[via The Hollywood Reporter]

The clips catch people up on recent backstory from the superhero soap, as well as show the marvels of selective editing and some new music; who knew that Heroes had all the ingredients for a classic camp romance (Seriously, that music for the Mohinder scene was a great choice) or that the Sylar show would look so damn entertaining? If the new season - premiering September 21st - is half as entertaining and archly self-aware as these videos, then we're in for a good year.

Sylar

Claire

Heroes In Love

The Writing Has Improved
No, really. It's very tempting to give most of the credit for this to the return of Bryan Fuller, now acting as "consulting producer" on the show - After all, the turn-around coincided with his first episode back, which also happened to be the best episode they'd had in years - but it's not as if he's the only person who's been delivering recently. Perhaps he just made everyone else step up their game, or maybe he's been reminding everyone what the show is really about, but the show is once again becoming fast-moving, popcorn-smart, funny entertainment again... and the characters are no longer seeming to shift personalities every couple of episodes depending on who the plot needs them to be in order to move forward or shock the viewers (Well, except Sylar, but that's intentional... I think). Also, they titled an episode "Turn And Face The Strange." That's got to be worth something, right?

No More Time Travel
The best thing about "Fugitives," the current arc? There's absolutely no time travel in it at all. For a show that had continually gone back to the same idea of "Character X Has Seen The Future And Must Prevent It" for its last three "volumes," this is nothing short of stunning... and, more than that, very welcome indeed. Instead, the show is slowly coming to terms with the idea that conflict can come less from predestination and more from the characters just doing what they do. Yes, they may still be ripping off the X-Men, but at least they're not still ripping off the one same storyline over and over again. Baby steps, people.

(Also something that seems to be finally being abandoned: The Daddy Issues. Now that we've dealt with Papa Parkman, Papa Petrelli and Papa Sylar, here's hoping that the show can finally move away from basing so much of the drama around characters' unhappy relationships with their fathers. If nothing else, they'll always have the Nathan/Claire/HRG triangle for cheap therapy.)

The Cast Is Shrinking. Ish.
Whether it's essentially sidelining characters (Mohinder keeps disappearing to "find himself" or "find the truth about his father" or something similar, and that's just fine with me), killing them off (Bye, Elle! Bye, Daphne! Bye, Tracy, even though I totally don't believe that you're dead!), or even just forgetting about them altogether (Are we ever going to see Monica again? What about Maya? Actually, no, I don't want to see her again), it's as if the writers had suddenly realized that the series was massively overpopulated, and mostly with characters that no-one cared about. Even though the show has only really started to improve in the last few episodes, a small cull has been underway since the start of this season, and it's something that I hope continues next year. One suggestion, though: Let's start killing off main characters who aren't serving any purpose anymore. Yes, Mohinder, I mean you. You too, Matt Parkman.

(Actually, another suggestion: Can you stop only getting rid of the female characters? It's kind of creepy, the weird gender bias when it comes to the characters who've been disappearing.)

Someone Has Started Thinking About The Powers
More signs of intelligence from the writers room: The Deus Ex Machina characters? Suddenly depowered in a move so welcome that I won't even complain too loudly about how awkwardly it was achieved. One of the show's constant problems has always been "The Flash Dilemma" - that is, the fact that if all of the characters were thinking, the stories would be over before they'd started because everyone involved was so powerful (So named because, if the Flash is really the fastest man alive, if he actually stopped to think, he could run around at superspeed and deal with all the bad guys before they'd had a chance to boast about how unstoppable they were), but now Peter Petrelli has to touch someone to gain their power, and even then, he can only mimic one power at a time, and Hiro can only stop time, not travel in it, nor teleport out of trouble with an overly-squinty blink. Only Sylar remains all-powerful, and that's as it should be; the bad guy should always be the one with all the power, otherwise he's no threat - and, even then, his power comes with a price (Not to mention a cameo from Ellen Greene in last week's episode). The result? Tension that you can believe in, without thinking that your favorite character is stupid.

