Heroes (Series 3) Volume 3 Episode 2 - The Butterfly Effect

After last week’s interesting opening episode, Heroes: Villains is now starting to settle down and flesh out its plotlines.

It seems that Angela ‘Cherie Blair’ Petrelli’s is going to be an integral part of this current overall storyline. She dreams that Hiro, Claire, Peter, Noah and Matt are all killed, in very viscous ways. She turns round to see Adam Monroe, Nikki, Maury Parkman and another man, who we learn later is an inmate at the company’s facility, with rather sinister grins on their faces. Sylar, standing behind her, then puts his hand on her shoulder, in a very chilling manner. Does this mean he’s going to get a group of villains together? Perhaps they’ve just set up a book club and want her to join!

Meanwhile, we learn that ‘Nikki’ isn’t Nikki at all – she’s someone called ‘Tracy Strauss’. She would later go to see Nathan and persuade him to take the job, he had been earmarked for and he’s aghast when she turns up. She is stalked by a newspaper reporter, who also believes her to the Nikki we know. He threatens to publish details of her ‘past’, which she knows nothing about. Tracy gets angrier and when she grabs hold of the reporter – he turns to ice and smashes on the floor. Which leaves one question – what has happened to Nikki?

Fatty Matt is still alive and well – just! He’s lying in the desert and is helped by a local, who seems to know him. Thing is though – Matt is in a yet unspecified country in Africa! We learn that the local can paint the future and knew Matt was coming.

Mohinder is loving his new powers and just after he deflowers Maya, he finds out he has some kind of skin infection, something that looks like ‘orange scales’. You should have worn a condom before you ‘got it on’ with the bore, Mohinder!

Sylar is up to his usual tricks and this time Bob is the victim as Sylar breaks into ‘The Company’ and kills him. The reason behind this is that Stephen Tobolowsky, who plays Bob, had an horse riding accident and was only able to act in a chair. Apparently he will make a full recovery.

Back to the action as the corpse of Bob is discovered by his daughter, Elle, who then has a showdown with Sylar. This resulted in Elle letting out a massive electrical charge, knocking Sylar out but opening all the cells and letting out all the inmates – including Noah.

Noah then goes home but immediately explains to his family that he needs to go out and recapture all the escaped inmates. He turns down Claire’s request to accompany him and he brings in her birth mother, Meredith Gordon, to protect his family. Angela takes charge of the company and immediately sacks Elle.

The escaped inmates are a terrible bunch and we now know what has happened to ‘Present Peter’. The future version of Peter trapped his younger self in the body of an inmate, Jesse Murphy, in order to keep him safe inside the company’s prison. With all hell breaking loose and the escapees murdering people on the spot, things are going to get interesting!

Hiro and Ando are perhaps coming to beginning of the end of their friendship. Ando is annoyed at Hiro, after the pair teleport to Paris, in order to get the formula back. After a showdown with the ‘speedster’, we learn that she is working for someone and she escapes, cutting Ando in the process.

Sylar wakes up and is trapped in the company’s prison, accompanied by Angela, she has to spoil it all by muttering – I am your mother! I’m not sure if this is the right thing to do, it’s a plotline which has been done so many times in other television programs and having good family members, trying to save the world and evil family members, working against them, can only make the series end up in a terrible state, which most of the shows that use this device, do.

It should be interesting to see how the plots with Matt, Nikki/Tracy and Peter, pan out. The same can be said for Nathan, who we learn is the only one who can see Linderman. Does that mean he is dead after all?

I felt that the program is trying to do plenty of ambitious things too quickly. Even though I enjoyed this episode, that bit with Angela and Sylar really spoiled it for me! Although the series has settled down rather quickly, this will give the writers the opportunity to develop the characters more, something which I think the program doesn’t do as well as it needs to. And it’s nice to see them using characters and plotlines from the novels, some of which I need to get my sticky hands on!

7/10

Next Time: We learn what the term ‘Ice Queen’ really means, thanks to Tracy!