Strange Attractors
Pink Raygun seems to have eaten an old post. So for the sake of completion, I'm posting it here. Nothing to see if you're not interested in Heroes.
Volume Five, Chapter Six - “Strange Attractors”
Righteous fury is a good look on Samuel. Robert Knepper does revenge like nobody else. It helps that every time he ices someone, they so utterly deserve it. You couldn’t get more cartoonish bad guys if you gave them thick black moustaches. When it is time for their comeuppance, you wouldn’t care if Samuel flayed them alive slowly, much less just crushed them in a massive sinkhole. It’s poetic justice-how many long has mankind wished the Earth would just swallow up the most hideous people ever to have sprung from it? If only.
Samuel hasn’t much to do in this episode except play at his favorite game: temptation. Mr. Bennet is still hovering protectively over the teenaged healer who accidentally killed his parents with his ability. Protective Mr. Bennet is Jack Coleman at his most friggin’ adorable, which I love, but he’s up against a pair of Suh-thurn townies at their least tolerable. Mr. Bennet’s plausible alternative cause-of-death scenario for the healer’s parents is shoved aside in favor of murder despite the fact that the Sheriff Redneck has no evidence to suggest anything of the sort. He wants the healer, Jeremy, for murder, end of story. Shut out from even seeing the kid, Mr. Bennet pulls a Hail Mary pass and gets Tracy Strauss to pretend she’s the kid’s aunt.
And that’s where Samuel steps in. Using his magically traveling Carnival, he takes Tracy to see the wonders of his world. He knows about Jeremy’s woes, and he doesn’t think that either she or Bennet have a serious plan for the kid once they spring him from Hick Hell. (As ever, Samuel is reading this situation exactly right.) He offers shelter and asylum for Jeremy; Tracy scoffs (though she half dreams of running away to Samuel’s circus herself) and demands to be returned to where she was. Samuel is a class act, top to bottom, and doesn’t press the issue, even though he knows he’s right. He gives her a compass to help her find her way back. (But not before Gabriel notices her, remembering her from Nathan’s memories. Samuel is really annoyed at this and tells him to forget it.)
Note: Tracy is deposited back in Stereotype City through means we don’t see. Still not sure how this is being managed, though I suppose Samuel’s weird bag-burying a few episodes ago might have something to do with it. It is worth pointing out that it is nearly always night at the Carnival, as it is when Samuel brings Tracy in-even though she was in daylight talking to him a second before they were both transported. I’m actually dying to know whose power this is and how it works. That’s something this show hasn’t made me curious about in ages, so well done there, show!
I haven’t been shocked by this show in a while, either, and while the visceral reaction I had to Jeremy’s fate is a good thing, it’s still a brutal event. Tracy bonds with Jeremy over things like having killed people by accident and how terrible that is (Tracy doesn’t volunteer info about her four intended murders). She and Bennet go to take him away, where he’ll live forever in bliss, basking in the awesomeness of being Mr. Bennet’s neighbor. This town they’re all in is some kind of unholy conglomeration of every variety of ignorance since the 15th century. As Jeremy is leaving the police station, he’s actually surrounded by an angry mob. (No pitchforks were visible, but you know they were there.) One guy tries to jump him and ends up on the wrong side of Jeremy’s ability. The poor kid is so messed up; he can’t even get it together to help the guy the way he saved Peter. This time, he’s killed people in front of witnesses. That is not going to help him any.
Sheriff Redneck tosses the kid back in jail, but two of his deputies decide to take the law into their own hands. Deputy Douchebag taunts Jeremy, daring him to fight back as he and his cohort lash chains around the kid’s legs. He could, too. With a touch, he could cause Deputy Douchebag to rot from the inside out. Jeremy stands there, shaking, desperate to save himself and hurt this bastard, but also afraid and self-loathing. It’s a powerful moment when Jeremy puts his hands down, a defiant act and difficult decision not to save himself at the expense of another’s life, not even someone so clearly in need of dying as the Deputy and his friend. (Kudos to the actor playing Jeremy. Very, very well done there.)