Less Episodes Means Less Filler
Perhaps most importantly, NBC just announced that there'll be less Heroes next year; they plan on making somewhere between 18-20 episodes in total, compared with the 25 of this season. This is definitely a good thing, because it'll cut down on the random, go-nowhere shenanigans that the show has used to stretch out stories past their desired length so many times in the past (Case in point: Claire helping comic store geek escape the authorities). Hopefully, it'll also make the show's PTB think more about what needs to be said, as opposed to following their desires down creative dead-end alleys (Almost all of the recent "1961" episode) in order to fulfill the season's episode order.

Don't get me wrong; the show's nowhere near perfect, still; there are still moments that you want to throw things at your television and scream that everyone involved just may be retarded, and Nathan's hair continues to get more out of control with each and every episode. But Heroes has, rather remarkably, turned itself around from the carcrash it used to be to become something that, once again, has the potential to fulfill its own potential. It's also, thankfully, become more entertaining in doing so, and is worth your attention for an hour every week again. Tune into Monday's big season finale to see the fireworks and over the top plot resolutions to see if you can fall in love with the show again... and stick around for the final scene that'll show what we have in store for us when the show returns in the fall. You know you want to.

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.

The insight came to King after he tried to imagine how to save the show:

[T]he more and more I thought about it, the more and more I realized that the once interesting show has past the point of no return. Nothing can be done to save it.

So I want to propose an alternative to NBC: Do a spin-off!

The three spin-offs he suggest include a Doctor Who riff for Hiro, an X-Files take on the adventures of HRG, and a serial-killer solo spot for Sylar:

“Sylar”
Tagline: Think “Dexter” but with Sylar
Sylar was always the most interesting when he was killing people. This whole nerdy re-vamp with a conscious (sic) is just plain boring. I want to see him as a bad ass slitting brains! Not only that, but I want the producers to expand upon and further explore ‘the hunger’ that his power forces him to have. Let him take on a secret identity and try to live a mundane life. Then at night have him out stalking and feeding the hunger that can never be quenched. Though to make this work, the life he creates must be one that not only he cares about, but that viewers care about. The supporting cast has to not only be interesting but filled with people matter. This way if he’s ever caught, he can’t just go on the run and ditch the new life he’s made for himself.

The worrying thing is - This actually sounds more interesting than what Heroes has actually done with the character. Maybe King is onto something, even if I'm surprised that he didn't try and pitch The Petrellis, a moving family drama about a family trying to face up to the fact that their sons are terrible, terrible actors.

How To Spin Off Heroes ['King Film]

There's a lot of coolness in "It's Coming," including a showdown between mind-reading Parkman, speedy Daphne, and the whole Petrelli clan. Suffice to say Parkman and mama Petrelli manage to defeat papa Petrelli's mind-smoosh, and are now scheming with Peter and Nathan to stop papa's evil plan to find the "catalyst" that will make the formula work. Yes, the "catalyst" is in Claire's blood, and yes of course freezy PR girl Tracy is scheming with papa to turn Nathan to the dark side.

But the most interesting developments by far last night involved Hiro and Sylar.

First let's consider Hiro's predicament. The once-beloved character has reached pretty much the nadir of his arc. He began so promisingly in the show's first season as an innocent otaku with a future of sword-wielding badassery, and then somewhere in season 2 it was if the show creators gave up on making him into a capable adult. Throughout the current season, he's been a grating clown who acts like a 10-year-old; and now, thanks to papa P's mind-scramble, he actually believes he's a 10-year-old. As you can see in the clip above, Hiro spends most of the episode acting silly in a waffle restaurant at a bowling alley.

