Last night's epidose, "An Invisible Thread," was aptly named. There was indeed an invisible thread bringing together all the plot lines in this episode, as well as invisible motivations for all the characters and an invisible justification for the climactic final scene when Sylar is "defeated" but only invisibly.

Though there were some cool moments in this episode - pretty much any scene with HRG comes to mind - mostly it was disappointingly simple for Hiro and Ando to take down mutant holding facility Building 26. And it was far too easy for the Petrelli Bros to take down Sylar. Meanwhile Suresh's voiceovers were even more treacly and vapid than ever before, which I guess makes sense in a season finale, where you always want to do everything but amped up to 11. There is literally a voiceover moment at the end where Suresh says, "Without these, can I be me? Can you be you?" And the referent for the "these" is completely lost, so you're just left feeling like somebody is having a lame LSD trip and has invited your sober ass along to babysit them while they talk about tasting colors and being you.

So we began last night's episode with pretty much the same damn pickle we've had at the beginning of every episode. The Hunter's Building 26 shock troops are rounding up the mutants for like the 400 millionth time, Nathan can't reach President Worf to stop him, and Sylar is a roving evil force who kills people for reasons that vacillate between working for The Hunter and dealing with PTSD from his sad wittle childhood.

Seriously, at this point I really want to know: What the fuck is Sylar's deal? In the first season he was a watch geek who wants to be something special and hates his whiny mom. So he discovers his powers, kills his mom, and starts eating mutants while wearing indie rock t-shirts. His quest is to become "special," and he's hunting Suresh because Suresh has a list of all the mutants that Sylar wants to eat. OK, makes sense: He's your basic serial killer whose appetite is for mutants. And he has to be stopped before he can steal Claire's superpower of undeath.

As far as I'm concerned, the Sylar plot should have ended there. Once the serial killer is captured, you can turn him to good or give him a new set of creepy desires or something. But don't just let him remain a glorified serial killer. But that's exactly what happened. In season two, Sylar has hooked up with super-death dealer Maya and his motivations get even more murky. Mostly he just wants to kill everybody again. Seriously, give the guy a cause celebre, and let him do something other than grinning creepily as he makes hand motions.

And then came the light at the end of the Sylar tunnel in season 3, or so we all thought. First of all, he gets involved with The Company and Mama Petrelli becomes his new fixation. He hooks up with electrical Elle, and suddenly turns back into a good nerdy guy. This was exactly the kind of thing the show needed to do with him. Turn him into something else, give him more depth, make him fascinating again. I think some of the best Heroes episodes since season 1 were during the Sylar-goes-good arc, when he's bonding with Elle and goes on to secretly help the Petrelli Bros by pretending to help Papa Petrelli. The guy had resolved his issues, figured out that he didn't want to give into his desire to eat brains, and had even learned how to absorb people's powers without killing them.

Then came season 3, book two (AKA post-writers strike). And so began the long, dark path of "what the hell." Instead of continuing with Sylar along his new trajectory, giving him depth by having him struggle with his dark side, he went right back to being the same boring, aimless serial killer guy from season 2. He could have sided with the mutants in the War Against The Evil Government, and been a truly interesting character. Instead, he becomes the same rogue who lives only to eat mutant brains and try to work out his mommy and daddy and step mommy and step daddy issues. Who the hell cares that he had a nasty childhood? So did Elle! So did the Petrelli Bros! And their mother! So did practically everybody on this damn show! You can't tell me that it's character development when we learn more about Sylar's sad childhood being sold by his psycho, mother-murdering dad to a nice suburban couple. Hello!!! We already knew his parents were psycho!!!

So here we are, as season 3, book 2 concludes, with an extremely boring, uncomplicated bad guy who has now suddenly grown a new motive. He wants to be president. Why? No reason. Just because. OK, great - so he's a serial killer who gained the power to shape-shift and now he's going to be president in order to - what? Kill more mutants? Does he have a grand scheme? Does he have an army of minions? Any sort of mastermindy moment? No, no, no.

Maybe that's why, in the end, it's so easy for the Petrelli Bros to take Sylar down. There is literally a scene where they run into Nathan's office, slam the door, and we hear "biff bang boom!" and see some light shoot out from under the door, and then it's over. Sure Nathan is dead, but Peter has stolen Sylar's power of shape shifting, and is able to take Sylar down by pretending to be President Worf. (Oh Michael Dorn, how I wish you'd actually been in this season - it would have brought a touch of class to this mess.) When Sylar-as-Nathan shakes Worf's hand, Peter-as-Worf stabs him in the neck with a tranq. So even though Sylar's been able to use his shape-shiftiness to MOVE THE SPOT IN HIS BRAIN that is his one vulnerability (hence Hunter being unable to kill him with a knife to the head), he can't I dunno move the tranq out of his blood?

Anyway, with Nathan dead, the Petrellis, HRG, and Parkman come up with the STUPIDEST PLAN EVER. One that will reinstate Sylar as the boring bad guy yet again next season (and WHY is there a next season?). They decide - get this - that the most LOGICAL thing to do is to use Parkman's brainwashing powers to turn Sylar into Nathan permanently. That way, they have access to political power via Nathan, and they can cover up the fact that a major politician was killed by a mutant and avoid further crackdowns. Plus, as Mama P argues totally incoherently, she wants her son back. But even if Sylar absorbs Nathan's memories, he won't be her son! He'll be a brainwashed serial killer with boring motivations playing her son really badly! Plus, when did Parkman's powers become so strong that he could literally brainwash one person into being another person? Why didn't he just do this before? Couldn't he have brainwashed the Hunter into being Holly Hobby or something?

So as you can see from this clip, it was super easy to turn Sylar into Nathan. And there was so little money in the effects budget that we didn't have to see yet another one of those awful CGI bumpy-face morphs. Sylar just turns over, and poof he's Nathan! He even hugs his mom at a bonfire where all the mutants burn Sylar's fake body. So only HRG, Parkman, and Mama P know about the Nathan/Sylar merger. And as Nathan hugs mom, she and HRG plan with him a way to restart The Company together to protect mutantkind. WHAT? Are you serious? How could these seasoned mutant-wranglers ever think this would work? Did it work to wipe Sylar's brain in South America? Did it work to make him thing Mama P was his real mommy? More importantly: Do we even care at this point now that our credulity has been stretched so thin that you could fold it over ten times and make a croissant out of it?

