Heroes 3.05 Angels and Monsters

[selenak]

Comments

[selenak]

Moments like that are worth being unspoiled for. Now let's see if I can ever manage it.

I'm crossing my fingers on your behalf, because the feeling of joy in proven right about an unspoiled guess is indeed worth it!

I love that she starts off using her dad's tactics of tasering the bad guy, but then shifts into a more empathetic (hah) mode and really bonds with Steven.Yes. I can see Claire taking her dad as a role model when trying to become someone who is not a victim, who is someone not to be messed with, but she quickly sees/is reminded of the other side. (And I really think that thought I gave her in a fanfic must have occured on more than one occasion - if she hadn't been his adopted daughter, Noah would have hunted her down and handed her over without a thought.) She is still able to see Steven as a person, not as "villain standing in for Sylar who hurt me". And you know, the show really exceeded my expectations because I did expect Claire to find out about the Sylar-Noah team-up and feel betrayed, but I did not expect the

[selenak]

Sylar and the Petrelli brand of manipulation: hm, I see it half between Peter's and Angela's variation. Just think about the way he played Mohinder in s1 and Maya in s2; he became whom they needed/wanted him to be. Angela manipulates by spotting other people's buttons and by using them against each other, true, but she doesn't change herself; she maintains the persona she projects. (Though you could argue Peter saw her differently than Nathan did until after the end of s1, I suppose, but not so completely different as the way Sylar's impersonations appear.)

And she does seem truly heartbroken over Peter's loss of innocence, and Nathan's anger. But she's still not above trying to manipulate Nathan, right to the end, framing Peter's absorption of Sylar's power as a "sacrifice." i.e. Don't let your brother's sacrifice go to waste. Help me. It's the truth, but only part of the truth, in classic Angela style.Oh absolutely. In the Apocalyptic Future Mark II, the one with the virus, she did the same thing with Peter, using Nathan's "

[almeda]

I noticed them repeatedly setting up conversations between Owner Of An Attacky Power and Owner of a General Power (freeze talks to fly; vortexes talks to healing), causing the latter to realize that 'finding out I have a power' is way less cool if you accidentally kill people when you do it. Culture shock -- privilege, really.

[selenak]

True, that, though Nathan accidentally almost got Heidi killed when he found out he had a power; it definitely got her crippled till Linderman intervened. (Otherwise flying pretty much is harmless or like Claire's power defensive, I agree.)

[londonkds]

Some of the critics of the show on racial grounds will see the differing fates of Tracey and Steven as an expression of racial prejudice on the part of the writers (Tracey kills someone with an outburst of uncontrolled power and gets Nathan's understanding and attempts to persuade her not to turn herself in, Steven kills someone likewise and gets tossed into Level Five for years and then kills himself when Bennet tries to make him do it again), but I suspect that it might actually have been meant as an examination of what happens to those who do and don't have racial and class privilege.

[wee_warrior]

And I guessed that way back in the first season

[selenak]

I think it's very clear that Claire isn't doing such a great job in her quest to become heroic without making one of the few female characters with agency into a damsel in distress.See, I'm withholding judgment here because I think this is a set-up so Claire gets to rescue Meredith, with or without Sandra, but definitely without Noah. If that's so, it would be a neat reversal to all the parent figures (safe Nathan) insisting on her need for protection, etc. If on the other hand Noah saves Meredith, or if Meredith dies, I'll be all grrrr, arggh

[cadesama]

But this one also illustrated that HRG doesn't see anyone outside his family circle as being a person in the same sense, and you could tell that Claire, looking from him to Sylar and back, saw them both as monsters, though for different reasons.

I wonder how much that plays into his determination to see Claire as someone to protect. Historically, Noah doesn't put a lot of thought into the specials being people, so does it make it easier to love Claire if he denies her ability to the point of thinking he actually needs to protect her? Some of it is emotional protection, sure, but he has gone way beyond what any sane parent would be doing at this point. You have to let go eventually, and he's determined not to, very possibly because that would be acknowledging that either all specials are people, or that he's a horrendous hypocrite who would have attacked his own daughter if she had been raised by someone else.

Speaking of excuses: the Peter scene at the start with Angela underlines the retcon of Sylar's ability as what made him

[selenak]

Re: Noah - I think there's something to it, though he had no problem using her ability to defuse Ted when telling Matt to shoot her in Company Man. But that was in a direct crisis, and everyday-wise, I think Noah needing to be in denial makes much sense.

[londonkds]

The scenes with Bennet and Claire in this episode make me hope that the writers actually did take the gender-related criticisms of Claire's relationships with Bennet and West last season on board privately, as opposed to their point-missing public statements of "apparently people don't want Claire to get a romance plot".

[selenak]

I hope so, too. Mind you, not that the show does have a good track record with romance, Charlie and Hiro aside, but still, ithe fact there was a romance wasn't the main problem with Claire's storyline - or lack of same - last season.

*starts to say more about gender in Claire's interactions with her parents, then realises this would contain a spoiler for something you haven't seen yet and shuts up*