Ok, this is the new Heroes thread so we can stop using spoilers tags in the other, now way off topic, thread.

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WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!

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This thread discusses the TV program Heroes, including past episodes, current episodes and speculation on future plot and development.

If you are following the series but have not seen the most recent episode, note that you can and will likely find what you may consider spoilers (details you may not ant revealed prior to having them revealed within the show).

If you won't want to risk reading spoilers or don't want to read speculation and other nerdy commentary on this TV program, then please back out of this thread and do not read any further.

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Re: Sylar and Hiro's recent encounter. I didn't mean to imply that Hiro brought Sylar with him into the frozen state. By whatever means, Sylar either broke the time shift completely, or first broke it only for himself (it breaking for everyone/thing else again by Sylar's will or Hiro's surprise and lapse of concentration).

Of course it's possibe none of these things are an explanation and the writers just decided to do this without concern to any "laws of hero powers"

I do recommend reading the Wiki character profiles. You can pick up a lot of background information there without having to read the online comics. I just read a few things today that my girlfriend and I had simply guessed/speculated ourselves earlier.

I think I agree with your assessment of what might have happened between Hiro and Sylar. It was pretty clear that Hiro didn't have the will to follow through. The more I think about the scene, the more I think you're right that Hiro lost his concentration.

Keep in mind the reading styles of some people here (myself included) will run into this thread without seeing the spoiler alert ahead of time, so use of the tags might still be a good idea.

Ok, I made some edits to the opening post.

If everyone keeps the word "spoilers" within the subject of their replies, any searches to the BBS bringing up posts from this thread should also be (more) easily noticed.

The whole purpose of this thread was to be able to stop using the spoilers tags which was making it difficult to read and post (not to mention quote) in the other thread.

Reading the comics online or from the PDF really does suck. I now read them in .cbr format.

Edit: Tom has asked us not to link to, uh, questionable web sites. -wfaulk

Picking up Dignan's post from the other thread, but this time without spoilers...

On Mohinder:
Clearly, it would have been more rational for Mohinder to call "The Company", but then it's also reasonable to say that he was totally freaked out and didn't know what to do. If you wanted to get more technical, what are the odds that a phone connection with two wireless handsets was good enough to be able to pick up the sound of a cell phone generating touch tones? All the super-hearing in the world wouldn't help you hear a signal that wasn't there in the first place.

What really matters is that Sylar had his moment of ethical confusion, Mohinder was no help, so he reached out to (and killed) his mom, which in turn solidified his bad-guy credentials and made him think about being the President. That whole thing seemed a bit forced to me. They're trying to humanize him now? Why not earlier?

I agree with your second paragraph. One thing I've liked about the show is that the characters aren't clear-cut good/evil. I think they attempted to humanize Sylar in his first episode, but since then he's just been a psychopath, and now they brought his mom into it all of a sudden.

I have a question for everyone:

WHAT IS NIKI'S POWER??

Here's what I've gotten from what they've explained about her character so far:

- she used to have a [twin?] sister, Jessica, who was sexually abused by their father
- Jessica died (as a result of the abuse?)
- at some point, Jessica became part of Niki

So my question is basically "what is the power that Niki and Jessica have?" Jessica apparently has super strength, but how does the multiple personality thing factor in? Is the whole mirror thing all in their mind, or is that part of Niki and/or Jessica's power?

Or do we just not know all there is about "them" yet?

*edit*

Remembering Bruno's comments about the Wikipedia Heroes articles (there's a lot up there), I checked her character bio out. I'm still a little confused, though. The opening to the article seems to indicate that Niki also has super strength when her personality is active. Does anyone remember when this happened? As far as I can tell, the super strength has only been apparent when Jessica is in control, which seems to be what is stated later on in the same bio in the powers section.

After thinking about this for a while, I think that understanding the Niki/Jessica character entirely depends on whether we know that the split personality is all a psychological issue, or something more. If it's the former, then I think it's pretty clear that the whole character that is Niki has super strength. If it's the latter, I'm not so sure...