I'll tell you one thing we really don't care about: Hiro and Ando taking down Building 26 by freezing time, putting all the agents in the drug-induced coma room, and shooting Hunter full of tranqs. So all the mutants get away, and Hiro is getting brain explodey when he stops time. Boo hoo.

The episode ends with the beginning of Volume Whatever, called Redemption. As you might guess, Nathan/Sylar is already having glitches, staring moodily at clocks and getting hungry for brains and useless plot developments. Meanwhile (yay!) Tracy is back and now she has the power to turn into water and drown people. She's slowly picking off all the former Building 26 guys.

What will happen in the thrilling season 4, book 200 billion? Wait, let me guess: Sylar will become a brain-eating serial killer again, whose motivations have something to do with wanting power for no reason and being obsessed with flashbacks that we've already seen! There will be a Nathan/Sylar struggle for control of the Nathan/Sylar entity! Hiro will have to deal with his headaches! Ando will have a baby! Claire will start shaving her head and get married and do a reality show about having mutant babies who have the special powers of turning into fishnet stockings and pasties and gluing themselves to Claire's naked body!

And of course, Suresh will keep voiceovering, "Can I be me? Can you be you? I'm OK - you're OK!"

People, tell me. Why are we watching this show? I just don't think that watching Sylar raise his eyebrow Spock-style is going to do it for me anymore. He's going to have to be a watchable character too. And he most certainly was not in "I Am Sylar," an episode all about our nerdy superpowered mental case's so-called identity crisis. And by the way, in case you were wondering, Sylar's identity crisis seems mainly to involve pulling out his own molars, turning into his whiny mom (YES THEY GO THERE), and cutting himself like a teenage girl who is obsessed with goth lolitas.

Check out that goddamn Spock eyebrow. Is that enough to carry an episode? No, dear watchers, I don't think so. But I slogged through this horrifying mess anyway, to bring you news of Sylar's tender inner feelings.

So things start tweaky when Sylar wakes up but he's in the body of Generic Agent Guy (GAG). Oops! He changed into GAG while he was sleeping and grew an extra tooth! So he switches back, rips out the tooth, and broods. Later he tells the Hunter, "I'm feeling broody because I don't know who I am." The Hunter says, "Well when you are in a bad situation killing and raping and brutalizing, you can remember who you are by focusing on something that reminds you of yourself."

And then, I shit you not, he takes out a pocket watch and says it was the thing that keeps him whole. OK, did the writers not watch Pulp Fiction and the watch scene? Seriously, I thought the Hunter was actually going to say he'd stored the watch in his ass, but no instead he just handed it to Sylar who didn't do anything assy with it either - just listened to it and said some creepy things about how many seconds fast it was. "Whoa how did you get the power to know about watches?" asks Hunter. "It's my only true power," Sylar says, and broods.

Then he goes to the park, and broods. At some broody point, he broodingly carves the words "I am Sylar" into his arm. Then he broods.

Next he absorbs some guy's porcelain figurine-shattering power (yes, that is really his power) and paints the words I AM SYLAR on the wall in blood. Turns out, by the way, that Sylar's power comes from "absorbing other people's DNA." At least, that's what he tells Rebel. But I get ahead of myself.

Next up, Sylar's supposed to help catch Rebel. Yay, it's Rebel, the only decent character left on this show! But Rebel is so nice and cool that Sylar actually saves him by pretending to be Rebel, getting shot, and then running away and bringing Rebel home with him. Where Rebel discovers that Sylar is turning into his own mom and having conversations with her Psycho-style. Repeat with me kids, one of the cardinal rules of bad show/movie-making: DO NOT REFERENCE A GOOD MOVIE INSIDE YOUR STUPID LAMEASS WHY DOES IT EVEN EXIST AND GET RENEWED WHEN SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES IS ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK FUCKIN SHOW. Jeezus.

OK I need to calm down. Let's check in with Matt and the Cutsey Asian Stereotype Twins, shall we? So now Matt has baby Matt, whom he proclaims a "game changer" that makes him suddenly in love with his ex again even though like three episodes ago he was about to rip the universe apart after his "true love" Speedy Daphne was killed. He brings Baby Matt back to Ex Lady, and tries to convince her they are destined to be together. Which made me really wish Daphne had resurrection powers so she could come back and slap him and sing an Alanis Morissette song.

So screw Matt, who is going off with Ex to her cabin or something to try to make sweet love to her. Meanwhile, Ando is having YET ANOTHER fight with Hiro over being his equal, and making a lot of groanworthy references to Batman and Superman. Seriously, DON'T REFERENCE GOOD COMICS INSIDE . . . oh why do I bother? So Hiro decides to make Ando his equal by turning Ando into bait for Hunter's shock troops. I'm still not really sure why. I guess he wants to find Hunter's secret hideout or something? It made no sense, especially when he stopped time and dressed up as a shock troop but wore his glasses and was obviously a plant.

Then Hiro and Ando had to stop time again, and run away towards the secret shock troop facility to "shut it all down" as equals. And Ando's name is going to be Crimson Splash or something.

Back to Sylar, who is still arguing with his mom about whether he can be good and become president. Between his dead mom cross-dressing and Rebel's advice, he's decided that his next course of action will be to impersonate Nathan and put a stop to mutant persecution. But Hunter tries to stop him with the old knife in the skull trick! Aaaand it turns out that knife in the skull doesn't actually kill Sylar after all. He gets up, gives Hunter the old mega-menacing look, and now Hunter is in seriously deep shit.

And of course Nathan is hightailing it to Washington to make everything right and confront broody Sylar. Will butch Nathan beat broody Sylar? Will broody Peter wind up helping butch Nathan beat broody Sylar? How many characters can brood before Claire finally also has to brood?

Suresh, back at the ranch, has been captured for what? the fifth time? by the shock troops. And Hiro has gotten broody too, because every time he stops time his brain bleeds. In fact, he's in dire deadly straits after his most recent time stoppages.

I thought Angela's guilt-mongering was bad, but this new wave of brooding and Sylar psychosis takes Heroes into new depths of dickwadery.

"1961" focused entirely on one group of characters in one place - the extended Petrelli family, including HRG and Suresh, at Coyote Sands. That point-of-view stability gave us a chance to dig into some serious plot development, as well as digging into mass graves stocked with dead bodies back in 1961.

