Okay, so maybe I needed to do one more thing before I start writing.

[apocalypsos]

Honestly, how am I supposed to concentrate when I still hadn't seen this week's Heroes?

Have I mentioned how much the little comic book-ish "To Be Continued ..." at the end of every single episode makes me giddy beyond all human comprehension? The flailing, it is ON.

Okay, so yeah. I had a thought while watching this episode. Or several thoughts that all sort of string together, to be honest. Niki says D.L. has been gone six months. D.L. was arrested for a crime Other!Niki committed, meaning that her powers (or whatever the hell they are, and this is assuming that part of her powers is that separate personality) are at least six months old. Assuming that everybody's powers emerged about the same time given various clues, that means nearly all if now the sum total of "9th Wonders!" (as in, the comic precognitive Isaac's been drawing) has been telling the story of the heroes from the very beginning. Which means that if Micah's been reading the entire run -- issue #9 was in the stack D.L. rifled through -- then of COURSE he knows both his mom and dad have secrets.

HE'S BEEN READING THEIR STORIES ALL ALONG. FOR MONTHS. IN A COMIC BOOK.

*spazzes*

Oh, my God, somebody who is not me needs to write that story.

Why am *I* not writing that story?

Oh, wait, I remember why not. Never mind. *is guilty*

Micah as a two-year-old in that one photo on the shelf! Micah and his daddy are so friggin' cute! SUPERPOWERS FIGHT!

Okay, that's about the whole of what I was thinking when I was having coherent thoughts about Niki and D.L., aside from the fact that he is so very hot and that I believe Other!Niki when she says they're not crazy for some reason which is definitely not helping me figure out what the hell her powers are. (Step One: Superstrength. Step Two: Making my brain explode.)

Elsewhere, Hiro and Ando continue to be the most adorable crimefighting team on the planet, and Hiro pretending to have a lightsaber makes me want to keep him in my apartment and have mock Star Wars fights and I don't even like the movies. It makes me sad that Ando is totally the Uncle Ben and is so going to get killed and make Hiro all solemn. You can just see it coming. I don't want to lose Ando, damn it! I like him and his superhero who likes holding weird pink feather things because "that is how they roll."

Claire's daddy continues to be creepy and yet I'm really, really sold on him eventually turning out to be a good guy and all of this creepiness and bad taste in eyewear to turn out to simply be awful social skills. Also, how come I have yet to see anyone theorize Zach is gay? Okay, somebody probably has, but HELLO. I mean, his reaction to Claire when she asked if he was hitting on her, and then his excitement about her "coming out" to her parents? It's like he was all happy that he has this pamphlet that he really wants to give her except he's whited out all of the times "homosexual" appears and replaced it with "superhuman freak." Also, show -- yes, Claire's self-healing. WE GET IT. No wonder she needs saving, for crying out loud. She's gained invulnerability and lost the common sense to WEAR OVEN MITTS.

Also, good or evil, I still want to raid Eden's kissing buddy's wardrobe while he's wearing it.

Comments

[random-serious.livejournal.com]

Zach is gay. And I love it, because Claire need a good frind and Zach could turn out to be it.

[scribewraith.livejournal.com]

I totally sniggered at Zach's comments. Mostly because I've heard rumours that he's going to be written gay (which is why Claire/Zach bugs me but not quite as much as Claire/Peter). Bryan Fuller's the guy who's doing the Claire storyline and there's an interview in Comic Book Resource with Bryan Fuller which talks about his writing for Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me, both of which he had specifically gay characters as significant cast members (DLM: George's dad was going to be gay, Wonderfalls: the main character's sister). Of course both of these got co-opted/cancelled and the interview goes into it a bit. As an aside, Bryan Fuller is himself Out.

I totally think Zach's gay, and that's why *grin*

[suaine.livejournal.com]

OH! *That's* the Wonderfalls connection. I was really wondering, because at one point early in the episode Nici had the Wonderfalls plastic lion on the table next to her bed XD

[scribewraith.livejournal.com]

YES! YES! I totally pointed it out to the rest of the household and they were all like, what? except the one other person who had seen wonderfalls.

I was very squee!

[beanarie.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that thing with the muffin pan was just excessive and pointless. Getting yourself burned for no reason five feet away from your mom is not the way to be keeping things on the downlow, young lady.

As for Niki, I just had a thought. That 20 grand she "donated" to the private school, she borrowed that from the dude her husband supposedly took millions from? That doesn't feel like it makes sense. On Linderman's end, I mean. You'd think he'd be like kidnapping the chick and holding her in exchange for the money DL Bad!Niki stole. Instead he's throwing more at her, which she then doesn't pay. I don't know. That doesn't seem like sound thinking, business-wise.

