Heroes 3.08 Villains
Flashback time! *settles down with the popcorn*
My, but I do love the flashback episodes. Even though the timelines tend to be headache-inducing, and certain aspects definitely do not make me happy, but there is so much else that does. So, let's see, about those three plot threads:
1) Meredith. I've been withholding judgment on the disconnect of Meredith suddenly having Company training because I assumed we would get an explanation sooner or later, and now we do. In fact, we get the most character stuff on Meredith - an enigmatic character since she's been introduced, whom we saw never from her on point of view but of Claire's and briefly Nathan's - we have so far. These flashbacks finally connect living-in-a-trailer Meredith to Company Agent!Meredith, and completely work for me, including the Unexpected!Brother. (Claire really is related to everyone on this show.) (Not that Flint would ever have posed problems to shippers.) An ongoing question ever since the last season - did or didn't Meredith know that Claire survived the fire, did or didn't she make a bargain with the Company - was cleared up. So, current status of Meredith's backstory: grows up poor with dumb brother, has George and Lennie relationship with same, has affair with Nathan which produces Claire, break-up with Nathan, Company catches up with her, fire, Meredith runs assuming Claire is dead, is still running and a small-time thief together with Flint when Thompson catches up with her again. Thompson, the least interesting of the Company Men so far, gains a layer here, though I'd argue his letting Meredith go at the end is less altruistic than it looks when you take into account that he has just seen a demonstration of how Meredith reacts when finding out the Company intends to use a family member as well, and that at this point they're all waiting for Claire to activate so they can bring her in. If Meredith had still been around by then, the result would have been obvious. In any case - I liked that Meredith is willing to work for the Company despite her loathing for it as long as it's just herself, and that she's good at it (and without much sympathy for the Vietnam Veteran version of Peter Rasputin, aka Colossus); she's not a saint (hello, scamming Nathan and Claire re: money), but not a villain, either. And I liked the unsentimental but matter of fact way she took care of Lenny Flint. Who all of a sudden has become interesting as well.
Lastly: as opposed to the crosscutting between HRG and Elle to Mohinder and Peter later, the cutting from Meredith and Thompson to Claire and the train wreck was a knock-out and a genuinenly awesome retcon. Loved it. Both on a visual and thematic level.
2) Still on the Company subject: the part of the Sylar plot thread I'm happy with is the depiction of Noah Bennet. Including his watching Sylar kill on the monitor like he was watching a lion eat a zebra. Because that fits with the HRG characterisation throughout three seasons; he basically doesn't think of the specials as humans, and it's his love for Claire that made the difference, not a moral realisation about the wrongness of his deeds. And he hasn't changed. His attempted use of Stephen, wanting him to kill Sylar with no regard to Stephen not wanting to be a killer, is basically the same thing we see here, only now Claire has witnessed it instead of Elle. And while the characterisation of Elle is somewhat questionable, Noah having worked with her before makes sense and underlines what I've always said; no, he didn't want Elle's fate for Claire, but that didn't mean any compassion for Elle, and he would have done exactly the same thing to Claire if she hadn't been his adopted daughter.
Now, about Elle: being undercover, she displays more social skills than through the entire second season, which is my problem with her characterisation. Though I can fanwank that with her playing a role, I suppose, acting the girl next door like she has seen it on tv. I'm going back and thro as to whether Eden would have been a far better choice; it would have made her determination to kill Sylar and killing herself before he could get her power even more an attempt to atone. But otoh, given Eden's power, she could have simply told Gabriel to stop if she had wanted him to, plus it makes no sense he wouldn't have killed her earlier than their encounter in the PrimaTech cells once he got into the killling swing if he had known her. (And there is the on screen dialogue that proves he had no idea Eden had a power before she demonstrated it in s1.) Lastly, Eden would not have been as poignant a Claire alter ego as Elle is here, and thus the counterpoint to the Claire-Steven-HRG scene in this season wouldn't have been as strong.
Sylar.... sigh. You know, it's not that I don't buy he could have felt guilt after his first murder; this actually ties to all those "sin" scrawlings on the wall Mohinder and Eden find in the pilot. (The Doylist reason for that was that Sylar before Zachary Quinto was cast was originally conceived as a character like Kevin Spacey's killer in Seven, but that doesn't preclude a Watsonian retcon.) But all this talk about his soul really makes me conclude we're supposed to see him as the Heroes version of either Spike or Angel, and either way - no. Just no.