It turns out that the conspiracy-of-mutants Company began almost 50 years ago at mysterious Coyote Sands, with a fateful meeting between teenager Angela, as well as cuteypants Charles Deveaux (the father of Peter's now-dead girlfriend from season 1), emo snot Charles Linderman (who grows up to star in A Clockwork Orange), and nerdotron Bobby Bishop (later to be Elle's dad). I truly love this scene where the four of them escape the camp for one night and go out for fries and a little small town racism. I would pay good money to watch a 1961 spinoff of Heroes where Angela and Deveaux fall in love and go on a cross-country spree where they mind-control everybody into letting them do the interracial tango. Eventually they'll just brainwash all racism away and the plot of the show will converge with the plot of Hairspray (the original, you dumbasses, not that awful remake with John Travolta) and one of the mutants will bring Divine back from the dead and television will be awesome again.

Ahem.

Anyway, in reality, Angela wants to sift through the dusty ruins of Coyote Sands, where scientists (including Suresh's smokin' hot dad) experimented on "special kids." So that's why Angela has gone there, gathering together sons Peter and Nathan, granddaughter Claire, adoptive papa HRG, and mad scientist sidekick Suresh.

Oh, and also? She has had an apocalyptic dream about her sister Alice being alive. Wait, what? There is a sister Alice? Oh yes, as we discover in more flashbacks (helpfully filmed in the black and white that permeated all of reality before 1970). She was pretty whiny and annoying, always calling Angela "banana," but she had weather-controlling Storm-esque powers. Honestly, are there any X-Men powers that Heroes hasn't plundered yet?

For reasons that are never explained, Banana and Alice's parents have brought them to Coyote Sands so that Suresh can stick giant needles in them. Also, there are a ton of other mutant kids there and somehow Angela gets picked by Deveux, Linderman, and Bishop to join their boy band. While they're out dancing and brainwashing white people into tolerating them, Suresh Sr. tries to experiment on Alice with a giant needle. She freaks out and brings a giant storm that shoots lightning into bad guys, who then start shooting all the good guys, and then we have to assume that everybody dies except Suresh and Alice (who hides under a building). Unfortunately, Angela lied to Alice right before she left, telling her that she'd had a prophetic dream that as long as Alice stayed at Coyote Sands she'd be safe.

And stay she did, for decades, in some kind of cement bunker that is inexplicably full of newspapers. Apparently she's been stealing canned food to live on and reading kids books all those years, but has somehow miraculously morphed into a sexy aging hippie with beautiful curly hair and lots of scarves. So she's feral, but she's an aging hippie mama? So confusing.

Anyway, Angela finally finds Alice and they have a tearful reunion full of dry-mouthed apologies (Angela) and freaky-eyed raving (Alice). But when Angela admits she lied to Alice all those years ago, Alice flies into another lightning rage, nearly kills Suresh, and disappears. So no more Alice. And then Suresh decides to stay at Coyote Sands when the rest of Banana's Clan leave because he wants to live in broken down shacks and watch old movies of his dad torturing people with big needles in 1961.

The best parts of this episode were the flashbacks, because we see how the early members of the Company - which later became evil - came together out of a desire to protect each other. Also, we see that Angela could have gotten together with somebody way cuter than Papa Petrelli.

What else happened? There was an atrocious and thoroughly worthless scene where Claire tells her two daddies that she wishes she wanted to be normal, but that she likes digging up graves or something. And then they both tell her that she's just a teenager and that's normal. Also, Banana tells her that she's really strong and if only Banana had been as strong as Claire then nothing bad would have happened. Seriously, why is everybody licking Claire's butt? Has she done anything fabulous lately?

Speaking of butt-licking, there was also a boring scene where Nathan tells Peter they have to forgive each other and Peter says something completely incomprehensible about how Nathan stole his tickets to some obscure sporting event in 1985. Just in case you are wondering, Peter and Nathan are TOTALLY MANLY because they like sports. Unfortunately we are totally bored because we came to watch mutant action not to hear about golf or hockey or lawn bowling whatever the hell they were talking about. Anyway, for some reason Peter eventually forgives Nathan because they are "family, not a company." And apparently the difference between families and companies is that there is room for forgiveness in families. OK, fine. I like the whole Sopranos feeling associated with that kind of talk, and there is a very Sopranos family dinner scene at the end of the episode.

Banana's Clan is eating at the Coyote Sands Cafe where back in 1961 Deveaux brainwashed the mean white dude. But now her family is all together and everything is french fries and Peter is forgiving Nathan for the hockey thing and the annoying Alice is banished again and they're all talking about how they're going to go back home and be better people. Nathan is reassuring everybody that he'll "clean things up" in Washington and talk to the president (which - why couldn't he do that BEFORE?!). But then they look up at the TV, and there is Nathan, the way he looked pre-retro parka and butch haircut. And he's talking about "big changes."

Yes, it's SYLAR! Pretending to be Nathan! I know you didn't see that one coming. The truly weird part is that Angela gives this creepy little smile when she sees it. Is this part of her ongoing creepy plans? Or is it just that her face is so tight and dry that every expression looks like a creepy smile?

Tune in next week, when an absence of Dancing With Deveaux will make everything suckier.

"Turn and Face the Strange" might well have been one of the best episodes this season if it hadn't been for the festering annoyance that is the Hiro and Ando subplot. I keep thinking the show is going to abandon its quest to turn these guys into some kind of terrifying embodiment of the most cheesy, cutsey part of Zelda characters - but somehow things always just get worse. As they try to reunite Baby Matt Parkman with his dad - who is busy engaging in mind controlly revenge (more on that in a second) - Hiro and Ando discover that "Stop and Go Baby" will shut down their car if he's crying. Cue the "let's make funny faces" montage to keep Stop and Go happy. ARGH! It hurts. Really, it does.

Thankfully the horror of the Bad Cute is stopped in its tracks by the horror of Changeling Sylar. He's turning into everybody, including Hunter Danko, just to manipulate the hell out of the world around him and do his psycho Spock eyebrow. I love this scene in the clip above, where Sylar, in Danko's skin, is basically cruising Danko in the men's room. It's over-the-top in a way that works, and underscores the manic glee that Sylar brings to his world domination schemes.

Unfortunately there is no Danko-on-Danko man love, nor Sylar-on-Danko, because it turns out that for some stinky reason Danko is doing the hetero tango with a hot Russian ex-hooker. We find this out in a really intriguing subplot where Matt decides to get revenge on Danko by hunting down and killing the person who is most important to him. As he explains in a freakish tirade to Suresh, he wants to make Danko feel what Matt felt when he lost girlfriend Speedy Daphne.