So they drag Jeremy to death. Thank god, the actual act is not shown, though the intent is obvious from the way they attach the chains around Jeremy’s body to their pickup and how he is later discovered by Mr. Bennet and Tracy, skin scraped off to the bone, lying in the road. Perhaps it’s more awful to know that this kid, who, until Bennet interfered, only tried to stay away from people, lest he hurt them, was literally ripped apart on the main drag of the town and nobody did anything to help him. This kid died screaming, thinking he was a monster who deserved it. I felt like throwing up when I watched this scene. This is powerful stuff, so while Deputy Douchebag and Sheriff Redneck are laughably over-the-top in their stubborn idiocy, there is nothing at all funny about what they did to this kid. Poor, poor Jeremy.
The horror persists through to the very last scene, where Jeremy’s blood is still on the pavement as Samuel returns for a bit of hard justice. All the suave and casual sexiness is gone. Samuel looks like some unholy, almost undead demon. His eyeliner is gone, so his eyes look hugely white. He trembles with fury as he watches Deputy Douchebag and friend stroll on into the police station, happy as anything. Pretty soon, the ground starts to quake along with Samuel’s rage, and the station collapses in on itself. For all that there could have been twenty innocent people in there, I find myself, once again, solidly on Samuel’s side. What was done to Jeremy was so unacceptable, so repulsive that anyone who avenges that stays on the right side of morality far as I’m concerned. Samuel, still sneering and seething, walks away, not sorry in the slightest-nor should he be.
For their parts, Bennet and Tracy are both destroyed by their failure to save Jeremy. Bennet might want to consider Peter’s advice from the season premiere: attempting to interfere in people’s lives often leads to them getting hurt. Jeremy might never have had a happy ending, but he didn’t have to go out the way he did. Tracy remembers her compass, which helpfully zips around to a direction, presumably locating the Carnival for her. She considers it seriously. Maybe Samuel is hiding away from the world, but no one messes with his people. (And Jeremy, who never got to the Carnival, was still one of his people.) There are kids at the Carnival-however poor they may be-who will never know the torment Jeremy went through. Surely, the isolation is worth that benefit?
Speaking of isolation, Uncle Samuel’s invisible girl, Rebecca, is still working on her mission to separate Claire from her one and only friend. I thought sororities did their awful stuff to pledges prior to accepting them into the house? Whatever, Claire and Gretchen and two other nobodies are subjected to Hell Week, where they must navigate around an old slaughterhouse to achieve…something. To be honest, I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention, not with all the other stuff going on. Claire and Gretchen have “the talk” about the kiss. Claire won’t commit to definitely offering to be Gretchen’s girlfriend but nor does she dismiss the possibility entirely; Gretchen, in the tradition of girls kissing girls on every show besides The L Word, has not committed to being solely into girls anyway. So, you have Gretchen being bisexual by her own declaration and Claire being so desperate to keep her one normal friend that she refuses to say outright that she doesn’t like girls. It’s patently obvious that this is a ratings ploy, and I refuse to care.
Long story short, Becky messes up in her assassination attempts on Gretchen’s life so badly that Claire figures out that there’s someone she’s not seeing behind all the shenanigans. In a fit of cleverness, Claire whacks what looks to her to be empty air strangling her friend, and connects with Becky’s face. Becky is outed as invisible girl to Claire, Gretchen, and the two other pledges. (Claire’s similarly outed when she heals after being slightly impaled.) So Becky doesn’t get to be the head or president of her chapter or whatever, and Claire and Gretchen are still in a no-holding holding pattern.
The only other development in this episode is that Mind-Sylar is now fully in control of Matt Parkman. After Mind-Sylar takes over Matt’s body to romance and service his wife (just…ew), Matt flips out, sends Janice and his son away, and attempts to drink Mind-Sylar into silence. This works until he passes out and wakes up in the passenger seat in his own body. (Note to self: Do not lose consciousness while piloting Sylar. You might not wake up you.) They’ve fully got a dude-version of the Niki/Jessica dynamic going, which is fun in its own right, much more so because Greg Grunberg does a wicked Sylar-pretending-to-be-Matt impression. Not sure how fooled Janice is-Matt confessed to her what he’d done to Sylar, though not in detail, and told her about someone riding shotgun in his head-but she seems pleased that Matt’s back on an even keel (probably because Sylar, used to hearing voices, can ignore Matt better than Matt can ignore him). I expect he’s off to find his body. Not sure if that will improve or further diminish Zachary Quinto’s interest in his own character, but I’m willing to go along while it allows Greg Grunberg to be evil. He’s good at it, and it’s a lot more interesting than what he’s been given to date.