3) "My king, my queen": well, Emperor and Empress wouldn't have had the same ring to it, though the Julian-Claudian overtones were stronger than ever in this episode, and anyway, nice phrasing, Daniel Linderman. Who, like that other s1 villain, Thompson, is given the chance to display "some traces of morality" by choosing his queen (and her son, thanks, Dan) over his king. See, this is why I wanted to see Elder interaction; it's a whole new dynamic, compared to how they interact with the younger generation, with Linderman instead of being the puppet player in the background being the beta dog, and Angela's faithful knight. It occurs to me that this is the exact reverse to the Godfather model, where you have the mafia don and his consigliere the lawyer; here, Las Vegas crime boss Linderman is actually the consigliere, and the lawyer pretending to be that is really the power in the background. Which also fits with Arthur telling Maury to play Head!Linderman with Nathan in the present, and Nathan in the past blaming Linderman for the Petrelli crime involvement, seeing him as the one corrupting his parents. And it fits with an older theory of mine: that originally Arthur was supposed to be the one to become President, not Nathan; Nathan got the assignment in Plan New York once Arthur "died". (It doesn't matter whether or not Isaac had already painted his picture, because the physical resemblance between Arthur and Nathan is strong enough for it to be either man in the Oval Office painting - and I'm ignoring here it was actually Sylar-as-Nathan, I know.) It's certainly what Arthur thinks will happen. (As a side issue, since he's ready to kill Nathan rather than let an investigation drag all kind of things to the surface, including who really has the power and is responsible for Linderman's empire, I guess that means Peter got promoted from spare to heir in his mind. If he thought about heirs at all.)
The Petrelli flashbacks are very allusive; Arthur in the garden pruning flowers recalls Don Corleone doing this with tomatoes in The Godfather, Angela asking Arthur to tell her he didn't order the hit on their son and apologizing after she gets her reassurance, saying "I love you", is almost literally Kay having this dialogue with Michael near the end of The Godfather about his brother-in-law, and of course, the men are lying in both cases and the women are about to find out. Only Angela is no Kay; she's Italian. So instead of a divorce, Arthur gets poison, and Angela sipping wine, as Livia does in I, Claudius, while it works. And having her monologue about just what the truth of their marriage is, as Livia has with Augustus in Augustus' actual death scene (which is a different one from the wine scene). The Angela and Arthur scenes finally make sense of a sentence of Peter's in the pilot - "I know you feel free to speak your mind since dad died" - which one couldn't understand before, because did Angela give you the impression of being one to hold back in the show? And they make her repeat insistance to Peter that Nathan doesn't love him or that "love is overrated" look as something more than manipulation; not that she's not also deliberately button-pushing, but now it also looks like a reflection of her feelings for Arthur, the way he betrayed her, which Linderman, no champion of morality, calls the worst possible. (It's also the way Noah betrayed Sandra. There are parallels between Arthur and Noah in this episode that that make me suspect I'm dead-on in my comment to 47_trek_47 two weeks ago about Nathan seeing Arthur as fandom sees Noah. With the difference between both, and the reason why Sandra so far found it in herself to forgive Noah, being that Noah really would not be capable of killing Claire and does believe he's protecting her, whereas Arthur stopped using reasons other than "because I want to" in the end.) It makes the relationship between Angela and Nathan even more screwed up, too; in a way, she killed Arthur for him, hasn't stopped projecting Arthur into Nathan since and goes wildly between using him and needing him.
Petrelli trivia observations: I love the family interaction now we see all four on screen at the same time, which we never did before, with tidbits like Peter after Arthur's speech telling Nathan "told you he wouldn't be able to say 'nurse'" and Angela telling Nathan re: Arthur still refusing to come to the graduation party "I tried, he won't" before Nathan gets more than a word out make the dynamics feel very real in an every day way, while the screwed-upness goes to the heavens if you are aware of what is actually going on in those scenes. Also, if I were Heidi, I'd have been immensely insulted because guess what photo in addition to one showing the four Petrellis Arthur keeps on his desk? That's right, the wedding photo, making its first appearance this season. The wedding photo showing Peter and Nathan, that is. We've yet to see one that shows Nathan and Heidi. Sidenote: as if to make up for the lack of touching in the present, Nathan and Peter spend every single scene they're in together just a milimeter or so apart and constantly touching, which to me proves I was right that the present day behaviour is a deliberate choice on the part of the show reflecting on certain assassination attempts.) And then there's Arthur saying what he believes to be a final goodbye to his older son. He doesn't kiss him the way Michael Corleone does Fredo when going through a similar internal condemming-to-death moment, but he does say: "You look good in a suit, Nathan." Oh, Petrellis.