Why haven't we seen Hiro developing into badass Future Hiro with the leather and sword? The man who no longer has to speak in pidgin? The simple answer is that the dystopian future where he became that man isn't going to happen. But the more disappointing answer is that this show can't seem to allow its Asian male heroes to be powerful, fully adult, sexual beings without punishing them. Each time Hiro has inched towards having an adult identity, whether that's as Future Hiro or the lover of the feudal-era princess in season 2, he's slapped back. Not only is he robbed of these identities, he's actually turned into somebody (a child) who can never have them.

And don't even get me started on Suresh, who was an unctuous weakling for two seasons, a guy who spent all his time whining or being a voice-over. And then when he finally became sexually involved with somebody, it turned out it was because he was slowly mutating into a hideous monster. Why can't Heroes make these men sexy and tough, instead of reducing them to aimless boy-children, easily manipulated and undermined at every turn?

It's interesting to compare Hiro's fate to Sylar's because their beginnings were oddly parallel. Sylar, AKA Gabriel, began as an awkward geek who wanted to be a hero. But unlike Hiro, whose dark future self never came to pass, Gabriel's dark self was fully realized in the serial killer Sylar. Gabriel moved through that dark self, a kind of hideous adolescence, and is now progressing beyond it. Hiro never got the opportunity to explore his darker half, and therefore his character remains a kind of eternal child. Meanwhile, Gabriel is evolving into a multi-faceted character who is the master of his fate even when captured by papa Petrelli.

One of the very best scenes all season came last night, when Gabriel truly emerged from Sylar. Papa Petrelli tells Sylar that he can actually take someone's powers without killing them, as long as he feels empathy. And then he locks Sylar in with electric Elle, who is filled with pain, wants to be rid of her powers, and hates Sylar for killing her father.

She also, of course, loves Sylar too. Last week we learned that she worked with HRG to seduce Gabriel into becoming the monstrous Sylar - and her seduction was not entirely a put-on. As Sylar faces Elle's rage, his dark self is burned away and Gabriel emerges. He's become a man who understands his power and can control it. And he's finally able to connect with another human being without taking her life. We know that Elle and Sylar are going to end up romantically involved, and there is nothing cutesy-poo or innocent about that connection.

While Hiro scampers around acting like a kid, Gabriel has become a man. And now I'd like to see Hiro get the same thoughtful treatment that Gabriel has. His character was my absolute favorite during the first season, and I feel like we've missed out on the opportunity to see him develop into an interesting, complex superhero. Will we ever get that chance, or do the show creators think the only possible role for our brave otaku is one of babyish impotence?

The mechanics of time travel is something that the writers of Heroes seem to have spent some time really thinking about, given the various ways in which they've used it throughout the show. We've seen people who can paint the future (Something that four separate people have done so far on the show, to varying degrees of success - although it's maybe worth noting that only Isaac has a 100% accuracy rate, perhaps because everyone was better at forward planning in the first season), we've visited the future - well, futures - and we've even visited the past a few times, as well. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the laws of time travel on the show are entirely consistent. Fans may argue about whether or not Hiro did change time when he tried to save Charlie, but the writers seemed to be fairly clear that the main events had stayed the same: Charlie still died, Sylar still had her powers afterwards, and Hiro decided that he couldn't change history (Even though he actually already had, by that point). But then, how do you explain the show's multiple futures?

By our count, Heroes has had somewhere between four and six different "futures" that we've actually seen for ourselves - the oracular painters' visions don't count, because people with no irises scare us - and most of those have been undone by the characters changing that future's history based on foreknowledge of what was to come:

Future 1:
New York gets blown up in a nuclear explosion caused by Sylar one year in the future, as seen when Hiro saw when he first discovered his powers in "Don't Look Back," the show's second episode (The cause of the explosion is revealed in "Five Years Gone," later in the season).
Undone because: Peter saved the cheerleader, but didn't save the world. Of course, what caused him to save the cheerleader? Hiro time-traveling and telling him to do it.

