Heroes, Season 4 – Episode 18: The Wall

Recap time, kiddies!

We start off with Sylar doing what he used to do best; fixing watches.  Ironic, since it becomes clear upon meeting Peter inside his lonely dream world that time is incredibly relative here.  Three hours in the real world also feels like three years in the dream world.

Peter vows to free Sylar from the mental prison, though he initially does it more out of duty to his vision of Emma rather than a moral purpose.  When he can’t liberate them from the solitude of the city, he starts to despair.  A month goes by with no further hope of ever returning.  Peter starts to suspect Sylar doesn’t actually want to leave, a suspicion Sylar confirms.

As soon as Sylar agrees to help Peter free them both, a giant brick wall appears, surrounding the outskirts of Faux York.  Peter notes that the bricks resemble that which trap Sylar inside of Parkman’s basement, so hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work he goes.  Peter Petrelli turns into Peter Gabriel, trusty sledgehammer in hand, battering endlessly away against a wall that just won’t budge.

The conceit of the time lapse soon becomes apparent.  Heroes needed to get to a place in which two things could logically happen before the end of the volume.  First, Peter Petrelli had to achieve closure over his brother’s death.  Still reeling from it, he’d moved on numbly through life with little to no purpose.  Second, the show had to earn any semblance of Sylar’s redemption through a penance that lasted literally years.

Putting the two of them in a situation to spend approximately a decade getting to their points while only using up 12 hours of plot time isn’t the cleanest way to do it, but I do give props to the show for at least realizing that the two men couldn’t realistically reach these emotional points through a measly conversation.

Personally, I’m intrigued to see where Sylar goes now.  It could be terrible, but at least it will be different.  And if he chooses to forge a path of righteousness, using Hiro as his Obi-Wan would be incredibly amusing and entertaining to watch.  Which means, of course, that it will never happen.  Oh well, moving on.

Sure, we’d seen Noah as a Company Man, in Season 1, but did we ever learn how he joined The Company?  That’s what tonight’s 2nd plotline focused upon, as Samuel sought to sever her from Noah once and for all.  Luckily, smart Claire showed up this weekend, rendering Samuel’s mind games null and void.  But in the interim, Heroes showed Noah’s past in great detail.

It turns out that Noah used to be a used car salesman with a heart of gold and a wife named Kate.  He’s too gosh-darned nice to sell an overpriced car to a young couple, instead giving them info on the down low about a comparable car down the street at another dealership.  When he learns his wife is pregnant, he’s thrilled, even though their money situation isn’t the best.

One night, their usual Chinese deliveryman is replaced by a special, who uses telekinesis on both of them in order to rob them.  He ends up sending Kate through their glass coffee table, a leg of which protrudes through her belly.  This incident turns Noah into HRG, a man that patiently constructs a detailed map over the course of a year to find the man that murdered his wife.  He eventually locates someone with special powers near the one he’s looking for, at which point the intolerance metaphor starts going into overdrive in tonight’s episode. Noah thinks that all people with special powers know each other.  He assumes they are all evil.  He kills the one in self-defense, though to be fair and balanced, Noah had conducted the entire conversation up to that point with a gun pointed in the that person’s face.

After that murder, Noah goes downhill.  He’s still a used car salesman, but now he’s an evil car salesman.  He’s wearing dark clothes and pressing young couples to buy his overpriced models.  The high-pressure tactics amuse a familiar face: Thompson, the Company man played by Eric Roberts.  Thompson is impressed with Noah’s tracking and killing of the special, and wants to hire him to “sell paper” rather than used cars.

Flash forward a bit and we find Bennet and Thompson having lunch.  Turns out that while working with Claude, a number of individuals with powers the duo have tracked, managed to turn up “accidentally” dead.  Thompson figures that Noah still bears a grudge over Kate’s death (gee, ya think?) and all but orders him to marry their waitress in order to provide both offspring and order into his life.

The last bit truly sends Claire, who has been watching all these visions via a funhouse mirror, over the edge.  She realizes that The Company essentially pimped her dad out.  Noah insists that he did love Sandra, and that is why he married her.  But since that marriage dissolved last season, wouldn’t it have been a bolder choice to show the roots of the deception inherent in their marriage via this flashback?  Noah’s relationship to Claire, in terms of importance as well as devotion, has always superseded his relationship to Sandra.  To use this episode to demonstrate the inherent crack in that foundation would have been nice, but it also would have severed Noah’s relationship with Claire.  Couldn’t have that.

End of episode.