Responding to viewers' questions about the latest turn of events for Heroes' former cop, writer/producers Joe Pokaski and Aron Coliete explained their... um... not-exactly-straightforward way of thinking:

Long story is: Matt's ability is to access the mind – or at least that's how it started. But as he grew powerful and as Usutu opened it up more to the "dreamtime," he began to access that same plane of consciousness that Isaac and Usutu drew from to paint (and arguably the same one Angela accesses from another door). Short story - You don't choose your destiny. Your destiny chooses you.

Or, at least, the destiny that actor availability allows:

It was supposed to be a trio of post-mortem painter-advisors show up to Matt, like at the end of Jedi when Yoda, Obi-Wan, and old Anakin Skywalker are there to give a blue-glow shout out to Luke (we refuse to even acknowledge that Hayden Christiansen revisionist nonsense). But unfortunately, we had two problems: first, Suresh's apartment is only so big, and more importantly, stupid Santiago Cabrera has become a huge movie star (see "Che Part 1").

So, Matt isn't actually telepathic at all, he's just able to use his brain to... access... stuff? I'd wonder if this is ever going to be explained on the show, but it's Heroes; of course it won't.

Behind The Eclipse [Comic Book Resources]

Writing about "Villains" on his weekly blog, Beeman gave one possible reason why we've seen so little of this season's new villainous characters:

[T]his was supposed to be the episode where we explored the villains that we introduced in the season opener. Frankly this changed a little bit as the script went through studio notes. The first draft really featured the villains – and our main characters were the side stories. This shifted as the drafts went on to the version that we now see.

Interestingly, there was a whole storyline that was dropped from the episode. There was a story that featured the character of Knox and his relationship with Matt Parkman. The story took place in L.A. and told how Knox was part of a gang and was trying to get out of that life. Matt was a cop who had busted Knox once and was trying to help him stay on the straight and narrow. As things progressed Knox realized he had the power of incredible strength whenever people around him were afraid. This caused him to turn away from Matt’s good guidance. It was a good story. But it was 9 minutes long. And, in the editing room, when Allan [Arkush, director] tried to fit it in – all the other stories became compromised. So the decision was made to just drop that one story altogether. It’ll be a great DVD extra someday.

Never mind the missing Parkman plot - It doesn't sound that impressive in the first place - but the dropping of that whole "this changed as we got notes from the studio" thing at the beginning is what caught our attention. Has the quick disappearance of Volume 3's eponymous villains been down to Universal and NBC stepping in and making demands, as opposed to creators who didn't know what to do with them? And if so, does this mean that we have NBC to thank for the (admittedly flawed) slow reboot that the show seems to be going through?

Season 3 - Episode 8 [Beeman's Blog]