Future 2:
New York gets blown up in a nuclear explosion caused by Peter one year in the future, as a result of Peter saving the cheerleader because Hiro told him to. Bad move, Peter. Everyone has gone bad as a result - well, except for Ando, who died in the explosion: Hiro has become a ninja, Nathan has become President and Ali Larter has become a stripper because the writers like to imagine her naked. We saw all of this in "Five Years Gone" in the first season.
Undone because: Nathan flew Peter into the "high-enough-that-a-nuclear-explosion-is-apparently-meaningless-sphere" at the end of the first season. It's unclear why this didn't happen in the Five Years Gone timeline, other than the promise of cheap drama, so this may not have changed as a direct result of time travel (although Hiro's time-traveling antics probably helped, let's face it).
Possibly not undone because: See Future 4a. No, really.
Future 3:
93% of humanity has died as a result of the Shanti Virus, which was a plot device if ever there was one. We see this in "Out of Time," during the second season of the show that we all try to forget ever existed as completely as Peter has forgotten Caitlin, his Irish girlfriend that he accidentally abandoned there. Oops.
Undone because: The virus didn't get released after all at the end of "Powerless," the last episode of the second season, thanks to Peter knowing what would happen if it did, thanks to time travel. So what happened to Caitlin? No-one knows, not even the writers, who've complained that their heads spin when they try and work it out.

Future 3b:
This future definitely doesn't exist but in some strange fan-fiction somewhere, but as originally shot, the Shanti Virus did get released at the end of "Powerless," and the never-completed later episodes of that season would have included Peter's attempts to rescue Caitlin and a town quarantined because of the virus.
Undone because: It never really happened in the first place.

Future 4a:
Four years from now - although when "now" is seems to be a somewhat elastic concept; I think it's actually somewhere around the end of 2007 at best, but "four years" forward brings us to the same time period as "Five Years Gone"'s Future 2, which may be important - future Claire tries to shoot future Peter, because she blames him for the way everything has turned out. It all happened at the start of "The Second Coming" from the third season.
Potentially meaningful point: Both Claire and Peter look exactly like they did in Future 2, whether it's hair color or massive scar on face and stubble. Are the hair and make-up people that lazy, or is there some connection between the apparently undone "Five Years Gone" flashforward to this time period
Undone because: Future Peter shoots present Nathan, thereby stopping him from revealing the existence of superhumans publicly, which was what caused all the problems, apparently. Time travel saves the day again! Except, maybe not. See below.

Future 4b:
Hiro travels to some unspecified point in the future where he is fighting Ando, who now has superpowers - and he's not the only one - before there's a massive explosion that's very similar to the McGuffin behind the first season. But Claire's not a cheerleader anymore! How can they stop this one? Again, from "The Second Coming."
Undone because: Well, it's not, yet.

Future 4c:
Again at some unspecified time in the future, all of the regular characters on the show have been killed by escaped villain Knox, escaped Alias actor Adam Monroe, Matt's telepathic absent father, some Ali Larter character that may or may not be Tracy Strauss (and really who cares that much anymore?) and potentially Sylar. This may or may not have been a true future - We saw it at the start of "The Butterfly Effect" in the third season, but it was Angela Petrelli's dream, and even though she's one of the show's many oracular characters, it was a dream.
Undone because: We don't even know if it's real yet, never mind how to undo it.

The problem with these last three futures - besides the feeling that we've seen them before (perhaps literally, given the crossover between "Five Years Gone" and "The Second Coming") - comes not from the show itself, but from an interview with writers Aron Coliete and Joe Pokaski, who said that not only wasn't future 4a changed by Nathan's shooting, but that "[t]hese are in fact, all the same future." Wait - didn't we see Hiro get killed in two entirely different ways in two of them (Zapped by Ando and then stabbed by a sword, respectively)? How does that work? Tomorrow's episode of the show, "I Am Become Death," promises to either address some of this confusion or increase it, as FuturePeter and PresentPeter travel to a/the future and, let's face it, probably see Hiro die in yet another way just for shits and giggles just to mess with our heads.