Next week: Save the season one character, save the show!
Volume Five, Chapter Six - “Strange Attractors”
Righteous fury is a good look on Samuel. Robert Knepper does revenge like nobody else. It helps that every time he ices someone, they so utterly deserve it. You couldn’t get more cartoonish bad guys if you gave them thick black moustaches. When it is time for their comeuppance, you wouldn’t care if Samuel flayed them alive slowly, much less just crushed them in a massive sinkhole. It’s poetic justice-how many long has mankind wished the Earth would just swallow up the most hideous people ever to have sprung from it? If only.
Samuel hasn’t much to do in this episode except play at his favorite game: temptation. Mr. Bennet is still hovering protectively over the teenaged healer who accidentally killed his parents with his ability. Protective Mr. Bennet is Jack Coleman at his most friggin’ adorable, which I love, but he’s up against a pair of Suh-thurn townies at their least tolerable. Mr. Bennet’s plausible alternative cause-of-death scenario for the healer’s parents is shoved aside in favor of murder despite the fact that the Sheriff Redneck has no evidence to suggest anything of the sort. He wants the healer, Jeremy, for murder, end of story. Shut out from even seeing the kid, Mr. Bennet pulls a Hail Mary pass and gets Tracy Strauss to pretend she’s the kid’s aunt.
And that’s where Samuel steps in. Using his magically traveling Carnival, he takes Tracy to see the wonders of his world. He knows about Jeremy’s woes, and he doesn’t think that either she or Bennet have a serious plan for the kid once they spring him from Hick Hell. (As ever, Samuel is reading this situation exactly right.) He offers shelter and asylum for Jeremy; Tracy scoffs (though she half dreams of running away to Samuel’s circus herself) and demands to be returned to where she was. Samuel is a class act, top to bottom, and doesn’t press the issue, even though he knows he’s right. He gives her a compass to help her find her way back. (But not before Gabriel notices her, remembering her from Nathan’s memories. Samuel is really annoyed at this and tells him to forget it.)
Note: Tracy is deposited back in Stereotype City through means we don’t see. Still not sure how this is being managed, though I suppose Samuel’s weird bag-burying a few episodes ago might have something to do with it. It is worth pointing out that it is nearly always night at the Carnival, as it is when Samuel brings Tracy in-even though she was in daylight talking to him a second before they were both transported. I’m actually dying to know whose power this is and how it works. That’s something this show hasn’t made me curious about in ages, so well done there, show!
I haven’t been shocked by this show in a while, either, and while the visceral reaction I had to Jeremy’s fate is a good thing, it’s still a brutal event. Tracy bonds with Jeremy over things like having killed people by accident and how terrible that is (Tracy doesn’t volunteer info about her four intended murders). She and Bennet go to take him away, where he’ll live forever in bliss, basking in the awesomeness of being Mr. Bennet’s neighbor. This town they’re all in is some kind of unholy conglomeration of every variety of ignorance since the 15th century. As Jeremy is leaving the police station, he’s actually surrounded by an angry mob. (No pitchforks were visible, but you know they were there.) One guy tries to jump him and ends up on the wrong side of Jeremy’s ability. The poor kid is so messed up; he can’t even get it together to help the guy the way he saved Peter. This time, he’s killed people in front of witnesses. That is not going to help him any.
Sheriff Redneck tosses the kid back in jail, but two of his deputies decide to take the law into their own hands. Deputy Douchebag taunts Jeremy, daring him to fight back as he and his cohort lash chains around the kid’s legs. He could, too. With a touch, he could cause Deputy Douchebag to rot from the inside out. Jeremy stands there, shaking, desperate to save himself and hurt this bastard, but also afraid and self-loathing. It’s a powerful moment when Jeremy puts his hands down, a defiant act and difficult decision not to save himself at the expense of another’s life, not even someone so clearly in need of dying as the Deputy and his friend. (Kudos to the actor playing Jeremy. Very, very well done there.)
