Initial thoughts: the episodes seem to be getting better. It's like they got into a bad spot during the writer's strike and are trying to get back on track--or "a" track rather. It requires some forgetting of elements from the past, but I'm interested again.
I've been poking around Wikipedia, and while it's not the grand arbiter of truth, I've read a couple of interesting things regarding the affect the writers' strike had on how the writers of Heroes wrote what they did. But more on that later.
...Speaking of Parkman, whatever happened to the agent he worked with in season 1? Clea Duvall's character?
She fell into the vortex that exists within the writers' minds, I guess.
I don't think they "took his powers" away. I think he "died" and came back? Or being near to death like he was, the powers became latent? Or, he was kept in the hologram thinking he had lost his powers? He got his powers back. Hmm. I don't recall either. I know he spent all his time with whiny Maya and her super lame brother and he had to kill that dude w/o powers. Then, before the big showdown, he had them. Maybe that narrows the window for someone else to remember.
Ok, I looked this part up on Wikipedia. It's never explained why Sylar had lost his powers. At the end of season one, Hiro stabs Sylar with the sword. While everyone else is busy dealing with Peter, who's about to explode, Sylar slips away down a sewer access hole leaving a trail of blood behind him. Sylar reappears in season two with the hologram girl; the two of them are in a shack in the middle of nowhere. She says he's there to recover from the surgery he had to keep him from dying from the sword stabbing. Who performed that surgery is never mentioned, but I assume that it was the Company because of the hologram girl being the one who's watching over Sylar, and she worked for the Company. Sylar mysteriously just can't use his powers. Why he can't is never explained. He gains his powers back at the end of season two when he injects himself with some of Claire's blood that he took from Mohinder.
Adam is a mystery to me. He was the oldest one with powers that we knew of (having uncovered his power during battle in Feudal Japan and living to the present day.) Was he the first? Or was there someone else before? Perhaps Papa Petrelli is older and is also "immportal." Not sure. Good question, though.
With both the helix symbol and the eclipse occurring when Hiro popped back in time, I always thought whatever happened there would be significant in the show's mythos, but the whole Kensei story and Adam seem to be absolutely insignificant now. With that eclipse happening when Hiro popped back in time, I expected to find some "hero" that was causing it to happen. But it seems more likely to me now that it's just a hollow symbol devised for nothing but to be Mysterious™.
Ok, here's what I mentioned earlier that I read on Wikipedia regarding how the story was changed as a result of the writers' strike.
"Powerless" (the last episode of season two)
...Kring and Arkush commented that they re-shot the scene in which Peter telekenetically caught the virus. In the original cut, the virus was to shatter and be released. Kring admitted that the virus being released was to play a huge role in Volume 3, however, they decided to go into a different direction and re-shoot the ending, allowing Peter to catch the virus and destroy it. Kring also commented that the scenes where Matt, Peter and Nathan were talking in the vault were rewritten in and added later, as well as the Press Conference scene and the scene with Angela Petrelli talking on the cell phone. Kring and Arkush stated that the ending had to be rewritten and re-shot because they did not know when the show would return to air, due to the Writer's Strike, and they wanted to make sure that they tied up all the loose ends.
It's kind of funny to me that they were concerned about loose ends considering half of the show is nothing but loose ends. So, maybe that Irish girl that I and others were talking about having just ended up as a loose end many posts back in this thread would have been in the story more had they continued with the virus plot the way they had originally planned.
As of the end of this episode, the status of three main characters remained undetermined. Niki Sanders was last seen inside a burning building which subsequently exploded, and Nathan Petrelli was shot while attempting to speak out against the Company. Their fates were left intentionally ambiguous because the writers were unsure of whether they wanted to proceed with Niki and Nathan's characters; decisions were made following the Writers' Strike resolution....
That the writers were so "unsure" about Niki and Nathan says a lot to me; mostly that significant portions of this show are being written by whim.
...Originally, Sylar was not supposed to get his abilities back due to Zachary Quinto's commitment to the new Star Trek film....
So, who knows what the original plan for Sylar's loss of abilities was if his getting them back was an unplanned change in the story.
Honestly, the more I read things like all this, the more I feel that this story is being told by someone standing across the room and throwing darts at a wall of index cards with plot elements on them and then just writing the ones they hit with darts together into a script.
And the Wikipedia list of episodes has this as part of a description for an upcoming episode:
"...Meredith watches her life go up in smokes, following the arrival of her hot-headed brother."
I swear to God that if they have that guy who uses blue fire be Meredith's brother I'm going to shit my own brain.
Just to recap: these three images are of Zuko and Azula, brother and sister characters from
Avatar The Last Airbender. One of them uses regular colored fire, and the other of whom uses hotter, blue colored fire. I'll especially will shit my brain given that there seems to be two episodes coming up on Heroes, according the Wikipedia episode list, titled "The Eclipse, Part 1" and "The Eclipse, Part 2". The third season Avatar midseason hiatus was two episodes entitled "The Day of Black Sun, Part 1: The Invasion" and "The Day of Black Sun, Part 2: The Eclipse" telling the story of an eclipse-centered event that had been long foreshadowed in the show.