So exactly how does time travel work on Heroes? After literally minutes of consideration, the best we can work out - ignoring the always present possibility of "it does whatever the writers need it to at that moment, internal logic be damned" - is this: You can change the details, but not the ultimate outcome, of destiny (or Peter Petrelli's unfortunate shaving accident, it seems) through time travel. Charlie will still die; she'll just have met Hiro six months earlier and been happier. There will always be a legend of Takezo Kensei, but he may end up being Hiro instead of a refugee from a JJ Abrams spy drama... and no matter how many cheerleaders you save or viruses you stop crashing against a vault floor, the future of Earth Heroes will always be dystopian, New York-centric and in need of the kind of help that only comes from the Peacock Network.

If true - and it's something that makes the similarities in Future Claire and Future Peter's appearance between "Five Years Gone" and "The Second Coming" - then it presents a couple of problems for the writers of the show. Firstly, it suggests that we're probably going to continually have some level of time-travel or change-the-future plotline throughout the entire series, never mind the entire season, and secondly, it kills a lot of the dramatic tension if we find out that no matter what the characters do, we're still all going to end up completely screwed by 2011. Have the writers written themselves into a corner, or will we end up seeing the rules of Heroes time travel clearly explained in such a way as to allow for a non-gloomy future sooner rather that later? Only time, ironically, will tell. Just let me know if I end up having to be get my Shanti innoculation.

Alien Presidents:

Superman ran for president in the alternate future of Armageddon 2001... and won. I mean, who's going to vote against Super-POTUS? Okay, there's a legal challenge to Superman's right to run for president, because of the whole "being an alien" thing, but then the Supreme Court rules (amazingly quickly) that Superman was born in America. You see, that rocket that brought him to Kansas from Krypton was like an artificial womb, and it didn't "give birth" to him until it landed. Really. As president, Clark is kind of a big-government liberal, solving the Earth's environmental problems with orbital solar power stations, achieving world peace and balancing the federal budget. (Aquaman finds a ton of gold in a submerged freighter, which pays off the U.S. trade balance.) And Superman ends terrorism. All in his first day in office. We don't get to see if Batman becomes Attorney General and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but I'm betting he does. What i love about that "what if" issue (Action Comics Annual #3) is that Clark's presidency never goes horribly wrong to show why Superman shouldn't be president. It's all pretty much great and wonderful, and then it ends.

President Kang, from the Simpsons, gets a bum rap just because he turned the entire population of the U.S. into slave labor to build a humongous ray gun to aim at another planet. He solved the unemployment problem! Plus do you really think his opponent, Kodos, would have done a better job? I think not. (In "Treehouse Of Horror VII," Kang and Kodos take the place of Bill Clinton and Robert Dole, and even after Homer exposes their deception, they still convince the American public that a vote for the human Ross Perot is throwing their vote away.) After everyone's enslaved, Homer says "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos."


Alien President Kennedy, from Teen Titans Lost Annual #1. I promise I am not making this up. In a "lost annual" that came out last March (but was designed to look like it was published in the 1960s) the Teen Titans discover that President Kennedy has been replaced with an alien shape-shifter. They travel to the aliens' homeworld to discover what's up. It turns out two alien races are trapped in a never-ending war, and one set of aliens has kidnapped JFK to serve as their general. To remind the brainwashed JFK of his true identity, the Titans have to reenact JFK's most traumatic memories from World War II. Finally, they jog his memory, and JFK starts negotiating a peace treaty between the warring alien races. Then the Titans take JFK back to Earth to resume his presidency — only to discover the alien imposter has been assassinated in Dallas while they were away. Because it would be too confusing to restore the real JFK to power, they end up taking him back to the alien planet so he can finish brokering a peace deal there. Yes, Titans scribe Bob Haney did a lot of drugs during the actual sixties.