(Puts the fact there was a suit in Nathan's hospital room in yet another light. Other than it being needed for the tv appearance.)
More trivia: several bits of Petrelli fanon are shot to hell as Angela cooks (which a lot of stories have assumed she'd be too patrician to do), a scene that comes complete with a call back to Linderman's encounter with Nathan in his kitchen. More seriously, there is the part where Nathan actually thinks Arthur dies from a heart attack. And no, what this destroys is fanon, not canon. (Though it is fanon I loved and have used in several stories myself.) All that's said on screen on the show in s1 is that Nathan by the time Peter is out of the hospital and on a rooftop again is aware of Angela's suicide story, i.e. he says in reply to Peter's "you know about Dad?" "Yes". And of course an episode later he uses the suicide story himself for political gain. But that's six months after Arthur's not-death, which means Angela could have given Nathan the suicide explanation at any point between their waiting in the hospital for news about Arthur and Peter's own hospital stint after his jump in the pilot. In fact, wouldn't it be like Angela to react to a lie on Nathan's part - about why Peter jumped from the rooftop, because he lied to her as well and didn't mention the flying - with a lie of her own, telling Nathan "oh, this reminds me to tell you what REALLY happened to your father"?
Lastly: Izzie? Did I hear right and the dog (hated by Arthur) was called "Izzie"?
PS: loved the detail of Hiro nearly snapping out of his trance when worrying about Nathan. Aww. I can't help it, platonic Hiro 'n Nathan is my favourite friendship in that 'verse. Flying Man & Teleporter Guy Forever! Also, not worried about Hiro, because clearly, Ando will come to the rescue, probably taking a leaf from Usutu's book and hitting Arthur from behind with a shovel. Usutu being dead, though? Not cool, show. Not cool. This makes the Haitian the only current black character, since Monica hasn't been back on screen yet.
My, but I do love the flashback episodes. Even though the timelines tend to be headache-inducing, and certain aspects definitely do not make me happy, but there is so much else that does. So, let's see, about those three plot threads:
1) Meredith. I've been withholding judgment on the disconnect of Meredith suddenly having Company training because I assumed we would get an explanation sooner or later, and now we do. In fact, we get the most character stuff on Meredith - an enigmatic character since she's been introduced, whom we saw never from her on point of view but of Claire's and briefly Nathan's - we have so far. These flashbacks finally connect living-in-a-trailer Meredith to Company Agent!Meredith, and completely work for me, including the Unexpected!Brother. (Claire really is related to everyone on this show.) (Not that Flint would ever have posed problems to shippers.) An ongoing question ever since the last season - did or didn't Meredith know that Claire survived the fire, did or didn't she make a bargain with the Company - was cleared up. So, current status of Meredith's backstory: grows up poor with dumb brother, has George and Lennie relationship with same, has affair with Nathan which produces Claire, break-up with Nathan, Company catches up with her, fire, Meredith runs assuming Claire is dead, is still running and a small-time thief together with Flint when Thompson catches up with her again. Thompson, the least interesting of the Company Men so far, gains a layer here, though I'd argue his letting Meredith go at the end is less altruistic than it looks when you take into account that he has just seen a demonstration of how Meredith reacts when finding out the Company intends to use a family member as well, and that at this point they're all waiting for Claire to activate so they can bring her in. If Meredith had still been around by then, the result would have been obvious. In any case - I liked that Meredith is willing to work for the Company despite her loathing for it as long as it's just herself, and that she's good at it (and without much sympathy for the Vietnam Veteran version of Peter Rasputin, aka Colossus); she's not a saint (hello, scamming Nathan and Claire re: money), but not a villain, either. And I liked the unsentimental but matter of fact way she took care of Lenny Flint. Who all of a sudden has become interesting as well.
Lastly: as opposed to the crosscutting between HRG and Elle to Mohinder and Peter later, the cutting from Meredith and Thompson to Claire and the train wreck was a knock-out and a genuinenly awesome retcon. Loved it. Both on a visual and thematic level.
