Quick Thoughts on "Angels and Monsters"

This episode further perpetuates a running theme that I have been following over the past year, Heroes characters walk a think gray line. The episode starts out with a monologue by Nathan who is trying to figure out if he is a hero or a villain. Much like everyone else, it isn't so black and white. Former heroes like Peter, Mohinder, and Hiro are on the wrong side of good and evil (although I'm not buying the Hiro thing quite yet. I'm sure we will discover not everything is as it seems when he stabs Ando) while the tradional villians of Angela and Sylar start lining up on the other side. HRG continues to walk the gray line, never clearly good or bad.

Under it all is a familiar theme. Things are being controlled by an unknown force. Like I stated in my last post, Arthur Petrelli is back. One thing is clear, people fear him. Maury Parkman fears him as does his wife, Angela. So is power, or his evil, must be truly something. More on that later. Also nice to see that my theory about Linderman being an illusion created by Maury Parkman was accurate. I knew that they wouldn't bring Linderman back to life, so the only logical conclusion was that he wasn't real.

Slowly but surely, we see the future as Parkman envisioned it and as Future Peter lived to be coming true. For some reason, Arthur Petrelli seems bent on giving powers to everyone. While I'm sure that future will never come to pass, the events leading up to it that would certainly be the basis for which this season's episodes will be based.

And can I say, I'm really think this puppet master character has some potential?

Heroes - Never Black and White

One of the things I really love about the characters in Heroes is that things are rarely, if ever, black and white. In most things, you clearly know who is good or evil. Superman is good. Lex Luthor is bad. The bad guy is easy to identify.

Not so in Heroes. Take any of the characters, there are many many levels to each of them. The most obvious character to demonstrate this is Jessica/Niki. The dual personality is constantly fighting between good and evil. But not all characters are so obvious. Even the the most evil character, Sylar, has shown his humanity in The Hard Part. If events had only transpired in a slightly different way, we may be talking about Sylar the hero, rather than Sylar the bad-ass murderer.

I thought about this even as I wrote that Takezo Kensei is a bad guy. In reality, I know he isn't truly evil. I know that him knocking out Hiro could very well be interpreted in many different ways. I thought about it as I wrote about Matt and Maury Parkman. Clearly Matt struggles with the demons that he has inherited from his father. Demons that were on display when we see Dark Matt Parkman in the future. The Matt we know is the epitome of courageousness and heroism, but it only took a few critical events to turn him to the lackey of Sylar and against his own kind.