Heroes Reborn 1.12 “Company Woman”

Heroes Reborn! Hell yeah! About to hit the series finale! Woooo! Powers and drama and time travel and the apocalypse. Let’s do it!

Ah. Sorry. I read somewhere that if you’re depressed you should start each day with a smile and positive thoughts. I figured if I got really hyped about this episode I could power my way through a review. Will it work?

The narrative atmosphere of “Company Woman” mimics the previous in doing legwork to set up the finale. Some of that is the necessity of story, but as usual the happenings are hollow, so much so that I need to surf for recaps because my notes are like “Emily meets Ren” and “Tommy Nathan teleports angrily”. I guess we should start with the episode’s centerpiece, the, uuhh…undressing of Erica Kravid.

We finally get context on the main villain, though at this point it feels really insipid. Erica is a busy girl in this episode, trying to be a present-day Noah and all. After successfully convincing Tommy to start transporting folks to the refuge in the future she is ambushed by a scorned Matt Parkman. For some reason the mind controller needs a hostage to get his way and he threatens to kill pregnant Taylor Kravid if the big baddie doesn’t send his own family to the future. Erica succumbs to his wishes and it begins a series of flashbacks each more troublesome than the last.

A teenage Erica, who is kind of a babe, and her sickly father are visited by a doctor who is also an Evo with healing powers. He blackmails and rapes the girl in exchange for his services, which, due to the power of Hollywood magic inseminates her. After the birth of Taylor the doctor returns and tries to abduct the kid or something, I don’t know, he just says he’s taking her, but Erica, forgetting that there are child custody laws, stabs him. Things get more trite when a young version of Casper/The Penny Man comes to her door looking for the doctor. Their interaction is strange, especially when he gets all giddy after realizing Erica has killed the creepy doc. There’s an implication this is how Erica begins on the path of becoming CEO of Primatech/Renautas, but the connection is as faint as it contrived.

These scenes do help set up some admittedly emotional moments between Erica and Taylor, however their relationship has seemed outright doomed from the very start so not sure what was at stake. As far as justifying Erica as a villain the background would have worked better with more evidence. One evil person coming into your life doesn’t justify underhanded genocide. The whole theme of doing bad things for good reasons is not earned.

Alright, the good vibes from my opening pep talk is dwindling, time for a speedy overview.

The gang of Malina, Luke, Phoebe and Quentin get to Odessa but realize they can get into Gateway so they try to find a way to get Tommy’s attention by causing a stink at Union Wells High School, a major Volume 1 locale, which is functioning as a shelter against the incoming deadly sheets of flame. Part of Luke and Malina’s plan is setting some shit on fire and getting on the news so Tommy will see. This loops in the group of Farah, Carlos and Micah who see the footage and loop it on all media everywhere. Somewhere during the episode Phoebe the Shadow, angry as shit for no reason, escapes into the woods, which causes brother Quentin to flip sides again.

Joanne, she with the insatiable death hunger, arrives at the gymnasium to kill Malina but gets transformed into a pile of soot by her husband. I guess that constitutes closure. What a character arc! Before she turns to vapor she shoots at Malina but hits an invisible Farah instead.

Someone along the way Parkman crashes in a ditch and loses his time travel bracelets then laughs like a psycho about it… I can’t even.

De facto lead character Tommy literally pops in and out of the whole episode. At the beginning of the hour he’s hooked up a macabre machine that sends people forward in time, then he overhears that the real plan is to on save a select few and flips out. Erica tries to use his step-mom as leverage but he saves her and they go to the future and after a pep talk he decides to find his sister to fulfill the prophecy foretold by his grandmother. I should note that a huge pivot of this scene is that no one knows what the hell is going on.

Tommy is alerted to Malina’s location by her video just magically playing on his step-mom’s phone, teleports over the gym and then starts wandering around. Before he can find Malina, who is like four feet away, Otomo, Miko’s (the real one) father, transports him into the digital world of Evernow where he is rendered powerless.

Meanwhile Tommy’s girlfriend Emily and Katana Girl’s “love” Ren have a serendipitous meet-up at Gateway and try to find their crushes by sneaking around like teen novel detectives. It’d be cute if it wasn’t so forced and poorly executed.

Finally, let’s talk about the fireball that is coming for Earth. It’s called a Human Extinction Level Event, or H.E.L.E., which would have been nice to know when I thought characters were calling it the “healing” or “heely.” Also, at the time this thing hits the planet the magnetic poles will coincidentally switch. I guess if you’re on fire the worst thing that can happen is your navigation equipment going all screwy?

By the way, the news of the solar flares is public knowledge, and people are otherwise calm about it, going to shelters, calling into radio shows and whatnot.

Yep. That’s all I got. With the finale on Thursday, and the recent announcement there will be no follow-up season, I’m absolutely sure next time I’ll have plenty to say about this odd duck of a show. May peace find you if you’ve stuck through this gauntlet.