, if only his accent would become more believable …
Matt doesn’t want justice, just revenge. Wow. That’s a … big step for someone who just last year was a cop living in LA, three months ago was living in a domestic partnership with another man and raising a child whilst trying to earn his detective license. Then again, for the past two months he’s been living with Daphne and just saw her murdered at his feet, so I can understand his anger. (PLEASE don’t let Daphne be dead! I like her! She’s the only good thing to come out of V3!) [Just to be clear, BTW, V2 takes place four months after the Explosion, in March of 2007, and V3 takes place in the last week of March 2007. V4 is taking place in June of 2007 until we learn otherwise. Claire applying for college this late is kinda odd, but I’ll let it pass.]
"Matt, that's not us! That's not you!" Mohinder pleads.
Peter makes a speech about frozen bank accounts, and how it's gonna be hard to fight back, what with having to give up their lives and Sprint Phones ™ and credit cards. All the guys look a little nervous, but very resolved indeed. Huzzah!
Sylar and possible-brother ride down the highway. (Damnit, Sylar now has a rtag … like a prag, but with ‘road trip’ instead of … ok, I’ll shut up now. That was uncalled for. I’m very sorry.)
Claire, in a bedroom set much larger than in V2 or V3, broods. She wants to stick close to home, maybe get a part-time job. Sandra, who was previously rambling about college in the background, swoops down into the camera’s line of focus and says she’s so relieved. They hug, and I beam. Bad plotlines will come and go, but Sandra Bennet is the most realistic mom-actor ever.
Claire gets a text message. "There is hope, you can still fight back.” Says 'Rebel.'
Claire asks who this is.
"A friend. Who hates them as much as you do.” That’s one presumptuous texter right there.
Claire texts that she's scared. Rebel says they are too, but tells her to be ready. Woohoo! Resistance! Get Claire into Badass!Claire mode!
Nathan has been calling Angela. She refuses to give him absolution, and eyes a file of the Hunter, which contains a newspaper clipping that mentions a shooting. Looks scary. Is Angela checking up on an old flame (oh god, no … please …), making sure her son is safe, or, as I’m inclined to believe, looking out for herself and only herself.
A cute (MALE!) assistant tells Nathan that they're ready for him.
Nathan goes into an armored car. Tracey is tied up inside. She tells him that he's doing this because of ambition. He tells her not to fight 'it' and goes to leave. She shrieks that he's one of them, and the two soldiers stick a tube up her nose. I think one of them is the girl from the webisodes. I’m hoping that the tube contains something that’ll knock Tracey out, and not suck her powers out through her nose like a Dementor ‘cure’ or something. Nathan keeps on walking down a very long, dark hallway in a long dark coat, and doesn’t look back. The symbolism is not lost on anyone over the age of five.
I just realized something. The title card wasn't anywhere cool this episode. It was just on a black screen. This is bad, guys. REALLY bad.
Next week, on Heroes: HRG gets more menacing lines. People look scared. Images are focused on. Sylar glares at a car-mirror. Niki screams in orange light. Sylar carries someone on his shoulder, but it looks too skinny to be Mohinder. A comic-book store is wrecked! Someone is flung through the air! Another person is hit by water! Nathan wants the heroes brought in alive. (Good luck with that, dude. Not only do I doubt Hunter Devlin will bring them back alive, I doubt they’ll LET him. Some I think would rather die than get hauled off to be tested on, or whatever you plan on doing with them on Faux-tanamo.)