Heroes: Past Imperfect

I was encouraged when I saw the title of last night's episode, "Four Months Ago." I figured the hour would fill in a lot of the blanks that made the first part of the season (what's the word I'm looking for?) sucky.

It got off to a promising enough start as we actually got to see Nathan flying Peter into the air as he was about to explode, resulting in a very cool special effect, and Peter dropping a still-alive, but very-badly burned Nathan at the hospital. I'm assuming all the money spent on that cool flying sequence was the reason they could never show us any of the battles in feudal Japan, or barely any hero-on-hero fight sequences in this show.

Unfortunately, things went downhill from there. Kristen Bell (pictured, left) showed up again as the electro-charged Elle — and she was terrible. There's just no way around it. Last time we saw her, we only got a small, but annoying dose of Bell's impression of what a sociopathic badass should act like. Last night, whenever she appeared on screen, my brother and I would audibly groan. I guess this is what you get when bad writing/directing happens to good actors. I'm convinced her biggest contribution to the episode was giving Peter his haircut.

The other person getting ample screen time was "Bob" the company man, who has a knack for appearing out of nowhere and recruiting heroes to his facility (first Peter, then Nikki). He tried to convince them to come into his facility and work for him, but while Nikki refused, believing she could control Jessica, Peter fell for his pitch about curing away his power because it had nearly killed Nathan.

It wasn't before long (with a little help from Adam/Kensei) that Peter realized he was being kept as a prisoner. Their neighboring-cell, jailhouse interactions were a little "V for Vendetta"-ish, which is fine. The big problem I had was why, if Adam is as dangerous as Bob has built him up to be all this time, would he, not only put Peter in a cell right next to him, but put him in a cell right next to him with a convenient vent so they could talk. Also, for such a dangerous hero, it seemed incredibly easy to escape that facility. Who knows? Maybe Bob wanted Peter and Adam to hook for some reason. Eventually, they got split up when chased by Elle and the Haitian, and Peter ended up in that crate to Ireland after a quick memory wipe from the Haitian.

So that was how Peter and Adam got together. We also saw why Nathan grew the "Anchorman" beard. It seems that it's his mom's fault (shocker!) that his family deserted him after she fed his wife Heidi (who I forgot can walk now) some story about Nathan having delusions of grandeur. The way the camera kept focusing on the way Angela kept rubbing Heidi's shoulder and hair makes me think that she was working some sort of power of persuasion on her (ala Season 1's Eden). Or Angela could be gay.

At the beginning of the episode, we also learned that D.L. didn't die from his injuries in the Kirby Plaza showdown. So we all figured that eventually Jessica came back and did the deed, right? While I admire the show for trying to take a left turn and not having Nikki (or Jessica, or Gina, who was introduced last night) be the one to kill D.L., the way his death was handled was unbelievably bad. So D.L. has time to react and let a punch phase through him, but not a gun shot, even though the guy walked right up to him and shot him? I don't buy it. And while I liked the idea of him becoming a firefighter (a real-life hero), I didn't think they hired ex-cons who'd been in prison just months earlier. It's just a crappy way of killing that character. I didn't think I enjoyed the D.L. character as much as I did until I saw Leonard Roberts in the past two episodes and realized how much I missed him.

Two people I wouldn't miss if you were gone — you guessed it, Alejandro and Maya. We also finally saw their origins as, during Alejandro's wedding, Maya got upset, cried black tears and everyone died. And then they ran away. How exactly is this different from every other episode with them in it?

So what'd you think of this episode? I didn't think it was nearly as good as last year's "Six Months Ago", which showed why Nathan resented his power after the accident and introduced Zachary Quinto as Sylar.

In fact, the stuff that this episode didn't address was more glaring to me than the stuff it did. Why didn't they show how Candice/Michelle was able to apprehend Sylar and take him back to wherever the hell they were? Also, why didn't they show us the exact moment when Parkman and Mohinder went gay for each other? Finally, how many times could YOU compare Nathan to a Will Ferrell character in one column?