Heroes 4-8: “Shadowboxing”
In the Los Angeles airport, we see Matt. Well, everybody else sees Matt, but we see Sylar because he’s in control now. Ghost Matt is following him, in a reversal of their usual roles. Sylar tells Matt that he’s going to New York to find Peter Petrelli and see what he knows about his missing body. Sylar is stopped by security (including Kevin Pereira from Attack of the Show) because there’s a handgun in his bag. Matt’s not out of the fight yet – he tricked Sylar into packing it. Sylar tries to use Matt’s power to make security let him go, but he can’t do it. Man, I love the Matt vs. Slyar scenes.
Meanwhile, Sylar’s body waked up at the carnival, and after some flashes of memory, he unconsciously shifts his features to those of Nathan. He’s a little freaked out when he looks in the mirror, and flies off. (By the way, we’ve never actually seen where Sylar picked up his flying from, but Lana points out that he flew in last season’s finale.) After he flies out, Samuel and Lydia talk about recruiting Claire.
Back at school, Gretchen freaks out about the fact that an invisible girl wants to kill her. Claire decides to check out Becky’s room, but first sprays her room with baby powder to prove that Becky isn’t there. (I know, I’ve been calling her “Rachel” because that’s the name Samuel calls her by. The nomenclature is getting to be a problem.)
Emma is watching the activity in the hospital – a doctor asks her to keep pressure on a patient’s wound and tell the nurse that she needs a suture. Emma, if you’ll recall, was a doctor and knows exactly what to do. Peter watches from a few feet away, impressed. Meanwhile, he goes back to healing people with his magic touch. Boy, that had to make the doctors feel like crap, right? Still, Peter nearly collapses from healing somebody.
Claire visits the sorority house and runs into the nameless girls who don’t remember anything that happened. Then Claire sees Bennet and the Haitian. Yay, Haitian!
Sylar’s in a car now, but he gets a flat tire. See, Sylar eventually talked his way out of airport jail, but he’s still on the no-fly list. He used his powers to make sure Sylar didn’t see a jagged chunk of metal in the road. Hilariously, Sylar can’t get the tire off – “Do you have any upper body strength at all?” he asks Matt.
A friendly old man with a tow truck pulls up. While Old Hank tries to help, Matt makes Sylar trip and fall. Sylar brings a gun to a knife fight and responds by beating Hank to death with a tire iron. Understandably, this shakes Matt up pretty badly.
Claire leads Bennet and the Haitian to Becky’s room. Bennet tells the Haitian to bring Claire back to Gretchen. Claire freaks out about Gretchen’s memory being wiped, but Bennet reminds her of the Haitian’s other power, canceling the powers of others. That does mean Becky can’t sneak up on them, but it also leaves Claire vulnerable.
Back with Sylar and Matt, Sylar explains “The world is my hostage” – whenever Matt screws with him, Sylar will kill somebody.
In the hospital, Peter explains to Emma that it’s getting harder and harder to use his power. See, I think it would be cool if he had to balance out his uses of the healing touch and the death touch, which would make him think twice before using it. As Lana points out, in this scene Peter keeps touching Emma but doesn’t copy her power. We know it’s involuntary, since he copied her power without realizing it once already, but they’re maddeningly inconsistent at this point. Lana also speculates that Peter could cure Emma’s deafness. Why didn’t anybody think of that? And would it work? Could he cure, say, a congenital heart defect? Or cause somebody born without arms to grow a pair? I’m fascinated by this idea.
Claire returns to her room to find Gretchen packing. Claire tries to calm her down, but Gretchen can’t deal with the craziness. The Haitian agrees to bring her to the airport, presumably to put her on the same plane with the lesbian character from Grey’s Anatomy who went into the parking garage and never came back. And hey, maybe there’s still room for the Russian from The Sopranos, Josh from 30 Rock, and Baron Underbheit. Anyway, after Gretchen leaves to catch a flight on Air Poochie, Samuel shows up at Clair’s door.