[paradisacorbasi.livejournal.com]

Zach says "not sure" on his MySpace with regard to his orientation, and bitch!cheerleader did snark at him getting an erection in the boys' locker room.

[spyderqueen.livejournal.com]

HOLY SHIT, I did not even realize THAT was why Micah knows his parents powers.

I am totally going to have to watch the ep again on SciFi this Friday.

[mcee.livejournal.com]

i'm with you re: claire's dad.

this show blows me away, i got nothing.

:D

[kanedax.livejournal.com]

I could see Zach being gay, but I wouldn't automatically jump there because of his reaction to her comment. The way I see it, there are more straight reactions to "Are you hitting on me" than:

1) "What? NO! No, I'm not... ppppph.... no, I'm not madly in love with you *cough cough*"

2) "Of course I'm hitting on you, sexy mama."

But, yeah, the whole thing about her just doing stupid things because she can, like the oven mitts or the ring in the trash disposal. That's just dumb.

What I'm more curious about is how they're going to play DL over the next few episodes. The way that he showed up, I was expecting stereotypical Evil Gansta Boyfriend. But now I'm leaning more towards him being more of a protagonist than Niki. I'm liking him.

[saturnalia.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've heard quite a lot of people saying that Zach is likely gay, ever since we had that line from the random cheerleader about how he got an erection in the boys' locker room. This episode just confirms it, really. (I'm not sure whether to be peeved or happy- because yay, more well-written gay characters on mainstream TV, but I was vaguely hoping he'd end up dating Claire. They'd just make such a cute couple. *sigh* [Obviously, he could be bi, thus giving us the best of both worlds, but his response to Claire's flirting line makes that doubtful.])

[slashfairy.livejournal.com]

yes. to the comic. and to micah. and to zach.
not sure about dad, but hope so.
niki makes my brain hurt too, in a good way. a history of violence, anyone?

claire.. i see claire as still not quite wanting to believe it, taking stupid risks the same way you'd leave your pills out in the bathroom, or a slashpic up on your computer, with your mom around. she pushes daddy, too, just not in that graphic way.

i fucking love you, man, for pointing this one out to me.

-hugs Ando very very tight-

[kurukami.livejournal.com]

Claire's perpetual tendency to have her healing factor pop into play in ordinary life is what makes me think she's had it since birth or shortly thereafter. People learn not to do things like pull hot pans out of the oven with their bare hands or stick their hand down a running garbage disposal because it bloody well hurts when they do it, and pain is a good discourager.

The fact that she's still doing these things suggests to me that she's never had that negative effect to make her learn not to risk herself. At this point, my guess is she's had it ever since that childhood illness.

[kkglinka.livejournal.com]

That's how I interpret it as well. Many people think of pain only in terms of injuries or illness, but discomfort is a regular component of everyday life. It reminds you to shift position when sitting to avoid pinched nerves or obstructed blood flow, for instance. We learn not to touch hot things because the burning hurts. We remember the pain. If Claire has had her powers for most her life, she's had limited exposure to pain, the chief motivator for remembering things like oven mitts and not touching sharp rotating objects, etc. There's a real condition, rare, in which people cannot feel pain and they often die early in life because they just can't remember to avoid dangerous things without the cue of pain/discomfort.

[apocalypsos.livejournal.com]

Yes, but if Claire has had her powers for most of her life, her parents would have to be either lucky or idiotic not to have noticed by now, and it certainly doesn't explain her mysterious cough as an infant. Plus she's an athlete which means she has to have been injured before, unless she was really beating the odds, and it doesn't sound plausible that she'd suddenly become an uber-klutz after developing healing abilities. And why would she start experimenting with these abilities now if she's always had them? It also seems highly unlikely that she's the only one of the heroes who's had their ability their entire life -- everybody else seems to have recently developed theirs.

In which case, things like not sticking your hand in a garbage disposal and putting on oven mitts when taking a cookie sheet out of the stove are common sense things that you don't just give up doing because you're suddenly invulnerable, especially if you're right in front of your mother and you don't want to be found out.

[drewbeartx.livejournal.com]

I've started developing the theory that Claire WANTS her Mom to catch her. There was that "I walked through fire" comment, she shoved her hand into the insinkerator and held up the mangled hand rather obviously and now the ovenhands. I get the feeling that Claire feels a lot closer to her Mom than to her Dad and wants to "come out" to her first. Which has got to be frustrating the crap out of Dad. :-P

[amalthia]

I'm thinking Niki had too much stress at some point and couldn't handle having any superpowers so created the evil!Niki to take care of things and I'm hoping if evil!Niki and normal!Niki can merge then normal!Niki would be able to use that super-strength without having to turn evil.