Suresh, for his part, mutters about how Matt is "following a destructive path" or something and then hightails it to India. Let's not even get into how many flip-flops his character and Matt's have gone through: friends, co-parents to the still-missing Molly, enemies, friends, evil, good, etc. We can set that aside because Matt's revenge is just plain cool.

He stalks Danko until he's within brain-scrambling range and then implants a paranoid thought that makes Danko need to check in on the person who matters most to him. That's how Matt finds out about Hot Russian Girlfriend, Danko's secret love. He's lied to her, saying he's a textbook salesman who will leave his wife and kids for her when the time is right. We find this out after Danko takes off and Matt confronts Hot Russian. With a helpful mind-warpage, Matt worms out of her that she's suffered so much as a hooker and whatever else that she's OK with Danko's (fake) tale of infidelity as long as she knows he loves her. Which he does.

But her appreciation of Danko crashes into a pile of poop when Matt tells her who Danko really is, and that he killed Matt's love Daphne. Matt then drags her to Danko's place at gunpoint, threatening to kill her so that Danko can find out "how it feels." At the last minute, of course, the smushy nice part of Matt's soul won't let him do it and he lets Hot Russian go. Of course Hot Russian now hates Danko, so Matt has still gotten his revenge. All in all, it's a pretty great scene - especially because it echoes another character's destruction.

Sylar, who has vowed to destroy HRG, does it by posing as Claire's mom and serving HRG with divorce papers. "I don't love you anymore!" he/she yells, breaking HRG's heart and brain. Pretty quickly HRG uses handwriting analysis on the papers to figure out that Sylar was shapeshifted into his wife, and realizes the charade that's been going on with the Sylar/Danko sexless loverboy shenanigans. And then the shit really hits the fan for poor HRG.

First he tries to confront Sylar in his wife's body, but accidentally attacks his real wife, throwing her to the floor and beating on her before she can convince him that she's the real person. Now she totally hates him even more than before, and orders him out of her life. Then he confronts Danko about Sylar, and Danko pulls a pretty slick trick. He reveals that Sylar is posing as one of his soldiers, and HRG shoots that soldier in front of all the shock troops, screaming, "It's Sylar!" When the soldier goes down while hosing blood out of his face, everybody thinks HRG has gone nuts and killed the guy. So HRG runs out of the building as fast as he can, with Danko's shock troops in hot pursuit. And Sylar peels himself off the floor, vomits up a bullet, and gives a big bloody grin.

So Danko and Sylar are still together, doing their dastardly deeds. And even though Danko keeps leaving whiny messages on Hot Russian's voicemail, we know that his heart lies with the man who can be anyone. Sylar should just change into Hot Russian and get some Danko action.

Alright, enough of my homotastic harangue.

The episode ends on a pretty good note, with Peter, Nathan, Mama Petrelli, Claire, and HRG all converging on what looks like an old campground or barracks called Coyote Sands. Mama P makes them dig a bunch of holes in the ground, which reveal a lot of skeletons with bullet holes in their heads. Uh oh. I sense a big revelation coming.

Meanwhile, Baby Matt is reunited with Papa Matt. While Ando and Hiro smile like they've rescued the princess, Matt lifts his son into the air and looks irritatingly beatific. Get me back to the Coyote Sands subplot, where there are skulls and Nathan is suddenly wearing his ultra-butch sunglasses, jarhead chic hair, and retro black parka. Can't wait to find out what's up with Manly Nathan next week - though I fear the episode may be all flashbacks.

OK look, if you liked Monday's episode then riddle me this: Why would Nathan swoop in and rescue Claire, then take her to Mexico, only to earn money for their hotel room by challenging some frat boys to a shot-drinking contest? Obviously the writers realize that we're dying for an excuse to drink during Heroes, but creating an actual drinking game in the show is not the way. Seriously, THIS is Nathan's way of showing he can be as cool as Claire's (good) adoptive dad HRG? Telling her that he earned money in the army by drinking lots of shots, and then passing out?

Luckily it turns out that one of Claire's many "tissue regenerating" powers allows her to stay completely sober while drinking over 22 shots because - as she explains later - her liver is regenerating. What? Honestly I would rather watch her liver regenerate like 1000 times over if it meant I could skip her whole pep talk with Nathan where she whines that he's "supposed to be Superman" and therefore he should go to Washington and make everything better. And then he drunkenly admits that he sucks and has been a lame father.

Actually, why can't he sober up and go to Washington and make everything better? He's been running the whole mutant roundup thing, and all he has to do is work more on shutting it down. Nobody will believe the psycho Hunter about Nathan flying anyway. Have I missed some subtle political point here that explains why Nathan is no longer a powerful politician and instead is some dude in a hot suit and even hotter sunglasses drinking shots with frat boys in Mexico?

Try not to think about that, Newitz - just focus on the Sylar. Oops, I'm talking to myself. Heroes does that to me after a while, especially when I'm watching Sylar eat his own brain! Yes, that was a truly awesome development and certainly worth slogging through the confusing Jesus stuff (more on that in a minute). Here's what happened. After some lollygagging, the Hunter finally decides to hook up with Sylar and go mutant hunting together. HRG has given Hunter a pep talk about how you can "use" the mutants and Sylar keeps leaving the Hunter all kinds of dead people as presents and finally Hunter caves and makes out with Spock. I mean, Sylar! I mean, crap! They don't really even make out!

But what they do is team up to hunt a shapeshifter at a club where the shifter is using his powers to mack on chicks while wearing the Hunter's pasty face. Then the shifter takes Sylar's face so he's a lot hotter. Then the real Sylar and the real Hunter trick the shifter into leaving the club and the Hunter shoots him - but leaves him alive for Sylar to eat. So there's literally a Sylar-on-Sylar brain eating scene! You should see the sexy looks that Sylar shoots over to the Hunter when he finds out what a pal his mutant-killing buddy is. Now they are truly a team, and Sylar can morph into anything as long as he sort of groans and makes faces.

As the new boyfriends drive away, Hunter says, "If we succeed, you'll be the only one." And Sylar does his Spock eyebrow and is like, "Yeah and we can have tons of sex." I mean, he says something like "Yeah totally that's the plan." Anyway, now it seems like Sylar's raison d'etre might be to eat every mutant in the world, with Hunter's help. But it's hard to say because Sylar is pretty sneaky and never really has sex with anybody except Electric Elle and that was last season.