2) Still on the Company subject: the part of the Sylar plot thread I'm happy with is the depiction of Noah Bennet. Including his watching Sylar kill on the monitor like he was watching a lion eat a zebra. Because that fits with the HRG characterisation throughout three seasons; he basically doesn't think of the specials as humans, and it's his love for Claire that made the difference, not a moral realisation about the wrongness of his deeds. And he hasn't changed. His attempted use of Stephen, wanting him to kill Sylar with no regard to Stephen not wanting to be a killer, is basically the same thing we see here, only now Claire has witnessed it instead of Elle. And while the characterisation of Elle is somewhat questionable, Noah having worked with her before makes sense and underlines what I've always said; no, he didn't want Elle's fate for Claire, but that didn't mean any compassion for Elle, and he would have done exactly the same thing to Claire if she hadn't been his adopted daughter.
Now, about Elle: being undercover, she displays more social skills than through the entire second season, which is my problem with her characterisation. Though I can fanwank that with her playing a role, I suppose, acting the girl next door like she has seen it on tv. I'm going back and thro as to whether Eden would have been a far better choice; it would have made her determination to kill Sylar and killing herself before he could get her power even more an attempt to atone. But otoh, given Eden's power, she could have simply told Gabriel to stop if she had wanted him to, plus it makes no sense he wouldn't have killed her earlier than their encounter in the PrimaTech cells once he got into the killling swing if he had known her. (And there is the on screen dialogue that proves he had no idea Eden had a power before she demonstrated it in s1.) Lastly, Eden would not have been as poignant a Claire alter ego as Elle is here, and thus the counterpoint to the Claire-Steven-HRG scene in this season wouldn't have been as strong.
Sylar.... sigh. You know, it's not that I don't buy he could have felt guilt after his first murder; this actually ties to all those "sin" scrawlings on the wall Mohinder and Eden find in the pilot. (The Doylist reason for that was that Sylar before Zachary Quinto was cast was originally conceived as a character like Kevin Spacey's killer in Seven, but that doesn't preclude a Watsonian retcon.) But all this talk about his soul really makes me conclude we're supposed to see him as the Heroes version of either Spike or Angel, and either way - no. Just no.
3) "My king, my queen": well, Emperor and Empress wouldn't have had the same ring to it, though the Julian-Claudian overtones were stronger than ever in this episode, and anyway, nice phrasing, Daniel Linderman. Who, like that other s1 villain, Thompson, is given the chance to display "some traces of morality" by choosing his queen (and her son, thanks, Dan) over his king. See, this is why I wanted to see Elder interaction; it's a whole new dynamic, compared to how they interact with the younger generation, with Linderman instead of being the puppet player in the background being the beta dog, and Angela's faithful knight. It occurs to me that this is the exact reverse to the Godfather model, where you have the mafia don and his consigliere the lawyer; here, Las Vegas crime boss Linderman is actually the consigliere, and the lawyer pretending to be that is really the power in the background. Which also fits with Arthur telling Maury to play Head!Linderman with Nathan in the present, and Nathan in the past blaming Linderman for the Petrelli crime involvement, seeing him as the one corrupting his parents. And it fits with an older theory of mine: that originally Arthur was supposed to be the one to become President, not Nathan; Nathan got the assignment in Plan New York once Arthur "died". (It doesn't matter whether or not Isaac had already painted his picture, because the physical resemblance between Arthur and Nathan is strong enough for it to be either man in the Oval Office painting - and I'm ignoring here it was actually Sylar-as-Nathan, I know.) It's certainly what Arthur thinks will happen. (As a side issue, since he's ready to kill Nathan rather than let an investigation drag all kind of things to the surface, including who really has the power and is responsible for Linderman's empire, I guess that means Peter got promoted from spare to heir in his mind. If he thought about heirs at all.)