I was completely prepared to hate DL but....now I'm really feeling bad for him! I mean that had to suck to find out your wife framed him for murder, killed his crew, and planned to run away with the kid and the 2 million dollars. But I also feel bad for regular Niki because of the confusion she's going through and even with all this stuff that happened and evil!Niki and DL tried to kill each other, I still kind of hope they stay together.

[inmyriadbits.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I really like that theory that Micah will know the heroes' stories from the comic book. Actually, Isaac must know them all, too, unless he doesn't read back over the comics he creates while high. Which wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, because wouldn't you want to double-check your drug-addled creations before publishing?

Regarding Niki's powers--I don't think we should think of them as "powers," per se. The amount of emphasis placed on evolution in the Mohinderlogues (rrowr, btw) points to the "powers" being less about being superheroes and more about survival of the fittest. My theory about Niki is that her normal side is meant to deal with the social/communal aspects of human existence; it allows her to move freely in society, reaping the benefits performing the necessary interactions without the negative repercussions of being a sociopath. Her mirror/evil side, on the other hand, is completely disengaged from moral or communal concerns. That half is all about protecting herself and protecting her genetic continuity (i.e., Micah); she does what needs to be done ruthlessly, without hesitation or wavering over social constructs like morality. This explains why she took over D.L.'s place in the job when he dropped out because he thought it was wrong; why she killed the thugs in the garage; why she killed the men at the card game. She gets the benefits of communal contributions to survival, but when those concerns start to make her choose a course of action contrary to her survival (like walking away from sleeping with Nathan to get out of debt, especially once they threatened Micah), her mirror personality takes over. It's not about good or bad; it's about survival. The hero thing is something we've projected on the changes.

I love Ando, too. I'm not sure he's doomed to die, though; he's the necessary powerless hero, like Hiro said. And we know he's at least around until the showdown with whoever tries to kill Claire, because both Ando and Hiro show up in the paintings Isaac did.

Re: Niki

[kkglinka.livejournal.com]

*nods* I likened Niki's "dual" personality (real Dissociative Identity Disorder is nothing like what Niki has) to the function of the SuperEgo and Id. Regular Niki is the hyper conscious, moral, obedient, even timid SuperEgo. Dark!Niki, represents the unfettered action of the Id, if it were not restrained by the SuperEgo, always serving the individual, but with utter selfishness.

[winterlive.livejournal.com]

HE'S BEEN READING THEIR STORIES ALL ALONG. FOR MONTHS. IN A COMIC BOOK.

*SCREECH*

[penmage.livejournal.com]

I am also sure that Claire's dad is not the Big Bad. The very fact that they keep calling him "the face of evil" in the voiceovers makes me think that they're trying too hard. He's not evil. Syler is the Big Bad. Daddy is just - coming at things from another angle. Not good, exactly, but not really "the face of evil", either.

And I was gratified to with the bet with my husband over whether or not Pixie was a spy or not.

[bleedingsand.livejournal.com]

We don't theorize that Zach's gay because we already know. ^_-

Well, it's not like they were hiding it...

[lazar-grrl.livejournal.com]

I maintain that Claire's mother is the Supreme Overlord of Whatever Creepy Organization It Is and Dad's her second. Hey, I called Eden as a plant within about five minutes of her appearance. This could work. Can you really see someone obsessed with breeding Pomeranians as the mastermind behind a possibly-evil conspiracy? No. Therefore, she's perfect.

You have to wonder what Micah's powers are/will be. I mean, he comes by it from both sides of the family and he's already been shown to be pretty gifted, intelligence-wise.

I don't want to lose Ando. And hopefully Simone will not be turned into a fridge-woman.

[tabaqui]

Heeeeeee!
Dude.
I *so* saw weird pixie!haircut girl that hangs with Mohinder being a damn plant! And trying to keep him there by *kissing* him? Girl, he's slated for hawt luff with Issac and Peter! Please!

I luff this show.

[diannelamerc.livejournal.com]

I've been constantly bugged by trying to determine how "blackouts caused by a deranged alter-ego who seems to be the one ultimately in control of things" counts as a superpower. (Other than in the lead for "Suckiest Super Power Ever" -- even counting the super-strength bonus.)

Then it occurred to me watching this last one: What's a (good) Super-Villan, but someone with super-powers used for evil?

Who says Niki is (is going to be) a "Hero" in this piece...?

After all, while not very comic-book in style, the best villains are the conflicted ones you understand, not the random inexplicable monsters. And Niki isn't in control of this. And even evil!Niki is motivated by survival and love of Micah.

It definitely sucks to be her... I'm just starting to think it may never get any better for her. :-/