Now for Jesus. If you thought Nathan's whining about how he never was a good father to Claire was bad, wait 'til you get a load of Mama Petrelli's "you must hate me" guilt trip. Yup, she even lays it on Peter in a church where she goes to calm down and get some sleep so she can start using her prophesy powers. Remember, Peter rescued her from Hunter's guys and they're on the run. So after she yammers at Peter for minutes on end about how she was a bad mom and even God can't forgive her, Peter is like, "I don't totally hate you, please just drink some tea and go to sleep." Poor Peter - he may have superpowers, but nobody can withstand the Total Guilt Momslaught.

That's probably why Peter goes and lights a bunch of candles and stares up at a painted Jesus thingie and talks for way too long about how Jesus should be helping him out and where is Jesus. Hello, you are in a scientific universe full of mutants, Peter! This is not a Jesus-based story. Jesus is busy on other shows that have angels and devils and crap like that. Anyway Peter doesn't know this, and so he prays for a really long time and then he and Mama hide in a confessional while HRG and the shock troops search the church for them. Mama confesses that she had to become an evil manipulator to save the world and she's guilting so hard that HRG finds them - but pretends he hasn't. You can tell from Peter's face that he thinks Jesus has intervened.

And maybe he has! At the end of the episode, Mama Petrelli finally falls asleep and has a vision of an angel or maybe just a stained glass window. Either way, she says they have to get the Petrelli family together again and go to visit her mysterious sister. I hope it's a Twisted Sister. Because I really want somebody to have the superpower of yelling WE'RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT every time the plot veers away from Sylar or Rebel.

I'm not letting this show off the hook yet - just because Monday's "Cold Snap" had moments of awesome does not mean Heroes is necessarily saved. But it's hard not to get a little excited when you see a scene like this one, where Ice Tracy saves Rebel Micah with her freezy powers. Yes, Micah is back! His voice has changed, his cuteness would give Harry Potter a run for his money, and let's hope we're not seeing the last of him. As many of us predicted, Micah was Rebel - the mystery mutant who has been helping our heroes evade capture by feeding them help via text, computer, and any other techie device that happens to be around.

Too bad his attempt to rescue Tracy went so wrong. She made a deal with double-agent HRG to lead the shock troops to Rebel, not realizing that Rebel was her clone Nikki's kid. So she grew a conscience and sacrificed herself for the rebellion, which was totally Star Wars of her. Meanwhile, HRG didn't get Rebel, which may hinder his ongoing efforts to ingratiate himself with The Hunter, the scary little white dude who leads the shock troops in their mutant-imprisonment operation.

We do get a chance to see the new mutant prison in this episode, by the way, and the orange jumpsuits have all been replaced with a Coma-like hospital where all the mutants just lie on gurneys and suck up drugs that keep them zonked. Even Speedy Daphne is there, dying of sepsis from her gunshot wound, but Parkman and Suresh rescue her and bring her to the hospital. For some reason Tracy awakens Parkman and Suresh on her way out of the prison after Rebel helps her escape (HRG allows the escape to happen so he can track her to Rebel).

It seems like Fuller was feeling a little rebooty with this episode, and so some of the dialogue gave us recaps on past action as if he was basically telegraphing to us: Here is the stuff I'm salvaging from the past season. Among the salvaged plot lines are of course Micah's, but also Parkman's relationship with his hot, ultra-successful ex-wife; HRG's secret connection to Mama Petrelli and Peter; and (thankfully) Hiro's power.

Rebel sends Hiro and Ando on a quest that is almost entirely free of "funny Asian antics" (thank you, Fuller!). They're to rescue Matt Parkman's baby, also mysteriously named Matt Parkman even though he's the child of Matt's ex who sort of hates him and never told him about their kid. Turns out Mini Matt is some kind of magical "on switch," who can turn on TVs and annoying kids' toys - and when Ando amplifies the on switch power, he gets a giant burst of electricity. But actually the on switch goes beyond that, because drooly Mini Matt also manages to turn on Hiro's power to stop time as well. Which was great, because (A) Hiro has power again and (B) he and Ando and Mini Matt escape from the shock troops and Matt's ex-wife. So now Hiro and Ando are on the run with Mini Matt, and Hiro is going to have to resolve his childhood issues so he can be a good surrogate parent.

Also on the list of escapees is Mama Petrelli, rescued by flying Peter from a bunch of shock troops that HRG sent after her to impress his new boyfriend The Hunter. Another guy who clearly wants to be Hunter's boyfriend is Sylar, who was totally absent from this episode but did leave Hunter a nice present in his pad. He somehow captured Creepy Puppet Guy and strung him up in Hunter's living room with a big bow on and a card that said "A gift for you." Please let Sylar and Hunter actually get it on or something. I really don't want this to be YET ANOTHER sexless daddy issue thing.

So where does that leave us? Tracy may be ready for the ice bucket, but I think we may see her again. First of all, we saw an eye open on her shattered face after Hunter shot her. But even if that was just the last twitch of a dying hero, we know that there is still one more clone of her running around somewhere. Nikki and Tracy are down, so next do we get Candy or Mandy or Micky?

Also I can't let you go without mentioning the one ultra-stinky bit in this episode when Speedy Daphne died. After Matt rescues her and takes her to the hospital, she's basically dying. So as she's slipping away he gives her a final fantasy in her brain, where they go to Paris and he flies her over the city. She realizes it's a dream, and that she's dying, and has one final request: That Matt fly her to the moon. OK, you KNOW that's going to be bad, right? So Matt zooms her up to a really cheesy moon screensaver, and they sort of float around in this dancey way in front of all these moon montages, and basically all I could think about was how awful those mini-dreads look in Daphne's hair and how I wish Matt would get back together with his hot ex-wife or maybe participate in a 4-way with Hunter, HRG, and Sylar.

But you know what? Fuller may be able to save Heroes, but I'm guessing he'll never give me the gay superhero orgy that I want. I guess that's OK.

Just check out this amazingly long and painful sequence when Claire nabs a job at the comic book store. Apparently comic book stores are packed with MALES ONLY, so in case you are female and were thinking about getting into comics, DON'T GO THERE. Because if you do, a bunch of men who match some casting director's idea of "nerd" will stare at you creepily and make you feel like a freak. I love that the comic book store owner hires Claire purely on the basis of the hope that he and everyone else will be able to sexually harrass her - or at least stare at her.

