So, is Heroes back, ladies and gentlemen? Well, it’s certainly back on the air, that much is certain, with Volume III: Villains. But did it shake off its Season 2 malaise and regain the narrative propulsion and fun of the first season? Well, not exactly. But it’s still leaps and bounds more entertaining already, with the good so far outweighing the bad (albeit barely). Bonus feature: nobody over-enunciating the name “Maya” eight times an episode! So, we can all rejoice in that.

Given the sheer volume of Volume III downloaded into our geek-addled brains tonight, I’m going to forgo trying to analyze the overall premiere episodes and instead try to look at them on a story-by-story basis. That should keep both you and I from leaking brain matter onto the keyboard while trying to sort everything out. Deal? Deal.

A Tale of Two Peters

If you’re like most Heroes fans, you found yourself thinking, “How will the show find new and creative ways to make Peter into even more of an ass hat than it did during Season 2?” After all, last season found an amnesia-riddled Peter dumbly following a centuries-old psychopath towards the brink of genocide. This year, the show takes a bold and inventive approach to Peter’s naivete: send him back in time without any knowledge of time travel ramifications whatsoever.

You have to admit it’s pretty impressive to take Peter’s most bad ass incarnation (Future Scar Peter) and turn him into every inch the emo wuss of his present incarnation. That takes talent. His intentions are good: prevent a future in which those with powers are subjected to lab experiments and concentration camps. But he fails to take into consideration anything Hiro learned in Season 2, or say, anything Marty McFly learned in the Back to the Future trilogy.

But let’s put aside the ass-hattery of this poor boy and focus on that scar: that relentless scar. Originally, that scar occurred in a future in which Claire was killed at Homecoming. But that future was averted thanks to Future Hiro’s intervention. Peter’s scar in the future seen in these episodes is different from that original future, and yet that scar curiously remains. You could call this a continuity error on the part of the show, but I think it speaks to the type of determinism that rules the space-time continuum in Heroes. To show what I mean, let’s move onto another thread.

Your Own…Personal…Petrelli

Reach out and touch Nathan! C’mon, everyone’s doing it. OK, maybe not everyone. Just Linderman, from beyond the mortal coil.

In Season 1, Linderman and other members of the Company saw a future in which the destruction of New York was a necessary sacrifice to preserve the greater good. Season 2 saw a future in which a quarantined society sought refuge from a horrific virus. And Season 3 started with a vigilante society akin to that in Season 1 morphed into another, even more horrible strand thanks to Peter’s butterfly kisses into Nathan’s chest. The question is: why must the future always be so bleak?

In essence, the show’s take on the future is that entropy always reigns, and, in the words of the poem from which the first episode tonight takes its name, “things fall apart.” There’s a natural, inevitable pull to these events, and the prevention of one element does not ruin the overall structure. Think of the Terminator series, in which there is always ever a future in which Skynet wages war against humanity. For both Terminator and Heroes, there is always a future in which anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Thus, it’s fitting that Linderman can still be around, in that his will and essence is intrinsically tied up in such a loosening. Much in the way that certain people in Lost have “work to do,” so too does Nathan Petrelli have a part yet to play in the fight to come. It’s just a question if he cleaves the world in half or manages to keep it stitched together.

I’d Like to Teach the World to Cleave

The ensuring image of Season 1 was the helix, seen in various forms in almost every episode. For this Season, they’ve opted to alter that image slightly, set in on fire, and send it through the earth itself. We saw this image twice: once in the African desert and another time on the docks where Super Mohinder fought off a couple of would-be thugs. Without Isaac, the show had lost its visual prophet. But it looks as if they have a new one in the form of an African shaman.

Now, I could be reading too much into the image, but it certainly looks to me as if that helix is contained in the blood-spattered patern shooting across the globe. This suggests that the potential power of evolution could turn lethal, especially in the hands of someone like Suresh, who inherited not only the proportional strength and speed of a certain arachnid, but also developed super smarm and super sores on his back. Bad trade off, man.

Mohinder’s work will more than likely dovetail into the Hiro storyline, another in which the conflict is kicked off by a supposed hero doing something so stupid that you want to smack them on the head and tell them to sit in the corner and think long and hard about what they’ve done. Hiro HAD to open the safe, didn’t he? Just HAD to do it, due to his SUPER boredom.

But the formula is part and parcel of a general theme this season: the search to accelerate whatever forces are naturally at work in turning ordinary people into superpowered selves (often with unforeseen and horrifying results).  Speaking of someone trying to accelerate the process…

Mind Reader

“Are you gonna eat my brain?”
“Claire, that’s disgusting.”

In a season premiere almost devoid of humor, this absolutely killed me. God bless the show for addressing a popular fan theory with such wit and dismissiveness. This was easily one of my favorite moments of the night, and the culmination of the most effective scenes overall: Sylar’s stalking of Claire. It worked on nearly every conceivable level.

Sylar would have definitely gone to Claire once strong enough, so the character motivation was there. Everything was shot and paced perfectly, and both actors sold the hell out of it. And, to boot, we got a decent chunk of mythology answered, as we saw Sylar “steal” a power for the first time. Absolutely incredible on all levels. It’s stuff like this that makes me mad when the rest of the show doesn’t live up to this level of quality.

I will, however, hold off judgement on the big, “I am your mother” moment at the end of the show, and I will try really, really hard not to make any obvious Empire Strikes Back-type jokes here. I’m not ready for Sylar to be a brother or step-brother or Stepford Wife to Nathan and Peter; that just seems a bit much. Which means it’s probably EXACTLY what’s going to go down here. Hopefully, what will happen is Angela will mean this metaphorically, with The Company as surrogate parents allowing someone like Sylar to truly reach his capacity. Or something like that. Because if we have a flashback of Peter and Sylar playing in a sandbox and TK’ing a Tonka truck I might have to kill myself.

She’s Cold as Ice

Won’t spend long on this, since there’s a ginormous backstory missing here between the time Niki almost died in a New Orleans fire and ended up as Tracy, Power Broker for the Governor of New York City. But obviously I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that she seems to have picked up a new power: to turn people’s perception of her against them. Thus, Hack Reporter calls her an Ice Queen, and she Bobby Drakes him to death. If I were smart, I’d run up to her and call her “Boneless Buffalo Wing Producer” and live like a king.

The question is: does she have different powers per persona, did someone inject her with a little Mohinder Special, or did her near-death experience produce insta-evolution as a defense mechanism? Only The Shadow knows. And by “The Shadow” I mean “Tim Krieg.”

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OK, that’s plenty for one recap, even if I haven’t touched upon the Speedster, Parkman’s turtle talk, or Elle’s adventures in unemployment. Hopefully, as the show returns to only one hour per week, I’ll be able to recap everything more completely. But for now, leave your thoughts about the two-hour premiere below!