Not the Heroes I was expecting, but OK...

Quick update on my life: The gas is back on, I love hot water, and everything else is going swimmingly. Now, on with more pressing matters...


NOTE: Do not read the rest of this post unless you have seen the season premiere of Heroes. Spoilers ahead.

Okay, just so I have this straight...

Future Peter shot Nathan, trapped Present Peter in some fat guy, marooned Parkman in the Sahara, and hung around to see things go completely apeshit. Nathan believes he's now an angel, in a character arc that could get really annoying really fast. Parkman thinks he can communicate with a turtle, but it turns out to be an African version of Isaac from season one.

Mohinder discovers the source of the mutant powers in the adrenal gland, makes one syringe of instant hero juice, and has a crisis of conscience. He must choose between testing the formula on himself, or dumping one more syringe in the East River (never mind the fact that the needle could've hit a fish and we would've had a giant, flying, psychic, super-strong, teleporting, rapid-healing mackerel on our hands). So, he injects the formula into his own arm, and now he's Jeff Goldblum from The Fly...drinking sugary drinks by the gallon, climbing walls and setting a world record for fastest seduction/stripping of a fully clothed female character in network television history.

Nikki/Jessica is now Icewoman and has a new personality. No word yet on what happened to her son, who was last seen in New Orleans watching a building burn with her inside it.

Hiro is now a multimillionaire with one job to do: to protect half of a complex formula, which is promptly stolen by a woman whose mixture of unbelievably cute and ethically questionable leads me to wonder if I might have dated her in the past.

Sylar can now heal, having stolen (or co-opted) the power from Claire, in a creepy scene where she's wide awake with her skull cap off. She asks him if he's gonna eat her brain, and his disgusted response instantly kills at least half of the internet chatter about his character. Apparently his method of stealing powers is about as complex as removing a wrenched ankle in a game of Operation. He puts her skull cap back in place and leaves with a file folder containing profiles of the prisoners of "Level 5"

Level 5 is where they put the worst of the worst, and also Noah Bennett because apparently Levels 1-4 didn't have a bed open. So, Sylar strolls right in like it's the Sharper Image of superpowers, kills and steals Bob's midas touch...I'm guessing because his master plan for ruling the world somehow involves upsetting the gold standard.

And Sylar's attempt to crack open Elle's skull resulted in the metaphysical equivalent of plugging an American appliance in a European outlet. This shorted the whole grid and the Level 5 prisoners escaped, including, but not limited to the firestarter, creepy black guy whose powers are supposed to be threatening for some reason, fat guy/Present Peter, and The German...which why is it always that the evil magnetic guy in these stories has to be German? What the fuck did we Germans ever do...oh, nevermind.

Oh, and somehow Nathan's wounds were healed by a figment of his imagination, and Mama Patrelli is Sylar's mother as well.

Which begs the question: Did the writing staff mainline speedballs for a solid week, watching every episode of Lost before they mapped out this season? Let's just really screw with people's ideas of these well-established characters and spend the rest of the season trying to explain it.

In the end, I'll just say that I'm not disappointed, just a little confused. They needed to take this shit in a different direction. Hell, Heroes may be the one show that benefited from the writer's strike. It forced the producers to pull the car into a motel for the night, get rested up and hit the road refreshed in the morning. The only problem is they had a quintuple espresso before getting back behind the wheel, and claim they know a shortcut through the cornfield. There's no way out of it. I'm along for the ride and all I can do is buckle up and pray they find paved road soon.