What I’m Watching: Heroes

Heroes: Season 4, Episode 16 “Pass/Fail” (F)

There is nothing remotely decent about this episode. None of the plotlines have any saving grace at all, and this episode is a total fail. Samuel taking out his anger on the human population by leveling and destroying the land could have been good, but the way that his outburst started at the restaurant killed it all. Hiro’s playful trial with eternally available guest stars David Anders and George Takei scrubbing back in was dumb, and Hiro’s story always being comic and exaggerated whereas the rest of the show is supposed to be more serious just doesn’t work. The umpteenth attempt to make Sylar seem more human before he inevitably reveals himself as more evil than ever before starts off as just stupid and devolves from there. His need to bond with Claire by kissing her makes no sense, and her failure to even try to resist is pitiful. Claire is impossibly stubborn and completely willing to put up a fight at any junction, even able to somehow talk down her bullying puppeteer and save her skin in the slipperiest of situations, yet here she accepts Sylar’s saliva without a hint of protest. The fact that Sylar left Gretchen alive and didn’t even harm her in the slightest way doesn’t quite jive either, and if it’s all to make him out to be a more humane and goodly person, the show should simply erase the past year and a half and rewind to when Sylar was flipping pancakes in the future and Elle was still alive. This episode didn’t have a terribly large breadth in terms of the characters addressed, though it managed to bomb pretty miserably and end in the most despicable way: a reunion between Sylar and Matt, which was so awful the first eighty thousand times when Sylar was in Matt’s head and body. I’m sure it’s going to be infinitely worse when they interact in person.