The Petrelli flashbacks are very allusive; Arthur in the garden pruning flowers recalls Don Corleone doing this with tomatoes in The Godfather, Angela asking Arthur to tell her he didn't order the hit on their son and apologizing after she gets her reassurance, saying "I love you", is almost literally Kay having this dialogue with Michael near the end of The Godfather about his brother-in-law, and of course, the men are lying in both cases and the women are about to find out. Only Angela is no Kay; she's Italian. So instead of a divorce, Arthur gets poison, and Angela sipping wine, as Livia does in I, Claudius, while it works. And having her monologue about just what the truth of their marriage is, as Livia has with Augustus in Augustus' actual death scene (which is a different one from the wine scene). The Angela and Arthur scenes finally make sense of a sentence of Peter's in the pilot - "I know you feel free to speak your mind since dad died" - which one couldn't understand before, because did Angela give you the impression of being one to hold back in the show? And they make her repeat insistance to Peter that Nathan doesn't love him or that "love is overrated" look as something more than manipulation; not that she's not also deliberately button-pushing, but now it also looks like a reflection of her feelings for Arthur, the way he betrayed her, which Linderman, no champion of morality, calls the worst possible. (It's also the way Noah betrayed Sandra. There are parallels between Arthur and Noah in this episode that that make me suspect I'm dead-on in my comment to 47_trek_47 two weeks ago about Nathan seeing Arthur as fandom sees Noah. With the difference between both, and the reason why Sandra so far found it in herself to forgive Noah, being that Noah really would not be capable of killing Claire and does believe he's protecting her, whereas Arthur stopped using reasons other than "because I want to" in the end.) It makes the relationship between Angela and Nathan even more screwed up, too; in a way, she killed Arthur for him, hasn't stopped projecting Arthur into Nathan since and goes wildly between using him and needing him.
Petrelli trivia observations: I love the family interaction now we see all four on screen at the same time, which we never did before, with tidbits like Peter after Arthur's speech telling Nathan "told you he wouldn't be able to say 'nurse'" and Angela telling Nathan re: Arthur still refusing to come to the graduation party "I tried, he won't" before Nathan gets more than a word out make the dynamics feel very real in an every day way, while the screwed-upness goes to the heavens if you are aware of what is actually going on in those scenes. Also, if I were Heidi, I'd have been immensely insulted because guess what photo in addition to one showing the four Petrellis Arthur keeps on his desk? That's right, the wedding photo, making its first appearance this season. The wedding photo showing Peter and Nathan, that is. We've yet to see one that shows Nathan and Heidi. Sidenote: as if to make up for the lack of touching in the present, Nathan and Peter spend every single scene they're in together just a milimeter or so apart and constantly touching, which to me proves I was right that the present day behaviour is a deliberate choice on the part of the show reflecting on certain assassination attempts.) And then there's Arthur saying what he believes to be a final goodbye to his older son. He doesn't kiss him the way Michael Corleone does Fredo when going through a similar internal condemming-to-death moment, but he does say: "You look good in a suit, Nathan." Oh, Petrellis.
(Puts the fact there was a suit in Nathan's hospital room in yet another light. Other than it being needed for the tv appearance.)
More trivia: several bits of Petrelli fanon are shot to hell as Angela cooks (which a lot of stories have assumed she'd be too patrician to do), a scene that comes complete with a call back to Linderman's encounter with Nathan in his kitchen. More seriously, there is the part where Nathan actually thinks Arthur dies from a heart attack. And no, what this destroys is fanon, not canon. (Though it is fanon I loved and have used in several stories myself.) All that's said on screen on the show in s1 is that Nathan by the time Peter is out of the hospital and on a rooftop again is aware of Angela's suicide story, i.e. he says in reply to Peter's "you know about Dad?" "Yes". And of course an episode later he uses the suicide story himself for political gain. But that's six months after Arthur's not-death, which means Angela could have given Nathan the suicide explanation at any point between their waiting in the hospital for news about Arthur and Peter's own hospital stint after his jump in the pilot. In fact, wouldn't it be like Angela to react to a lie on Nathan's part - about why Peter jumped from the rooftop, because he lied to her as well and didn't mention the flying - with a lie of her own, telling Nathan "oh, this reminds me to tell you what REALLY happened to your father"?
Lastly: Izzie? Did I hear right and the dog (hated by Arthur) was called "Izzie"?
PS: loved the detail of Hiro nearly snapping out of his trance when worrying about Nathan. Aww. I can't help it, platonic Hiro 'n Nathan is my favourite friendship in that 'verse. Flying Man & Teleporter Guy Forever! Also, not worried about Hiro, because clearly, Ando will come to the rescue, probably taking a leaf from Usutu's book and hitting Arthur from behind with a shovel. Usutu being dead, though? Not cool, show. Not cool. This makes the Haitian the only current black character, since Monica hasn't been back on screen yet.