TV Review: ‘Heroes’ Episode: ‘An Invisible Thread’

So here we are. The end of volume four has been reached and what an interesting end they’ve chosen to go with. I’m not exactly sure how to take the episode I just watched for I didn’t think they bungled it like they’ve done so often in the past with one of my favorite shows, but it felt like something was lacking. It had all the neat twists and turns I was hoping that it might take and there was no lack of intriguing story arcs to make it a disappointing mess. I must say it might be the fact that there was no big showdown like I feel a season ender should have. There were some good fights here and there but when you watch the end of a season, and in this case the end of a volume, shouldn’t there be some big explosions and people flying all willy nilly through the air to their deaths? Even the end to the last volume had the explosion of the Petrelli’s father’s evil lair. But maybe I’ve just seen one too many action movies. But in the end I will say that this was a good end to the volume and a very introspective one at that.

Now I won’t go into every detail of the show but leaving off from last week we now see Sylar is all back to being a bad ass villain mode and is planning on going to meet the president at some hotel and is all jazzed about shaking his hand. I’m not exactly sure what this will get him but it’s apparently a big enough deal to get every available hero moving his ass double time to stop him. Hiro and Ando are still on their quest to bring down Building 26 and now it seems as though Hiro’s body is rejecting his power for some odd reason and every time he uses it he gets a nose bleed or his ear bleeds, pretty much blood will shoot out of some part of him if he keeps using his power, that and he’s now more prone to dizzy spells and collapsing into people’s arms.

Nothing of too much excitement goes on during the scenes at Building 26 and it’s no great siege as you might be hoping for. It basically becomes a plot point to help out a few characters so they can join the rest as they head to the hotel to make sure Sylar doesn’t touch the president, and not in a creepy pervy kind of way but in a power hungry demented Sylar kind of way. Now there is a pretty good show down between Nathan, Peter, and Sylar, or at least it sounds really cool as we get to see none of it because the door gets closed and all we get is fighting noises and blue lightening flashing around the cracks of the doors. That’s okay though because it ends up being kind of a nifty trick to not waste money on the CGI that would be required to show us a good old smack down. And let’s just say one person doesn’t get out of the fire fight all in one piece.

And of course we build up to the inevitable meeting of Sylar and the president because we can’t not have a scene where the villain looks like he is about to succeed in his nefarious scheme and then all hell breaks loose. Now what they do with several of the characters at the end is pretty inventive and I’m not entirely sure how they are going to pull it off in the season, or seasons, to come. It was a pretty nifty trick but it seems to negate where the whole show had been heading in the whole future of it all. Of course as we’ve seen through time paradoxes, the future of the show has changed many times over from the choices characters have made so it won’t be more needed than a simple altering of what the future now has to offer to explain away all the events that have transpired from this volume ender.

So I must say good for you Heroes in making a volume that pretty much corrected all the wrongs that have been going on with this show ever since the start of volume two. I will say I think they’ve pretty much regained their strength and have restored my faith in this show and of course now there’s always the problem of sustaining it and keeping it on track but that can’t be that hard. From the little preview of volume five that we’re given, titled Redemption, it seems like they are heading into some interesting and mind bending territory.