I think they're keeping Niki/Jessica's power deliberately vague. In particular, it's unclear whether she had the power to absorb a personality, and along with it a superpower, or whether she's just got super-strength all the time, but has the dual-personality crutch preventing it from always manifesting. In the future-show, we saw that the dual personality was gone, but we didn't learn whether the super-strength was gone as well. One can imagine that this aspect of Niki/Jessica will be a big deal at some point, if not in the season finale, then later on.

Greg Beeman's blog (he's a director and producer for the show) gets into the whole "humanizing Sylar" thing, which was apparently also a debate among the writers. I'll bet they had more material that had to be cut for time.

Peter says something in the future episode to indicate that Niki still has super strength.

All the powers are genetic mutations, so Niki has hers regardless of who's personality she's manifesting. Controlling the power is another thing, and I'm sure at some point the writers will cover that and we'll see some super strength action and a lack of the Jessica personality.

Many of the charcters have gone through some type of learning curve on the show to gain control of their powers. Niki didn't know about her super strength for a long time and once she discovered what was going on, she didn't try to harness it because she associated it with the jessica personality. For the newer episode Niki's own personality has been completely locked away, so the whole thing is moot.

From the other thread, it was mentioned that we learned Candice can morph the outside environment much like she can turn into other people.

I don't think that is correct. She mentioned a couple times (one in each of the last two episodes) that she can make people see things that would drive them insane. Her power is hallucinations or visions rather than morphing.

You might be right about that. I suspect that she was playing some visual tricks on Micah that merely made him run into the same room again and again. I tend to think his sense of direction wouldn't make this work, but I'm not going to think about it too much

I read the comics last night. They really are terrible. Not just the writing, but the inconsistent art, too. And I don't mean each artist having a different style, I mean the one guy, Marcus To, who seems to do most of them sometimes being vaguely realistic and then the next panel it'll look like a Popeye cartoon. I only saw two artists in there that I liked at all, and them I liked quite a bit. The first is Phil Jiminez, who's been drawing actual comics for quite some time now, but he only did a single splash page. The other one I liked was Jason Badower. Tom Grummett is another established comics artist, who I usually like, but his outing was pretty bad, too.

I've been trying to read through them too. They're awful. They lost me right in the very first comic, where for really no reason whatsoever they showed an image of Kali ripping apart a taxi cab.

I'm struggling through them. I'm liking the short series about how Peter and Niki hooked up in the future, though.

That one was not bad, but the only one that seems to give actual useful information is the 6-part "War Stories" series. And it's pretty badly written.

I thought the May 15 episode was really good. A question I have, could we expect DL to survive so Sylar can get his ability? I can't remember Peter meeting him, but with all of Peter's other abilities, he might be able to make up for it.

I was wondering how Micah was going to fit in to all this, never expected that he was used to rig the election. Fun stuff.

The episode was only so-so for me. It looks like they're back to the awkward pacing and direction of some of the earlier episodes. I almost want to go back and see if my least favorite episodes share some of the same writers or directors.

I don't think DL is dead yet. As far as I can tell, Hiro didn't change anything that would affect the Sanders family, so presumably they're still on track for Sylar to get that power too. Besides, Spoiler:
lbh pbhyq frr QY va gur cerivrjf sbe arkg jrrx'f rcvfbqr. Ur jnf vawherq, ohg fgvyy nyvir.

*edit* By the way, DL had plenty of time to see and react to that gun. Couldn't he have just grabbed Niki and phased them both so that the bullet would go through them? */edit*

I think the main thing I liked about this episode is that we're pretty certain that Candice doesn't actually look like Missy Peregrym, and is projecting her illusion round the clock.

I wanted to bring up something that was mentioned in the other thread about Sylar and Peter.

It was suggested that no matter how many powers Sylar gained, Peter could merely stand near him and copy all of them. Now, I don't believe it's been ruled out, but so far there hasn't been anything to suggest this is the case, as far as I could tell.

When Sylar and Peter met at Mohinder's house, I would think that was plenty of time for Peter to absorb whatever abilities Sylar had, but we haven't seen him deal with super hearing, melting things, etc.

So I posit that Peter can merely absorb Sylar's original power, to intuit how things work. The only hole in that theory is that we haven't seen Peter do that either, but I think that's just due to it not being very necessary for him.

