On one hand, I’m so happy Heroes is back. Mondays are cool again! On the other hand, Monday’s episode was the first one I’ve been even mildly disappointed with overall. The problem is pretty clearly that this was an “aftermath” episode where they had to kind of reset the plotlines following the flurry of significant activity from the last couple of shows before the break, but to me it felt like they spent too much time going over ground we’ve already covered, sometimes literally (Claire and Zach filming her “stunts”).

Here’s some of my cobbled-together thoughts from the episode:

The Good

• I’m glad that Nathan seems to finally be getting out of his state of denial, since that was getting old. The connection between Hiro, Isaac and him seems to be the first steps toward getting the Heroes together and I think that’s what I’m really hoping gets going sooner than later; the show is really at its best when the Heroes interact with each other.
• The scene in the museum where Hiro mimicked Isaac’s painting with the stuffed Dinosaur was a bit of a relief: I’m not saying that rampaging Dinosaurs wouldn’t be kind of cool but it seems a bit early in the show’s run for it to start going that far over the edge.
• Parkman’s confrontation with Horn Rimmed Glasses was excellent, especially in the perfectly executed response by HRG. Jack Coleman’s delivery of the could-have-been-lame line, “Good luck with that” was spot on and satisfactorily sinister. Clearly HRG thinks he’s more or less invincible.
• HRG’s swagger was effectively counterpointed by the scene between Claire and the Haitian since we know that HRG is not quite as clued in as he thinks.
• Parkman finally coming clean to his wife gave me hope that we’ll soon get some sort of resolution of that more or less uninteresting thread. I don’t mind that we have some backstory on him and his family situation to give a better idea of his character but they’ve spent a lot of time on it and I think he has better chemistry with Audrey (Clea DuVall, whom I usually can’t stand but does an okay job in this show) than with his wife (played blandly by Elizabeth Lackey).
• The invisible man’s introduction was pretty well done although I wasn’t quite able to discern how Peter knew that he was supposed to help him stop the explosion. The impression I got from the dream sequences was that this guy (Wikipedia lists the character’s name as Claude) was somewhat sinister.

The Not So Good

• Not to keep harping on it, but can we do something about the Niki/Micah/DL storyline, please? It feels like those scenes are from a completely different show. Or at best from a spin-off where the continuity remains but these events are completely separate from the main show. It doesn’t help that DL’s character is written in a really bizarre way where he seems to flip-flop on his feelings for Niki and I don’t think Ali Larter’s acting chops are quite up to the split personality thing. The only redeeming part of this storyline in the last six episodes was the brief and never addressed moment where it seemed that Niki was able to use Jessica’s super strength to snap the police baton and that ain’t enough to make up for the ten minutes of otherwise wasted time.
• Claire’s scenes were almost entirely wasted. Other than the brief conversation with the Haitian, it was all retread territory going back to the pilot. The off-air drama surrounding the actor who plays Zach (I guess he or his management wasn’t happy with the revelation that Zach is gay, which I don’t really care about one way or the other except that I think it was a weak way to try and evade the obvious chemistry that he and Claire have so it didn’t turn into a “will they get together?” kind of story element) maybe didn’t help, but either way I’m more interested in seeing Claire connect with the other Heroes than seeing her try to win Zach over. Again.
• I was kind of baffled by the scenes with Ted Sprauge (the radioactive guy) in the desert until I figured out that there was supposed to be a little snippet featuring a new character (Hana, introduced in the online comics at nbc.com) and Ted. I’m not sure when it was aired, if at all, but I found it on the website. Without it though, the part with Ted sparking fire from his hands seemed really random. You know, come to think of it, even with the Hana scene, it was still pretty random.
• I wasn’t all that impressed with the time spent on the sword scenes. Most of the time whenever Hiro is onscreen I’m happy, but all that time spent for a replica? I guess it was semi-necessary to show where Hiro’s powers are at the moment and to introduce the Lieberman connection but the end result was so anticlimactic that I wished they’d either handled it differently or had something more tangible result from that sequence.
• I’m usually not a Mohinder hater, but his confrontation with HRG was kind of lame. He really needs to get his storyline into motion because he’s practically the only person who is still more or less at the same point they were during the pilot. And no, I don’t count his conviction that this is something he needs to do as progress: We all knew he’d end up back in New York so the sidetrack wasn’t entirely welcome despite it being decently executed.

So, not my favorite episode but at least they got the aftermath show out of the way so hopefully next week we can get back to moving things forward.