Every time I watch a Sylar-centric episode of Heroes the same question pops into my head: Is Zachary Quinto at the mercy of bad directors, or is he just an old-fashioned ham? His take on Sylar is like Nicolas Cage on Valium. Tonight's episode gave him plenty of room to play and he even had some genuinely good moments, schizophrenic character motivations notwithstanding.

Kudos to the writers for not just letting the whole shape-shifting thing be a stupid plot device. Giving a guy like Sylar the ability to take on entirely new identities is an invitation for new pathos to form. As Nathan reminds him at the end of the episode, he's a psychopath. It was really only a matter of time before Sylar's very broken mind started to do freaky things with such a masturbatory ability.

Those freaky things include shifting in his sleep, reconstituting his own DNA in incorrect ways and, um, having conversations with himself while pretending to be his own mother. Paging Doctor Freud. Doctor Freud to Monday nights at 9:00. Paging Doctor Freud.

With his identity crisis in full swing, Sylar starts to go off-book when Danko sends him out on the hunt. He kills an ability-positive played by a criminally under-used Clint Howard just so he can absorb another ridiculously specific, "I can't imagine when I'll ever need this" kind of power. Seriously, back in Season 1 we had useful stuff like flying and super-hearing. Now we've got a guy who can shatter stuff if he concentrates really hard. That little bit of useless violence out of the way, Sylar decides to save Micah when the agents close in on his position. Why? I dunno. Chalk it up to Sylar being the poster child for conflicting motivations.

Meanwhile, Hiro and Ando manage to have a productive, not inherently annoying day. They trick some agents into guiding them to gestapo headquarters, but not before trotting out the whole "Hiro is insecure about Ando having an ability" thing yet again. As for that ability, I'm still trying to figure it out. When Ando blasts ability-positives with his pink lightening (jeez, that sounds so wrong), they get supercharged. When he blasts regular people, it just hurts them. I feel like I shouldn't complain, though, because so far Ando is the only character on this show who has never used his powers to do something astoundingly stupid.

Also, Matt Parkman wastes our time being a daddy and barely saving his ex-wife and child from being captured yet again. Yawn.

The episode closes on an all-too-rare twist that doesn't suck. When Nathan confronts Sylar for stealing his identity, Danko comes in guns a'blazing. He tranqs Nathan and then puts the knife to Sylar's soft spot. Except that Sylar gets up this time. Early in the episode, Sylar mentions via his unusual extra tooth that his frequent shape-shifting has started screwing with his original DNA. I guess now his weak spot has either moved or has just disappeared entirely. This is either going to be awesome or it's going to completely break the show.

What am I saying? The show is already broken. Kill 'em all, Sylar!

Best Moment: Maybe I'm abusing this rating today, but I'm going to go for Adrian Pasdar doing a Sylar impression. I love watching the other actors on this show pretending to be that character. Their method seems to be, "Look creepy and remove all subtlety from your performance".

Biggest Shock: Everything kinda went topsy-turvy at the end there. Sylar's soft spot is gone, Hiro's power is starting to make his brain bleed (hooray!) and next week's episode has a surprisingly good chance of not sucking.

Episode Rating: 3.8/5- There might have been more ham here than liquidation day at the hog farm, but the plot actually progressed, people used their powers a lot and the tone was nice and dark. Now entering the home stretch.