Why did we need this giant buildup scene for a job that Claire ultimately is never going to take because she's running away to start the underground mutant railroad with flying daddy? Was it just to have the joy of seeing a hot comic book geek throw away all his values ("Oh, they're only comic books!") so he can get a sniff of the yarn on Claire's head? Or was it so that we could all remind the ladies that they're not welcome in our clubhouse? Seriously this scene almost drove me to write the word "ugh" 700 times instead of a disgruntled review with a slightly broader vocabulary.

OK, so what the hell happened last night other than bad gender? Well, Hiro and Ando minced around to the "Asian comic relief" music and discovered that they're going to have to protect Matt Parkman's baby self. And grownup Matt Parkman got rescued from his explodey vest due to some fast footwork by Nathan, who is now apparently on the side of good again. Nathan is also busily trying to break icy Tracy out of prison, and has decided to take on the Hunter too. Unfortunately, when the Hunter throws him out a window, he has to reveal his flying side.

But that's only after the single most disgusting scene involving oysters to ever hit the small screen. Trying to worm some intel out of Mama Petrelli, Hunter goes all soft and probey on her in a nice restaurant where she slurps (SLURPS!) oyster juice at him, snorgles champagne, and basically tongues him remotely if that's possible. Maybe that's her latent superpower: Remote tonguing. (I've heard that's an undocumented feature in nmap actually.) He's trying to tell her that she has lots of skeletons in her closet and she should give up the goods on Nathan, and then she slurps something about Angola and he gets all huffy and leaves. Score one for the remote tongue.

So Nathan and HRG are totally going up against Hunter, even though President Worf has dismissed Hunter from the mutant roundup project. (Where is President Worf by the way? Michael Dorn, we need you.) And Parkman is on the loose, though mostly in baby form.

Meanwhile, Sylar is still without his boyfriend, which makes me sad. So he has a showdown with daddy, who turns out to be a taxidermist dying of cancer. They bond over killing a bunny (which was almost as bad as the remote tonguing scene), then stuffing the bunny, and then fighting over whether dad will be able to steal Sylar's healing powers by using some kind of sleepy whistle power. Of course Sylar wins, and leaves pops to die slowly of cancer surrounded by dead animals in a broken-down cabin. The best part of their fight was when Sylar totally did a Spock eyebrow thing when his dad said something ridiculous. Yay for any hints of scifi stories that aren't Heroes!

Also, Sylar took the stuffed bunny he and papa killed and left it as a present on Hunter's mantle. He also left himself as a present in the hallway, so expect next episode (in two weeks) to give us some Sylar vs. Hunter homoerotic smackypants. Also, Claire did wind up helping the puppetmaster dude get away from some evil Hunter agents, and then the government finally came after her for reals. Luckily, Rebel sent her a text message about it just in time and her superdaddy came to rescue her before the goons could start asking, "Flight or invisibility?! Pick one, bitch!"

Tune in next week, when a giant band of female comic book geeks take over the comic book store and tell that dude in the glasses to look pretty and hand out free candy to their friends while they leer at his ass.

First, allow me to retort even before you start, um, torting. Last night's episode, "Cold War," should have been fucking great. It was an HRG-centric episode, sort of a companion piece to "Company Man," which remains one of the most memorable Heroes episodes ever.

Peter, Suresh, and Matt have kidnapped HRG so that Matt can read his mind and get more information about the secret government program which led to their abductions. Again, this should have been great. The formerly rounded-up and tortured guys are now pulling the same tactics on their former captor. They'll be torturing HRG for information, using drugs on him, playing with his mind. We should be asking ourselves: Has every hero gone dark? Who is the moral center of this show? Nobody? Those are good questions when posed gracefully in the context of a show like Heroes.

Instead of grace, we got the worst Three Stooges-style episode ever. Except without the funny, and that's saying a lot considering that Three Stooges are barely funny at all (sorry to Stooges fans - I'm more of a Marx Brothers person). Anyway, my point is that all this episode delivered were a bunch of scenes where Peter flew a bunch of places and Matt and Suresh hit each other a lot. Plus flashbacks into HRG's mind, cunningly rendered in black and white to make them seem like they were Really In The Past.

The big reveal, which you see in this scene, is that Suresh kinda sorta knew about the government program. Oh and also Speedy is still alive, which is the dumbest reveal ever. Also, here's another not-new-who-cares thing about the episode: the Hunter is MEAN even though he's short. Yes, former Heroes fans, the supervillain of the season is mean. Can you believe it? I am in awe of this amazing new plot development.

I know, I am unleashing the mean myself and I should give this show yet another chance for the ten millionth time and you are all angry at me for saying that Heroes is delivering the suck despite Bryan Fuller coming on board to rescue us from lame txt mssgs from Rebel. But let's be honest. This show has moments of awesome and moments of terrible, and this was one of the most terrible and repetitive ever. HRG is a double agent YET AGAIN and we visit his flashbacks mostly to see him getting a retirement gift from Mama Petrelli and the gift isn't even a goddamn laser canon.

Even more awful? The episode ends with Peter and Matt at Isaac's old apartment/Suresh's old lab where Parkman has just painted the floor of the apartment EXACTLY THE WAY ISAAC DID. Except this time it's different! Instead of New York City blowing up, it's Washington, D.C.! This is not a clever callback. This is just terrible story recycling. If you're going to flagrantly rip your own show off, at least call back to the alternate future thing, because you can have a million alternate futures. But you can only menace us with a city inferno once. Seriously, relocating the inferno to Washington does not advance the plot, even incrementally.

I am seriously considering ending my relationship with this show. What do you think I should do?

Is it just me, or is there something weirdly charming about the way that Heroes seems to be trying its hardest to be contemporary and relevant for people who haven't left the house or had any communication with the outside world for about five years? It's not just the show's increasingly 24-esque approach to the internal machinations of governmental policy, but the fact that Claire seems to just have discovered text messaging. The episode opens with her messaging "Rebel," the mysterious maybe-good guy who's been sending her fight the power messages like "U R SO HAWT - F THE MAN" and the like for the last week. If nothing else, it's distracting her from pretending to her exceptionally gullible mother that she and her dad did a college tour the week before instead of crashing a plane into generic countryside somewhere. Eventually, she snaps (with the great line "Dad was busy... locking up innocent people."), tells her mom that Daddy HRG has been lying to her for the seven-millionth time, and then cries when her mom throws him out because, like, she loves him really. It's just hard when your domineering father figure happens to be a bad-ass spy who forces you to go to community college instead of become a guerilla warrior against the government. Or something.