Samuel tells Claire that Becky is his niece. He tells her that he knows she’s special, but that she can trust him. As he’s talking, we cut to Bennet, who finds a (the?) compass in Becky’s closet. He hears her enter but doesn’t see anything. Bennet pulls a taser and says that 10,000 volts of electricity ought to make her materialize. That’s right, Bennet used to partner with Invisible Claude, so he knows all the tricks. (I miss Claude…)
Matt/Sylar stops at the now-famous Burnt Toast Diner in Midland, Texas. Dude, be very careful or you will get sucked into a continuity black-hole. At the very least, all Hiro’s mucking about tore a hole in the universe, and if you’re not careful, you’re going to run into Yivo. (Please note: I assume that everybody who watches Heroes is a Futurama fan and thus will get that joke.)
The nice lady who was Charlie’s boss last week takes Sylar’s order. Interestingly, Sylar explains to Matt that “I tried to kill a waitress here once”. So Hiro did definitely succeed in altering the past, since other characters no remember the revised history instead of the actual history. But wouldn’t there be other repercussions to changing the past? Remember the old string timeline in Isaac’s studio? You change one thing and it branches out all over the place. Anyway, Sylar demands that Matt explain how he ended up in Matt’s head and where his body went. Matt refuses, so Sylar sets out for some more killing. Matt cracks and agrees to tell him everything.
We pick up with Claire and Samuel, and Samuel is giving her his standard patter about families. He explains that a family is ‘more than blood’, and you’d think that an adopted child wouldn’t really need to hear this. In Becky’s room, she explains to Bennet that he came to her house when she was 5, to round up her father. In a flashback, we see Becky’s father unleashing force waves on Bennet, and he shoots the guy in retaliation. While Bennet searches the house, young Becky turns invisible. In a nice touch, she interpreted it as saving herself with a wish, and is racked with guilt that she can’t make her other wishes (saving her father, etc.) come true. Becky tells Bennet that she went after Claire for revenge against him, so it’s awfully convenient that she was also ordered by Samuel to recruit Claire, right?
Samuel goes into the hard sell for recruitment, and says “We both know what your father would do in this situation.” At that moment, and this is awesome, Bennet enters the room, calmly pulls a gun on Samuel and says “No. Tell me, What Would Bennet Do?” Ha! If I still had by cafepress store, that would already be on a t-shirt.
Samuel accuses Claire of stalling, and Claire makes it clear that she’d never trust him over her own father. Bennet asks Samuel about the compass, and Samuel says that it could mean trouble for his family in the wrong hands. He claims he just wants to find Rebecca and get her some help. Ain’t nobody buying that, bro.
Emma finds a passed out young girl in the supply room and calls for help. Peter finds her, and Emma explains that “it’s a pneumothorax”, which I probably spelled wrong. Lana says that it would be impossible to make that determination just by looking at somebody, and this is the kind of thing she knows. She has Peter fetch her some supplies, and she sticks a big damn needle in the little girl’s side. That’s enough to wake her up, and I don’t understand what happened in this scene.
In a parking garage, Bennet is loading Samuel into the back of his van. Suddenly, Invisible Becky knocks Claire over and then takes a swing at Bennet. Samuel grabs Bennet’s taser and blasts her with hit. Bennet pulls his gun on the both of them, and Claire talks him into letting them go.
At the Bunt Toast Diner, Matt explains the situation to Slyar, while Sylar doodles. Sylar decides to kill every single person involved. (Lana: “So, exactly the same as what he always does, then?”) We then see that Matt made Sylar write “I have a gun and I’m going to kill everyone in here” on his doodle rag. The cops are waiting outside the diner. They’re surrounded, and Matt tells Sylar that he’s willing to die to rid the world of him once and for all. In a really neat scene, Ghost Matt reaches into his pocket as if to grab a gun, and Sylar mimics the movement exactly. They both pull out their empty hand, but it’s enough for the cops to open fire and put a dozen bullets in Matt’s body. Sylar collapses and Ghost Matt disappears. (This scene is less shocking when you remember Peter’s current power, but it’s still really good.)
We end with some short bits, including a very nice scene of Peter and Emma playing the piano, and then Emma at home looking at her old lab coat. And then, we’re back at the carnival, where Lydia tells Samuel that Sylar. Finally, “Nathan” shows up at Peter’s incredibly depressing apartment and says “I think I’m in trouble.”
Five dollars says Peter saves Matt next week, even though they’re about a thousand miles apart!