We know Peter picked up Sylar's telekinesis, and that wasn't originally Sylar's power. If it truly is a passive thing, though, then Peter should have other powers stolen by Sylar (e.g., great hearing). The exact interaction between Peter's power and Sylar's stable of powers clearly has yet to be spelled out.

Meanwhile, I'm modestly annoyed about Sylar and his super-hearing as well as Peter and his mind-reading. We know that the original holders of those powers had to work for quite a while to master their powers, and the super-hearing woman required an iPod. Sylar's already jumped way past that. Likewise, Parkman took a while to figure out how to shut out all the noise from crowds. It's as if Peter and Sylar have both broadly mastered the ability to control random powers.

For the most recent episode,
Spoiler:

V nterr gung Q.Y. fubhyq unir tenoorq Avxv naq cunfrq gurz bhg, be neenatrq sbe gurz gb snyy guebhtu gur sybbe. Ba gur bgure unaq, ur'f orra fubg orsber. Ur pyrneyl unfa'g znfgrerq uvf bja cbjre lrg.

Nyfb, jvgu Grq'f novyvgl gb tb obbz, lbh'q guvax ur'q chg hc zber bs n svtug ntnvafg Flyne.

Just to let you know, you don't need to do a spoiler tag for an episode that's been aired. That's the point of making this new thread I just used it because I was talking about the previews for next week (which I watch for Heroes but not for Lost).

As for the other stuff, I'll just go down the list:

- when did we see Peter use telekinesis?
- the woman with super hearing didn't "require an iPod" for her powers to work, which appears to be what you're implying. she used it to drown out the noise.
- I would argue that Peter and Sylar's powers inherently make them able to master other abilities much quicker than others. None of the people whom Sylar stole from had trained their abilities. Sylar tends to know how things work, and Peter through his training with Claude has gained a degree of control over whatever powers he comes into contact with. I'm sure that without that he would have hurt quite a few people when he met Ted.
- hasn't DL phased to avoid being shot before? Maybe I'm not remembering correctly.
- I agree, I'm pretty surprised that Ted didn't put up more of a fight, but I think that's why they (the writers) had Sylar crash the truck like he did. Ted was in pain and not thinking straight, and the others really should have done more to warn him about Sylar in the first place. Still, Ted had gained some mastery over his ability, so I would have liked to see a little tiff between them.

I think it was a little odd how the series left out Clea Duval's character for so many episodes in a row. She showed up for a couple minutes in this episode and she seemed more like a plot device than a character.

- when did we see Peter use telekinesis?

Most notably in the 'flash forward', when he and Future-Hiro toss aside all the guards.

- the woman with super hearing didn't "require an iPod" for her powers to work, which appears to be what you're implying. she used it to drown out the noise.

Yeah, that's what I meant. Her power, at least as she dealt with it, was too sensitive and required the iPod in order to block out external stimuli and let her think. Sylar has, in effect, a more useful version of her power.

- hasn't DL phased to avoid being shot before? Maybe I'm not remembering correctly.

Not sure, but he did get shot by Niki/Jessica at one point.

I guess I just don't count that future as evidence of that happening. I'd say it's more likely that he gained it from someone else. We still don't know if multiple people can have the same power, which would seem likely. I would think that if Peter got his telekinesis from Sylar after that meeting, he would have used it by now...

I tell you, though. If that future episode was evidence of how many people would gain powers, it must be really tough for Peter. I'd imagine that he would just walk a few blocks down the street and pick up a couple powers right there, not even knowing what they are

If Peter really wanted to go power-collecting, he should start frequenting shopping malls, sports events, anything with large crowds. Of course, if you follow that chain of logic, you quickly start bumping into the limits of our suspension of disbelief about how these powers actually work...

Peter used telekenesis in his last run-in with Sylar at Mohinder's apartment to throw Sylar across the room slamming him into the opposite wall.

Peter was able to absorb Ted's explosive abilities even when Ted had everything turned off, so it's at least somewhat unclear the extent to which Peter can reach out and copy somebody else.

(Also, Peter may have come close enough to Sylar when he saved the cheerleader to absorb the telekinesis at that time.)