Cryptosporidium, the evil alien in the Destroy All Humans video game, assassinated the U.S. president back in the late 1950s, and various Cryptosporidium clones impersonated the president and served with distinction for many years.

Bill Clinton was also replaced with an alien clone in the humor-esque film 2001: A Space Travesty, starring (of course) Leslie Nielsen. The real president is hidden on the moon, and it's up to Leslie to save him. This film is best known for including the Stifficus Constellation, a constellation shaped like an erect penis. Also, there's a "rising moon" sequence involving a bare butt.

Also, Michael Dukakis becomes president in the Robert Sheckley short story — but is eventually revealed to be an evil alien, in the anthology Alternate Presidents.

The Fantastic Four's frenemy Impossible Man, from the 10th Galaxy, also impersonated the U.S. president at one point, when the cyborg Deathlok was trying to assassinate the pres. But that only sort of counts.

ALF actually ran for president — and won — in the episode "Hail To The Chief." But it turned out to be only a dream sequence. I still think it sorta counts — was anything in ALF actually supposed to be real?

Robot Presidents:

In Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters #2, the charismatic Senator Frank Knight is murdered by a shapeshifting robot known as Gonzo The Mechanical Bastard, which takes his place. Since Senator Knight is already ahead in the polls in the presidential election, it's a simple matter for the android to become president of the U.S. How evil is this robo-pres? As Senator Knight is bleeding to death, his cyber-doppelganger promises to seduce the Senator's daughter, who's the Phantom Lady, and have incestuous robot sex with her. In the Oval Office. (Is this robot still president in the DC Universe?) When I was at Comic-Con, I asked co-writer Jimmy Palmiotti about this comic book, and he basically said nobody was reading USAFF, so he and Justin Gray just figured they should go as crazy as they could.

Robots also tried to replace the president in Ben 10, but I don't think they actually succeeded. And there's a robot president at the World's Fair in the Firesign Theater album I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, but I'm not clear on whether it's meant to be the real president.

At least nobody would question the experience, leadership or courage of our benevolent President Executron:

Also, John Quincy Adding Machine became the first robot president, winning by exactly one vote according to Futurama. Voters were won over by his campaign pledge not to go on a killing spree, but like most politicians, he couldn't keep all his promises.

And then there's this guy:

Mutant Presidents:

Captain America didn't just punch out Richard Nixon, he also battled a hideously mutated Ronald Reagan. Viper and the evil Serpent Society put a chemical into the Washington D.C. water supply that would mutate anyone who drank it into a snake monster. Captain America finally put a stop to this scheme, but first he had to battle the mutant snake version of President Reagan. Just another example of business as usual in Washington.

There's also Leo Barnett, the two-term president in George R.R. Martin's Wildcards universe. There are odd hints that Barnett may actually be a mutant.

You could argue that Sylar, who became president in an evil alternate future in Heroes, is a mutant rather than a plain old human.

So which of these upstanding leaders would you prefer to lead America through the challenges of the early 21st century?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Show creator Tim Kring is definitely hinting that Sylar's upcoming year will move in that direction:

Sylar will play a major role in the new volume, and the creator and star both spoke about what's to come. Quinto said that in a flashback episode, fans will see more of Gabriel Gray, the pre-Sylar watchmaker... Kring added that Sylar will evolve and his life will become complicated by his interactions with others. “He'll have a series of very human relationships in this season.”

It's almost as if they learned nothing from last year's aimless subplot of powerless Sylar's roadtrip with black tears woman. We don't want to see Sylar having "very human relationships," and we don't want him to evolve - We want the blackhearted bad guy who's only hanging around other people to work out how quickly he can manage to eat their brains. Zachary Quinto, please, tell us that we're not seeing some kind of weird rehabilitation of your character?

Quinto was asked about his upcoming role as Spock in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, and the actor revealed that he sees several similar traits when playing the logical Vulcan and the sociopath villain. “There are elements of the characters that echo each other, but from opposite ends of the spectrum,” Quinto said. He added that they both have “a stillness and a rich internal point of view that informs the way they behave.”

