Heroes Volume Five: Chapter Fifteen

415 – Pass/Fail

Here’s a shocker for you – a good episode that revolves around conversations between three groups of people. It shouldn’t work – every single part of this is utterly doomed to fail – but it works and it manages it in a very comic book way.

Sylar pursues Claire to her college, intent on finding out why she is his destiny and his random fear of dying alone. They spend their time exchanging barbed comments as Sylar uses what methods he can to find out why he and Claire are bound together. It’s a fairly interesting revelation, albeit one that sort of breaks Sylar’s character completely.

Meanwhile, in the much more interesting subplot, Hiro passes out at Bennett’s and wakes up in a courtroom in the Burnt Toast Diner, where Judge Kaito is presiding over whether or not he altered the timeline for his own personal gain, with the prosecution taking the form of Adam Monroe. This is classic comic book stuff – the hero on the stand for the few crimes they’ve committed, with the penalty for a guilty verdict being that Hiro succumbs to the brain tumour. It all builds to a proper climax where Hiro must fight Adam Monroe to stay alive.

Least interesting part of the whole thing is Samuel’s attempts to convince Vanessa to stay with him. It turns out that he’s made the valley beautiful so he could build her dream cottage right in the centre of it all. But she rejects him and we finally get to see what he’s capable of when he causes an earthquake to swallow an entire town.

It’s an enjoyable episode that seems content on solving all the minor quibbles for the characters before we get plunged into the build-up for the final few episodes of the season. It’s a really curious choice of David Anders as guest star though – didn’t they use all of Volume Three to sever any and all ties to the much-maligned second season?

All in all, it’s a merciful break from the usual craptastic plotlines. If the Claire and Samuel plots were slightly faster in pace and if the Hiro plotline wasn’t resolved in exactly the same way it was cleared up in Volume Three (seriously, it’s the second time they’ve used the same conceit to unscrew his brain) then this would get full marks. As it stands, it gets four stars simply for not being shit.

4 stars

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