Heroes Reborn 1.08 “June 13th, Part 2”

The unbelievable has happened: The Heroes franchise has managed to string together two solid episodes.

I’m not trying to be facetious but this series has struggled with consistency from inception. Scene to scene, episode to episode, volume to volume it’s been an absolute crapshoot in terms of quality. Just when a character or plotline appears sound and lucid a magical logic fallacy will creep up and smack you in the face for ever thinking things were on an uptick. Heroes has earned the viewer’s distrust, but if it can maintain the quality of the last two episodes it could very well achieve unlikely redemption.

This week’s episode picks up where the last left off. Erica Kravid is addressing the press regarding the Unity attack and quickly shifts the onus of blame onto Mohinder Suresh and Evo terrorists. Meanwhile, the 2015 edition of HRG decides to pull a temporal faux pas by killing Erica in the past before she can commit future atrocities. Much to the detriment of this plan the 2014 HRG stops his future self just as the trigger is pulled which causes a bullet to go through Kravid’s calf. In a circumstance of dooming serendipity Quentin Frady, for some reason looking for his sister at the hospital, saves Kravid by pulling her away from the gunfire and hooking her up with medical treatment under the promise she’ll let him see his sis, Pheobe. This almost mundane development sets up the semi-brilliant twist that closes the episode.

In a now what can be considered a classic time-travel trope the two versions of Noah Bennett lay down some expositional dialogue and try to combine and focus their efforts. HRG-2014 agrees to have Casper the Penny Man mindwipe him and Molly Walker attempts to find Hiro. Strangely, she can detect his power but not his body.

The discrepancy is quickly explained when we re-visit Hiro and Angela Petrelli. With Claire’s twin babies in their arms the two arrive in Odessa in 1999 and quickly discover themselves stranded. Hiro immediately finds he’s been completely sapped of his powers and Angela postulates the boy, Nathan aka Tommy Clarke, possesses the Petrelli trait of usurper (a similar ability held by Peter and Angela’s husband, the villain of Volume 3). Baby Nathan’s penchant to absorb powers caused Claire’s death in childbirth and has stranded his guardians in the 90’s. Thus, Angela suggests she and Hiro split up as Nathan could steal his sister’s power and fuck everything up.

Back in 2014 things get even more ornate. Noah-2015 tracks down Hiro, who is now sporting spots of gray in his hair. This is the Hiro we just saw in 1999 aged fourteen years and he’s been raising young Nathan and is his step-dad! The Evo Formally Known As Tommy shows his face, he’s completely on board with saving the world with the time-travel powers he obtained from Hiro.

In the midst of these series-altering scenes we reconvene with Noah-2014 who has been captured by Harris in order to gleam more information about the fate of Claire. The cloner calls in the big guns, Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg), who has apparently abandoned his crippling morality and is willfully working for Kravid and Renautas. At first this seems really off about Parkman, he was often an affable guy troubled by the immense scope of his powers, but the iffy morality of telepathic protagonists was a character hurdle that the former writers could never leap. An evil Parkman makes sense in a lot of ways, but really he’s little more than a cameo here.

The mind reader extracts information from HRG regarding Claire’s status (dead) and the cause (childbirth) but just as he’s about to learn the locale Penny Man erases Noah’s memory and then conks Harris over the head with a briefcase full of coins (that thing has to be sooo heavy). Parkman lets them go, and Penny Man erases the rest of Noah-2014’s relevant memories and places him out in the chaos of the bomb-out Unity venue which is where we found him in the first episode of the season.

Meanwhile, in the fracas of time-hopping and memory erasure some of the side characters get into the mix too.