In HRG's defense, he's clearly still on the side of the good guys and working to bring them down from within... which is why I'm not too bothered that he gets drugged and kidnapped by Peter, Matt and Suresh - oh, the moral ambiguity! - at the end of the episode. Also, as Claire showed when she saved the life of Alex, the most stereotypical comic book clerk in existence ("You're a girl!" he exclaimed upon seeing Claire, shocked that one would be in a comic book store. That groan you heard was every single comic retailer in the country), she's not the greatest freedom fighter in the world. After all, good freedom fighters generally don't keep those they free in their closet.

Of course, maybe Claire just got her planning skills from her biological father, the increasingly ineffectual Nathan. This week, Nathan's new governmental agency got shut down and then unshut down within an hour, because Tracy Strauss froze someone to death in front of a governmental investigator. Which, when put like that, almost works as a plot. Sadly, in the actual show, it was less of a nuanced look into the way that fear of the unknown can impact decision making, and more a sudden swing of extremes from "This is inhuman, and worse, unamerican!" to "You can have whatever you want" because the plot demanded it. Was this all a cunning plan by Nathan, showing a previously hidden Machiavellian side? No, not exactly; it was all manipulation by this volume's cardboard cut-out badguy, the Hunter, who's eager to show that he has no limits to how far he will go yadda yadda yadda.

Also undergoing ill-advised father issues, Sylar continued his strange roadtrip with new sidekick Luke, who only seems to exist to give Sylar a reason to tell us that he's not so bad really, he's just looking for his father to find out how he ended up this way. While we can put up with - almost - his saving Luke from the Hero Hunters, we're really not too convinced by his attempts to teach him not to waste his powers and be more responsible with them. What's next, telling him not to put his elbows on the table? We can only hope that, when he eventually appears, Sylar Snr. will tell his son to stop being such a wuss... and perhaps kill Luke in the process.

In the grand scheme of things, this episode didn't really move any of the larger plots forward (with the exception of HRG leaving his family and being captured), and maybe it's that sense of pointlessness - and the characters' uselessness, or yet another pointless plot where Hiro "learns to be a hero" (This week: You can be a hero without superpowers! Who knew?) - that made it feel like Heroes again, as opposed to the last couple of episodes. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up to you, of course, but there was one good side to this episode that no-one can deny: Only one scene of Milo Ventimiglia means less frustration. The less Peter Petrelli whining, the better.

Normally I don't criticize a dictator for being non-authoritarian, because obviously that's a good thing. But on a TV series that needs a good, strong, scary-ass Big Bad to propel the action forward - not such a good thing. Last week's episode showed us the evil side of Nathan, who has now abandoned all pretenses of being a nice guy and is simply arresting and locking up every single mutant he can find. That made for good drama last week, but last night's episode, "Trust and Blood," took it all back.

Once the plane full of mutants crash-lands in Arkansas, Nathan suddenly goes all soft. His main military helper, new bad guy The Hunter, is trying to hunt down (and kill) the escapees, but Nathan keeps backing off. First he keeps making exceptions for Claire, even though she's responsible for crashing the plane and letting the mutants get away in the first place. No matter what this indestructible brat does, her two daddies are willing to cut her slack.

Each time Nathan and HRG catch Claire, they're all about sending her off to college instead of into lockdown. OK look, if they were really serious about being bad guys, wouldn't they finally lock up the one person who seems completely determined to fight them - and has a relative degree of success doing so? Let's push Nathan over into Big Bad territory and have him finally snap and go after his little Claire Bear. Otherwise he's not a real bad guy - he's just a whiny politician with a funny chin.

To make matters worse, Nathan even gets soft on his brother Peter. When Tracy goes turncoat on Peter and gives him up to Nathan, Nathan basically lets Peter go. And then when HRG has a chance to shoot Peter later on, but doesn't, Nathan gives HRG the old secret thank-you nod.

You might argue that this is an effort to show the gray areas in Nathan's plan - perhaps he really does believe he's doing something good for the world. First he tried to give everybody powers, but that alternate timeline got squelched. Now he's rounding up everybody and thinking it will do them some good. No wonder The Hunter asks him at one point, "Did you think they'd treat us as liberators?" More heavy-handed references to the Iraq war do not make this tortured allegory work any better.

What did work well in this episode were the sequences where new mutant alliances formed. Sylar got a cute teen sidekick named Luke who understands Sylar's mommy issues and likes to use his heat ray to melt action figures. Actually the whole sequence where Sylar and Luke hook up was jam-packed with sado-masochistic, homoerotic zing.

Here's how it happened: Sylar decides to torture a random family who live down the street from his long-lost daddy's house. Somehow he thinks hurting the mother and her kid will make the ninja who tried to capture him reveal all about Sylar's mutant heritage. All it does is reveal that mom resents her kid, who has heat ray powers. After torturing Luke's mom for a while, Sylar is almost killed by the ninja - but Luke heat-rays him, steals his mom's car keys, and promises Sylar he'll drive him to long-last daddy (who might be Luke's daddy too?)

While Sylar and Luke head towards Batman and Robin territory, Peter is rounding up a resistance force to defy Nathan. (By the way, he also expositions that he can only have one power at a time now. And yes, I think "exposition" should be a verb, at least when it comes to cheesy superhero stories.) After Speedy and Ando try to rescue the gang, Speedy is killed by the Hunter - giving the normally sweet-tempered Matt a burning vengeance feeling. I have high hopes for Peter's resistance force just because it will create some good action sequences and allow some of the less badass heroes to get tough.

As the episode closes, the college-bound Claire has started receiving mystery messages on her Treo from someone called "Rebel" who promises there's hope - and that Rebel hates the people Claire hates too. My suspicion is that Rebel is a bad guy trying to draw Claire out. Good guys never talk about hate.

Lingering questions: Why is Parkman still going all white-eyed? Do we really need that? Can Claire's relationship with adoptive daddy HRG survive this latest round of nastiness? And most importantly, why didn't Hiro want to wear that "Rednecks are better lovers" t-shirt?

Spoilers ahead!

Let's get some of the bad news out of the way first, and then talk about what this episode, "A Clear and Present Danger," got right.

First of all, the really bad news is that Heroes ratings didn't go up much compared to last season, so if you're hoping that there will be a rebound that convinces NBC to keep investing in Heroes - well, signs point to no. Last night, Heroes finished third in its time slot, with 8.5 million viewers (that's only about 700,000 more than the last episode). But if the show continues to get better, those numbers could grow.

