'Heroes': Reset!

At the newspaper I used to work at in Florida, one of my reporters and I developed a shorthand whenever we wanted to retract something: "Yeah, Apple-Z that," after the macro for "undo" on a Mac.

Monday's Heroes effectively Apple-Z'd the start of the season, which leaves me with two thoughts. First, that was a fine, fun episode, much more in keeping with the show's strong efforts last season. And second, why'd we have to wait until episode eight for it?

(Spoilers coming, and you won't have to wait long.)

When Heroes has been good this season -- and there have been a few times -- it has invariably been good in episodes where the focus was kept good and tight. Such was the case tonight, as the all-flashback "Four Months Ago" stayed primarily with two stories: that of the Petrelli family, primarily Peter, and Niki, D.L. and Micah. But for the unnecessary look at the first manifestation of the Wonder Bread Twins' powers, it was pretty much all good.

Since we can dismiss with Maya and Alejandro in just a couple sentences, let's do so now and be done with it. Maya kills Alejandro's cheatin' bride, and the whole wedding, with her black-oil tears, and flees to a convent in Venezuela. Alejandro discovers he can calm her later, and on the lam they go. Nothing new there, and the seven or eight minutes spent on them was really kinda worthless. I'd much rather have seen, for instance, the Bennets going underground and setting up shop in California, but no such luck.

Small potatoes, though, compared to the rest of the episode. Adam reminds Peter that on account of their proximity (and Peter's previous run-ins with Claire, although he doesn't remember that), he can heal and urges Peter to apply those powers to his mind by thinking about "what matters most to you."

Focusing on the photo of him and Nathan, Peter flashes back to the night he blew up, and we get the show's best CG work of the season as we watch Nathan's skin burn, the two brothers separate, Peter explode, Nathan fall -- and a healed-up Peter catch him and cart him to a hospital. He's promptly shocked into unconsciousness by Elle (the devilish Kristin Bell -- anyone else getting sort of a Harley Quinn vibe, in behavior if not backstory, from her character?) and Bob, who transport him to the Company's facility and tell him they can give him medication to keep him from going all nuclear again.

For all their sinister machinations, though, Bob and Elle don't have the sense to bunk Peter in a cell farther away from Adam, who gets to know our brooding empath thanks to a series of air-vent conversations over the four months between then and now and fills Peter's head with stories of how the Company is deceitful and duplicitous. Which is probably all true, but given what we know about Adam's past as Kensei, it's hard to believe his motives are pure.

Aside from filling in the gaps from the night Peter blew up to the night he was found in Ireland, the flashback introduced a healthy amount of ambiguity into the Company/Adam/elders portion of the show. Adam may in fact believe he's "saving the world," but is murdering 12 people -- assuming Bob's assertion last week that he's the one bumping off the elders -- really the way to go? And just what, exactly, do Bob et al. have to gain by de-powering people with abilities?

Peter, along with his mother and brother, are sort of stuck in the middle. Both sides clearly want Peter as their pawn, and given how powerful he is I guess neither can be blamed. I can't believe it will end well once he figures that out, but I'm suddenly pretty interested in seeing how it plays. (As an aside, I'm curious what it is that Angela Petrelli did to help the Haitian, and whether his memory-wipe on Peter was really an act of mercy or part of something he and HRG have cooking.)

The Niki story felt like it was in large part crafted to give Leonard Roberts' D.L. a proper sendoff, and that it did. (I guessed "cop" when he told Micah he was getting a job that would make his son proud, but firefighter makes more sense given that D.L. has a criminal record.) But it also demonstrated some of the problems with the Company's approach to "curing" people with powers.

On her meds, Niki is a lethargic lump who can't even celebrate her son's birthday; when she goes off them, she "fractures" again, to use Bob's word for the multiple-personality disorder that manifests sometimes when people discover their abilities. This time we meet not Jessica but Gina, a party girl who dashes off to L.A. and gets with a skeevy bearded dude who takes very unkindly to D.L. coming to take his wife home. He shoots D.L. at point-blank range (presumably not giving him any time or space to let the bullet pass through, or maybe he just didn't think the guy would really pull the trigger).

His death convinces Niki to buy completely into the Company line and take her power-sapping medicine, although I'm a little confused by the coda to her flashback. In her final scene tonight, she's wheeling a suitcase and thanking Bob. Given that we last saw her injecting the vaccine into herself, I guess we're to assume that scene is at the start of her treatment. That doesn't quite jibe with the timeline of Peter and Adam, who end the episode pretty much where we left off last week.

Still, though, I'm much more encouraged by the direction Heroes took with this episode. If only it had happened sooner.

How'd you like "Four Months Ago"? Has Heroes won you back? And are we to believe that Nathan grew, then shaved, that fantastic beard in three weeks' time?

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