Luke and Joanne Collins got a lot of screen time last week but I wouldn’t say too much happened. The audience basically was introduced to their son, Dennis, who had a rare disease that required him to avoid direct sunlight (a play on his father’s power which is activated by the same source). The scenes with the Collins follow up on this: they find their son’s corpse amongst the recovered bodies and when an Evo comes to their motel room to thank Luke for saving his life a kerfuffle results in Joanne gleefully shoving a pair of medical scissors into his back. To this point, particularly in the tethers developed in this episode, Luke and Joanne are the wild cards for the back half of the season. The focus has primarily been on the husband but I believe the writers are trying to firmly establish Joanne as a psychopath. I’m hoping that pays off.

Completely MIA from Part 1 was Carlos, the Cali-based hero El Vengador. We gain some context on his military service and the biggest and only real notable event from the scenes is the surprise that Carlos and Farah Nazan, Malina’s mentor killed by Pheobe a few episodes ago, served together in the same unit and were likely lovers. That’s a pretty neat connection. Their scenes involve a government tribunal into a mission gone array. I didn’t really understand the specifics but it seems that Farah used her invisibility powers kill some unsavory types and the ensuing cover-up contorted the facts so that Carlos came out looking like a heroic beast. All well and good but I thought women didn’t participate in combat missions (yet)?

The final stray thread unveils Miko’s origin story. Not much here is a surprise. Her “father” Otomo realizes that Kravid is up to no good when she names Hiro (his boss) as an accomplice of Suresh. As he has trapped Hiro (of 2014) inside Evernow he realizes he must undo this and extracts Katana Girl from the game. In a few hours he apparently teaches her all she needs to know in regard to being a flesh creature while lying to her about her real identity. Miko is an interesting character, in theory, but it almost feels like she was grafted onto Heroes Reborn from a failed spec script or something. I have no idea what her role could be as we approach the final stretch of ‘sodes.

Alright! Let’s get back to Noah-2015 to close things out.

HRG and Nathan teleport to meet with a comically gray-haired Angela Petrelli who also has been stranded in Odessa since 1999. She’s looking over Malina who wanders into background doing some weird shit with bees, again implying she has some sort of control over life or nature. Angela is both revelatory and coy about the purpose of the twins: they’ll save the world in Hill Valley Odessa under a clock tower. Let me state how gung-ho little Nathan is about saving the world. Dude is all about it!

They return to the house of Old Man Hiro but before things get too heartfelt a throng of Harrises (Harrisi?) descend on the house. Hiro gives his surrogate son the 9th Wonder comic book that first guided him way back when then Nathan teleports grandpa HRG back to 2015 and Penny Man and his mom Anne from the Harris clan. Hiro brandishes a pair of blades and appears to go out in a blaze of glory (sleep well, sweet prince). Elsewhere, Nathan starts to flip out for some reason and Penny Man erases most of his memory, turning him into full-on Tommy. Damn, I already miss Nathan.

Noah-2015 returns to the present-day Renautas facility with a thud. Immediately, Quentin Frady rolls up on him asking a bunch of questions and acting frantic. Since he last saw him bleeding out right before his time travel trip HRG’s predictably happy. He tells his sidekick all about the 4-dinemisoon smashing hoopla and the final plan to take down Erica Kravid. The episode ends with a shock: Quentin quickly relays this information to Erica.

In a series of short scenes dispersed through the episode, Quentin was reunited with his sister through an appreciative Erica Kravid. Subtly, the two built a rapport, and in an unintended consequence of Noah-2015 trying to kill Kravid on June 13th the Q-Man has switched sides. That’s a pretty original way to use time-travel, and that compliment has been notoriously hard to give in the past decade or so.

That final story beat put a big bright bow on another good episode. This turnabout in quality is impressive, though not wholly spectacular. There’s still a lot of the trademark hokiness, but at this point it’s almost charming. I’m a cynic to the core but I’ve really enjoy the ingenuity of particular elements like the time travel plotting and the trio of female antagonists (Erica, Phoebe the Shadow and Joanne).

Still, I’m not totally absolving Heroes Reborn. The torpid episodes from earlier in the season could easily return before next month’s finale. It’s in a good place right now, but overall still a pretty average show.