Unfortunately the arc that's planned for this season doesn't bode well for a ratings boost, and here's why. Though I'm not usually one to complain about overused plot devices (I will confess a love of cheesy, overused plots), Heroes' creators made some strategic errors with a storyline about a presidential candidate (Nathan), who uses fear of terrorism to create a special Gitmo just for mutants.

In case you missed the political message in last night's episode, there's even a scene where an Iranian-American character talks about how Nathan's speeches about God-fearing patriotism and anti-terrorism are all about scapegoating people from the Middle East. Plus, the mutants that Nathan is rounding up are dressed in Gitmo-style prison uniforms. So there's a political edge here - but it's completely out of date. This is a great story for 2007, but not for 2009. Now it feels like an unfair liberal pile-on in the wake of Bush's departure, a kind of unnecessary nose-thumbing at a political regime that's already gone.

A less dire concern is that the Fugitives arc also borrows heavily from Marvel's 2006-07 "Civil War" series, about how the government is rounding up superheroes as part of a war on terror. I'm less concerned about that, simply because Heroes has always borrowed heavily from comic books (duh) and at least in this case they're borrowing from a relatively cool and interesting series. Still, if Marvel were publishing Civil War now, I'd have the same issues with it as I do with Fugitives. Why so anachronistic? Two years ago was the right time to tell that story. Today, not so much.

However, I may turn out to be wrong, and millions of viewers may identify very strongly with the tales told in Fugitives and boost those saggy ratings for a show that I believe still has the potential to blow us away. Especially now that Bryan "Pushing Daisies" Fuller is back in the writer's room where he was during Heroes' terrific first season. Which brings me to what was right and good about last night's episode.

Many fans of the show clawed and cried their way through the Villains chapter of Heroes, and not in a fun way. The show's pacing became frenetic just as the narrative arc went incoherent, and it made for a swillish brew. Last night, however, you could feel a tangible shift in pacing and flow. Characters started to feel human again, returning to their jobs and struggling with how to fit into normal society now that they've had so many superheroic experiences. Peter is working as a paramedic, Matt is trying to hold down a security guard job while dealing with endless drama from his live-in girlfriend Speedy. Even Claire is on the cusp of normalcy, with grandma Petrelli about to send her off to some exclusive college.

The writing in this Tim Kring-authored episode was good, and even funny. "What advice can I give you other than kiss my ass?" Peter asks his power-hungry brother Nathan at one point. There's even a good scene with Hiro and Ando, which hasn't happened in what feels like a year. Hiro may have lost his powers, but that doesn't stop him from buying a "lair," and giving Ando a special Andocycle to go with the latex uniform he tries to get his reluctant friend to don.

What made this episode work so well was that the "return to normal" theme in most of the characters' lives contrasts nicely with the escalating violence that's being done against them by Nathan's crew of Snake-Eyes-looking ninjas. During the course of the episode, everyone from Suresh and Hiro to Tracy and Peter gets rounded up and drugged with a cool-looking syringe that makes a weird "trrtrrtrr" noise. Then they're dressed in orange jumpers, chained up, and loaded onto military planes. In a slightly shocking reveal, we discover that HRG is Nathan's right-hand man in the whole Gitmo operation, and that both of them are trying to keep Claire out of the roundup.

Again, this is all good: It's great to see HRG enter the morally gray zone again. It's where he belongs, and makes him an interesting character with more than two dimensions. It's fun to see Nathan go totally evil, and more than anything it's nice to have a plot that brings our heroes together again to fight danger.

The only mutants who resist being rounded up are Claire and Sylar. While I'm a little sick of bad Sylar (his going-good arc was a standout success last season), it's hard not to love watching Zachary Quinto ham it up as he hunts for his birth father and his own mysterious origins. And Claire has got more than new pink lipstick: She's got a new sense of heroic purpose as she sneaks into a Mutant Gitmo-bound plane and quickly releases a bunch of the mutant prisoners so they can escape. Unfortunately, she didn't bargain on finding her father HRG in the cockpit.

Especially towards the end of the episode, we got a lot of great action. The mutants are revolting on the plane; the plane is about to crash; and we're still not sure what Nathan and his mother have planned for the country. Plus, Sylar is still on the loose and his daddy issues just won't stop. Also, for a reason that probably will never be adequately explained, Matt has developed the "prophetic comic book drawing" power, and is churning out images that look sort of like bad Frank Quitely. It's a great setup for next week.

My interest in this show is definitely re-awakened. Even if the plot arc feels a little dated, I'm willing to go with it because the characters are developing in intriguing ways again. If you left the show during Villains, but you miss the old days of saving the cheerleader, I'd say give this show a try again. You might like it.

While this collection of the 46 web-shorts that accompanied the show's second year on NBC's official Heroes site shares some of the basic flaws of the first volume - In particular, a over-reliance on the show to give particular stories any meaning or impact whatsoever - it's also a massive improvement over its predecessor in a number of ways. For one thing, it's actually reasonably enjoyable.

Yes, the stories are still either vignettes based around particular episodes of back story for characters from the show, but this time around, they're given the added benefit of being interesting and, for the most part, carried out well, with the less explored characters getting the majority of the screentime (The Haitian's origin, and backstory for Adam Monroe are both highpoints of the book). The addition of creators with comic book experience - specifically the Men of Action team of Steven Seagle, Joe Kelly and Duncan Rouleau - reigns in a lot of the flabbiness and aimlessness of the previous book's writing, and manages to make this book more of a tie-in and less of a cash-in to the previous volume; there are even a couple of plot threads that I would like to see followed up on the TV show, if the writers there are ever stuck for ideas. Artwise, this time around has a few names more familiar to comic fans (Alias' Michael Gaydos and Thunderbolts' Tom Gummett both contribute some nice-looking work), but the art, for the most part, still tends towards the pedestrian with the lesser-known, more generic artists.

Despite being better than the first book, this Volume Two has the main problem of the first - Namely, it's hard to see who it's actually aimed at. The hardcore fans who'd appreciate the very-in-continuity nature of the stories have, presumably, already read them online, and the more casual fans would likely balk at the $29.99 price tag, no matter how well-designed the hardcover is. As with the last book, the publication date of the book seems to be very intentional - This book makes the perfect holiday gift from a confused relative who knows that you like comics and watch Heroes, but doesn't want to put too much more thought into it. So, if it turns up in the stocking or gift delivery device of your choice, take a look - It's a slight book, but more fun than you might expect at first look.

Heroes, Volume Two hits stores today.