A stillness and rich internal point of view...? Oh God.

I am now dreading Heroes Volume 5: Sylar Learns What It Is To Feel This Thing Humans Call Love.

Tim Kring and Zachary Quinto Discuss 'Heroes' Season 3 [BuddyTV]

According to Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello, the two fanboys are going to "cross paths with (and perhaps serve as advisors to) one of the Heroes." No mention of which Hero it would be, but my fingers are crossed that it's not the already-geeky Hiro. Instead, why not show someone with imagination teaching Peter what he can really do with all those powers of his, or teach Sylar that, with great power, comes great responsibility?

Exclusive: 'Heroes' Geeks Out Over Seth Green, Breckin Meyer [EW.com]

• 
  
• They've given man-bags to all the guys on the show, except Sylar. Is that the hot new hero fashion accessory of the year?
• 
  
• Sylar might include an alternate pointing "let me open your head up" finger-hand, as well as a "shards of flying glass" accessory hand. Oh, and a baseball cap.
• 
  
• Claire would come with alternate "injured" body parts that you can swap out, featuring "regularly occurring forehead injury" head.
• 
  
• Peter in a double-hoodie wearing outfit, and would have extra "radioactive" hands that look like he stuck them in boiling water. Ouch.
• 
  
• Hiro comes with "Ando's sword" covered in blood (what?) and his alternate "constipated" power-activating head.
• 
  
• Mohinder comes with a tiny version of his dad's Activating Evolution book, complete with his picture on the back cover.
• 
  
• There will be a special "Flying" Peter figure, who basically looks like he has a swooshing coat, at a retailer to be named later.
• 
  
• Mohinder was going to come with a set of his files, and an urn containing his father's ashes. Which would have been weird. Does he carry that urn around on the show?
• 
  
• Of course, raddest accessory ever: Sylar comes with a brain.
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Images from the March 2008 Issue of Toyfare Magazine, Issue #127.

• Tim Kring and Jeph Loeb explained they'd literally pried the footage out of NBC's hands to bring it to us at the Jules Verne Festival. It's never been seen before, and might be the only new Heroes footage for weeks or months.
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• The footage starts out by summing up the tail end of Volume Two. Nathan Petrelli gets shot, Noah Bennet (HRG) leaves his family to go back to work for Bob and the company, and Sylar gets his powers back.
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• Then we move into the new stuff when Angela Petrelli says "There's going to be some changes around here." Based on what we can see, she's moved into a powerful role at the company.
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• Sylar confronts Elle (Kristen Bell) and she tells him, "I'm not scared of you." To which Sylar says, "You should be. I'm a psychopathic killer." She retorts, "Takes one to know one."
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• Angela explains that the prisoners kept on Level Five, one of The Company's prison areas, are "The most dangerous, the most powerful: rapists, arsonists, killers." And guess what: Level Five gets breached.
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• There are shots of most of the major Heroes all dead. Peter as a corpse in a pool of blood, Hiro is pinned to the wall with his own sword, lifeless. Matt Parkman has his throat torn open.
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• Noah Bennet says, "It's like twelve Sylars running free."
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• While there might be a lot more villains, it's doubtful they've cast them all yet. There's one new African American bad guy running amok who seems to have the power of super-strength and speed, but it's not totally clear in the clips. Although he does rip one guy's heart out, which can't be good.
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• Sylar is all over the place in this one. At one point, he's held captive in a room which looks like another Company cell and has tubes running up his nose. Maybe he has some sinus problems, who knows.
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• At one point, Sylar puts his arm around Angela's shoulders, in a friendly way. So either they're working together now, or they both have some creepy dating habits.
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• Several villains are walking towards the camera, Reservoir Dogs style, but they're all in shadow so we don't know who they are. Yet.

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