tvthatdoesntsuck

REVIEW FOR

Heroes
Season Three
Episode Thirteen
“Dual”
Written by Jeph Loeb
Directed by Greg Beeman

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first.

- What’s up with Matt Parkman?  He gets all the corniest lines and actor Greg Grunberg does absolutely nothing to inject life into them.  He’s quickly becoming the weakest member of the cast, and that’s pretty sad, because Matt used to be one of my favorite characters.

- Nathan Petrelli.  Another favorite character who the writers have messed up.  Unlike Grunberg, however, Adrian Pasdar is doing his best to make Nathan into a believable character… but the writers turned him from a morally grey politician who loves his family but is ashamed of them to, first, a fanatic Christian (what was that about), and now… an arch villain.  With almost no explanation.  I guess the “Eclipse” episodes were the catalyst for this, but the dude went from good to evil in a night.  All the character’s moral ambiguity seems to be gone.  A few tweaked lines here or there would have made him, and his conflict with Peter, utterly believable… but Loeb didn’t think that was important.

So two gaping, stinking flaws so far.  Luckily for the fate of this already rocky show, the rest of the episode is gold.

+ With Big Bad Arthur Petrelli disposed of in the previous episode, Sylar steps up his villain game and traps Claire, Angela, Meredith, and Noah in Primatech and plays Jigsaw with them.  Only, unlike Saw, this is actually goodand not torture porn.  Sylar, played to perfection by Zachary Quinto, is a nuanced villain here that is as desperate to prove something to himself as he is to prove it to everyone else.  Only… he’s not sure what he wants to see.  He, at different times, begs to see that there is good in the world… but he also tries to prove that everyoneis like him.  The Sylar scenes really bring his arc to a surprisingly great close.

+ Not everyone makes it out alive.  One of the main characters Sylar has trapped die in this episode, and a whole bunch of villains die.  All the cards are on the table, and it looks like the series isn’t playing games anymore.  One person who “dies” is obviously going to come back, but the considerably numerous rest are probably down for the count.  And the series will be better for it.

+ Ando gets a power.  And it’s awesome.

+ Peter didn’t suck in this episode.  He actually became the morally grey hero that Nathan once was when he decides to bring down his father’s company.

+ Despite Tracy completely sucking as both a concept and a character… or maybe because of it… there is a scene between her and Hiro that is perfect.  And, yes, it involves her calling him “Pikachu.”  And a great, well-deserved response.

 So overall, while the structure is still flawed, most of the bad stuff here come from things established in other episodes.  Could Loeb have fixed Nathan’s arc and tried to save Parkman’s character?  Yeah.  Did he?  No.  And the episode suffers for it.  However, it’s still a very good conclusion to an uneven volume.

8/10

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