Heroes: The World vs. Hiro Nakamura

How low are my expectations for this show?

Are they on the floor? No, they’re definitely lower than that. The basement? The Earth’s core? Hell?!

Because, God (or Kaito Nakamura) help me, I enjoyed the latest definitely-bad-yet-thoroughly-enjoyable-in-its-own-ridiculous-way installment of “Heroes.” Mostly.

Let’s jump right into Hiro’s storyline, which had the Master of Time and Space, literally, on triall for his life.

Hiro’s brain tumor acted up early in the hour, transporting him to Charlie’s Texas diner, which doubled as a makeshift courthouse. Hiro was on trial for using his abilities for his own personal gain. His dad, Kaito (welcome back, George Takei), served as judge and Adam Monroe/Takezo Kensei (David Anders) was the prosecuting attorney.

Of course, the idea of bringing back dead characters to interact with living characters as their lives hang in the balance has been done before (a particularly atrocious recent example was “Grey’s Anatomy” ferry episode), but “Heroes” had more fun than usual with the concept.

My two favorite things (other than the shout-out to the opening narration of “Quantum Leap”) were Anders’ performance (“Hello carp”), which I enjoyed even during the dark days known as “Heroes: Season 2”, and Zachary Quinto showing up as Sylar and absentmindedly testifying as to how many people he’d killed (“Ted……Sprague!”) as a result of Hiro letting him live in exchange for Charlie’s life.

Less successful was the result of the mock trial itself. It was determined that Hiro had ultimately used his powers for his own selfish motives, despite having noble intentions and saving the world (“twice!”). Hiro had even accepted responsibility for his actions.

Unfortunately, that’s around the time the show remembered that (Nathan Petrelli notwithstanding) they’re not really in the habit of killing off popular characters, even if they’ve long outlived their usefulness. As a result, we got a weird, slapped-together sword fight between Hiro and Monroe before Hiro got a new lease on life after interacting with his saintly dead mom. (Insert sad trombone sound.)

The season’s main villain had a similar “good news/bad news” situation with his storyline.

The good news is that Samuel has FINALLY gone full villain. It turns out that all (or most) of his efforts this year have been in the surface of recreating the romance he had with his beloved Vanessa. The scenes between Samuel and Vanessa were sweet and VERY well played by Robert Knepper and Kate Vernon. Unfortunately, Vanessa (correctly) pointed out that the idyllic cottage was really Samuel’s fantasy and not hers. This caused Samuel to flip out and cause a whole town to cave in on itself (maybe they’ll run into my expectations for this show while they’re down there).

The bad news is that, um, all of our main villain’s efforts this year have been due to him wanting to impress a girl he likes. All that talk about giving people with abilities a safe place to live appears to be a bunch of crap and a waste of time. This was almost as bad as when Jack told Kate on “Lost” that he wanted to detonate the bomb and reboot timeline for her. Blech.

Speaking of blech, that’s what I expected to do during the latest “Sylar creepily hits on Claire” storyline, but I’ll be damned if Zachary Quinto and Hayden Panettiere didn’t pull this off.

Sylar caught up with Claire at her college because the latest thing with Sylar is that he doesn’t want to end up alone and Lydia’s tattoo had appeared on his body and apparently told him that Claire is what he really wanted. The dialogue between the two was too cutesy by half (again, remember when Sylar was LEGITIMATELY scary?!), but the show did bring up an interesting point about Claire and Sylar’s similarities.

Throw in a nice twist – Claire confessing to Sylar how much Gretchen means to her while Sylar was disguised as Gretchen – and this thing didn’t turn out nearly as awfully as I thought I would. That is, of course, until the writers decide what other direction they want to yank Sylar in, and they give the currently-content Claire something fresh to whine about.

So what’d you think of this episode? How did Samuel emerge from his destruction unharmed? (Does he have teleporting abilities I’m not aware of?) What does Sylar want with Parkman now? Finally, where the hell is Tracy?