So they drag Jeremy to death. Thank god, the actual act is not shown, though the intent is obvious from the way they attach the chains around Jeremy’s body to their pickup and how he is later discovered by Mr. Bennet and Tracy, skin scraped off to the bone, lying in the road. Perhaps it’s more awful to know that this kid, who, until Bennet interfered, only tried to stay away from people, lest he hurt them, was literally ripped apart on the main drag of the town and nobody did anything to help him. This kid died screaming, thinking he was a monster who deserved it. I felt like throwing up when I watched this scene. This is powerful stuff, so while Deputy Douchebag and Sheriff Redneck are laughably over-the-top in their stubborn idiocy, there is nothing at all funny about what they did to this kid. Poor, poor Jeremy.
The horror persists through to the very last scene, where Jeremy’s blood is still on the pavement as Samuel returns for a bit of hard justice. All the suave and casual sexiness is gone. Samuel looks like some unholy, almost undead demon. His eyeliner is gone, so his eyes look hugely white. He trembles with fury as he watches Deputy Douchebag and friend stroll on into the police station, happy as anything. Pretty soon, the ground starts to quake along with Samuel’s rage, and the station collapses in on itself. For all that there could have been twenty innocent people in there, I find myself, once again, solidly on Samuel’s side. What was done to Jeremy was so unacceptable, so repulsive that anyone who avenges that stays on the right side of morality far as I’m concerned. Samuel, still sneering and seething, walks away, not sorry in the slightest-nor should he be.
For their parts, Bennet and Tracy are both destroyed by their failure to save Jeremy. Bennet might want to consider Peter’s advice from the season premiere: attempting to interfere in people’s lives often leads to them getting hurt. Jeremy might never have had a happy ending, but he didn’t have to go out the way he did. Tracy remembers her compass, which helpfully zips around to a direction, presumably locating the Carnival for her. She considers it seriously. Maybe Samuel is hiding away from the world, but no one messes with his people. (And Jeremy, who never got to the Carnival, was still one of his people.) There are kids at the Carnival-however poor they may be-who will never know the torment Jeremy went through. Surely, the isolation is worth that benefit?
Speaking of isolation, Uncle Samuel’s invisible girl, Rebecca, is still working on her mission to separate Claire from her one and only friend. I thought sororities did their awful stuff to pledges prior to accepting them into the house? Whatever, Claire and Gretchen and two other nobodies are subjected to Hell Week, where they must navigate around an old slaughterhouse to achieve…something. To be honest, I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention, not with all the other stuff going on. Claire and Gretchen have “the talk” about the kiss. Claire won’t commit to definitely offering to be Gretchen’s girlfriend but nor does she dismiss the possibility entirely; Gretchen, in the tradition of girls kissing girls on every show besides The L Word, has not committed to being solely into girls anyway. So, you have Gretchen being bisexual by her own declaration and Claire being so desperate to keep her one normal friend that she refuses to say outright that she doesn’t like girls. It’s patently obvious that this is a ratings ploy, and I refuse to care.
Long story short, Becky messes up in her assassination attempts on Gretchen’s life so badly that Claire figures out that there’s someone she’s not seeing behind all the shenanigans. In a fit of cleverness, Claire whacks what looks to her to be empty air strangling her friend, and connects with Becky’s face. Becky is outed as invisible girl to Claire, Gretchen, and the two other pledges. (Claire’s similarly outed when she heals after being slightly impaled.) So Becky doesn’t get to be the head or president of her chapter or whatever, and Claire and Gretchen are still in a no-holding holding pattern.
The only other development in this episode is that Mind-Sylar is now fully in control of Matt Parkman. After Mind-Sylar takes over Matt’s body to romance and service his wife (just…ew), Matt flips out, sends Janice and his son away, and attempts to drink Mind-Sylar into silence. This works until he passes out and wakes up in the passenger seat in his own body. (Note to self: Do not lose consciousness while piloting Sylar. You might not wake up you.) They’ve fully got a dude-version of the Niki/Jessica dynamic going, which is fun in its own right, much more so because Greg Grunberg does a wicked Sylar-pretending-to-be-Matt impression. Not sure how fooled Janice is-Matt confessed to her what he’d done to Sylar, though not in detail, and told her about someone riding shotgun in his head-but she seems pleased that Matt’s back on an even keel (probably because Sylar, used to hearing voices, can ignore Matt better than Matt can ignore him). I expect he’s off to find his body. Not sure if that will improve or further diminish Zachary Quinto’s interest in his own character, but I’m willing to go along while it allows Greg Grunberg to be evil. He’s good at it, and it’s a lot more interesting than what he’s been given to date.
Next week: Save the season one character, save the show!