Heroes 3.05

For those of you who were thinking about abandoning this show, I hope tonight's episode was a good enough reason to stick around. All of the action took place in the present day, which makes things so much easier to follow. For those of you who need a recap, here is what happened in tonight's episode, entitled "Angels and Monsters" :

MOHINDER- Am I the only one that thinks Mohinder has become infinitely more interesting, since he started became a villain? We open with Mohinder in Central Park, sitting on a rock, watching a drug deal go down. When the dealer is all by himself, Mohinder with his saccade powers, attacks him and takes him down. Maya checks up on Mohinder to see if he is having any progress with coming up with a cure for her condition. She assumes something is fishy when she sees a blood smear on the floor, not to mention that Mohinder has no idea about his missing neighbor. Maya returns later to Mohinder’s lab, to find that he has cocooned the neighbor. Mohinder catches her, and even though she uses her power to defend herself, she cannot bring herself to kill the monster Mohinder has become. Maya, being the helpless, somewhat naïve victim she was in Season 2, is subdued by Mohinder and put into a cocoon of her own.

CLAIRE, SYLAR AND H.R.G- Claire wants to dish out payback, after what Sylar did to her in the first episode. Using files she stole from her father, she traces down one of the escaped villains. The villain’s name is Steven Canfield, and he has a power that inspires all of us nerds to go “That’s AW-SOME!”. He can create a vortex, a mini black hole, to suck up anything or anyone (That doesn’t look as good in print). Claire confronts Canfield, only to find out that he is an innocent , and just wants to see his family, who he has missed for years now. Once Claire has earned his trust, Sylar and H.R.G show up. They attack Canfield, who uses a black hole to cause a diversion, while he escapes. Sylar saves Claire, right before she is sucked into the black hole. The dramatic music that is playing at that moment, as well as the look Sylar gives her, suggests that she might be the mother of the boy that the future Sylar was taking care of, in the last episode.
Claire, is stunned to see her father working with Sylar, but helps the duo track down Canfield at a nearby amusement park. Canfield is distraught. His family chose not to meet him at the park. Claire tries to give the man some encouragement, but we see it was just a trick. H.R.G is behind Canfield, pointing a gun to his head. H.R.G tells Canfield he will let him go, if Canfield is willing to kill Sylar. There is great dramatic tension at this point, but any genre fan could easily have predicted that the hopeless Canfield would opt to kill himself, instead of taking Sylar’s life. Canfield jumps into his own black hole. Bye Bye, Vortex Man.
Claire returns home, where her adoptive mother is overjoyed to see her. She suspects that Claire’s biological mother is the one that found her and brought her back home. Unfortunately, Claire’s biological mother has been captured by The Puppet Man, a villain who basically controls people as if they are puppets. Dun Duh Duhhhh!!!

NATHAN, TRACY AND ANGELA- Peter has Sylar by the throat, in the beginning of the episode. He breaks Sylar’s neck, but as you know from previous episodes, Sylar can easily recover from that. Peter wants to know what is going on, and to do so he attacks his mother, Angela. He begins to do the Sylar trick, where he can cut the top off his mom’s head. Just before he can, Sylar gets up and knocks him out.
In steps Nathan and Tracy, ready to confront Angela. By this point, Angela has put Peter into a medical induced coma. Finally, after four episodes worth of confusion, we finally start to get some answers. Angela explains the significance of the formula to both Nathan and Tracy. In doing so, she mentions that both Nathan, as well as Tracy and her sisters were not born with powers. They were experimented on at one point and injected with the formula. With all of that explained, Angela then asks for help from the two. Nathan tells her to go to hell.
Later on, Angela has a prophetic dream. In this dream Nathan and Tracy are dead. Peter is standing above them with bloodied hands. Just when we are about to label him as the killer, he falls forward, with a pipe sticking out of the back of his head. A man in a business suit tells Angela that all of this is going to happen, and that she is completely powerless to prevent it. This well dressed man also has a ring, very similar to the one Angela wears, that may or may not give her the power to persuade people to do things for her.

HIRO, ANDO AND DAPHNE - So Daphne can see Linderman as well. He is the one that told her to steal the formula. Daphne has her suspicions about Linderman. She wonders why she can never sneak up on him, even though she has super speed. She swings a suitcase through him, proving that he is only in her mind.
Meanwhile, Hiro and Ando dig Adam from the grave Hiro placed him in, in last season's finale. Adam is reluctant to help the two Japanese guys, but realizes he has no choice. He brings the two of them to a bar, which has great potential to be something similar to the Cantina in “Star Wars” or one of the places Harry Potter goes to shop. It is a bar that people go to, to hire “specials” (a nickname for people with powers) for certain jobs. Adam starts a fight with the bartender, during which the bartender knocks out Hiro.
Adam escapes out the back door, only to get knocked out and captured by Knox. Knox and Daphne confront Hiro and Ando, inside the emptied bar. The two Japanese men proclaim that they are “true bad-assess”, and want to join Knox and Daphne’s team. Knox offers a catch. He takes Hiro’s sword, and tells him to kill Ando. Ando has no powers, and if Hiro kills him, he will prove that he is bad ass. Hiro stabs Ando in the chest, and his friend falls to the floor.

THE CLIFFHANGER- Daphne meets up with Linderman once again, at the site of the Pinehearst Company. When their meeting is over, Daphne zooms away. Linderman disappears, and we see that it was actually Parkman’s dad, The Nightmare Man, who has been putting the image of Linderman into people’s heads. The Nightmare Man walks into a hospital room, where there is a man lying on a bed with life support. The man in the bed is the apparent puller of the strings for this season, the main bad guy, and guess what? He is Nathan (and Sylar) and Peter’s father!

We are nearing the middle of this half of the season. This is the point where all the big reveals explain what has been going on, as opposed to adding more questions.
What I liked most about this episode was the intense violence in the opening scene with Peter and Sylar. I was watching this episode with my girlfriend, who has some sort of weird crush on Zachary Quinto. She didn't know that Sylar had Claire's ability to heal, so when Peter snapped Sylar's neck, she was both shocked and disturbed. That moment is one of three parts in tonight's episode that were quite creepy. The second was when Mohinder captured Maya. Basically, any scene with Mohinder now is something I would expect to see in the Jeff Goldblum version of "The Fly". Finally, the scene where Claire's biological mother is forced to kiss the Puppet Man was one to make your hair stand up on the back of your neck.
The personal danger that each of the characters gets placed causes far more suspense than the idea that the Heroes have to prevent a large scale disaster from occuring. We all know that they wont blow up New York City, or LA in the show. What we don't know is, which character is going to die. If they keep this up, until the mid-season finale, I will be very impressed.