I know I'm not alone when I say that I hope Hiro actually does die relatively soon. His power-induced illness is probably just one big fakeout, but a guy can dream. We waste a good third of tonight's episode watching Hiro try to save a humiliated salary man from suicide just so Hiro can learn yet another valuable lesson about responsibility and how it somehow relates to time travel. Ya know, real down-to-earth wisdom. In fact, this entire episode was about various conflicted characters coming to some sort of epiphany that puts them back on track to engage in things related to super powers, only in a very self-actualization sort of way. Too bad most of it was pretty boring.

Outside of Hiro's nearly pointless adventure, "Acceptance" consisted of several unrealistically brief meetings in bars and restaurants. First Tracy Strauss reconnected with the oily senator who she used to work for/have sex with and it takes not one, but two additional meetings for her to realize that she no longer wants to make a living helping a politician pass unethical legislation and... zzz... oh! Right. Ahem.

Anyway, Noah Bennet is still bummed that he's not a hard-nosed company man anymore, so Claire comes over to his depressing apartment to hit him with some wisdom that wouldn't have been more out of character if she inexplicably started speaking Swahili. I like Bryan Fuller, but maybe someone ought to tell him that Claire has never been and shall never be wise or level headed. She's a self-absorbed brat, on top of the fact that she's now a college freshman.

In yet another unnecessary extra plot, Nathan discovers that he was involved in an accidental death in his teens and that Angela erased his memory and covered it up, because that's what Angela does. This thread actually explained how the Petrelli family is connected with the character played by Swoozie Kurtz who pops up from time to time. Unlike the rest of episode, something actually kinda happened here, but only at the end. Kurtz's character, the mother of the girl who died on teenage Nathan's watch, has modern-day Sylar/Nathan taken out into the woods and shot in a shallow grave. The nice twist is that it's Sylar who pops out of the dirt. Now that means we have two Sylars running around, one in the original body and one in Parkman's head.

I understand that all of this character development was necessary, but once again, Heroes is a show about people with (mostly) cool super powers. Muted, dialogue-driven scenes are not what makes this show interesting on the few occasions that it is interesting. And so we say the mantra of all continued Heroes viewers: Maybe next week, something awesome will happen.

Best Moment: The gun goes "click", the gun goes "bang".

Notes: If TV and movies are to be believed, then all rich families have a team of unscrupulous thugs on retainer should they need to kill, kidnap, or otherwise destroy somebody.

Episode Rating: 2.5/5- It was slow, it was boring, there were barely any demonstrations of super powers, but the script was unusually good and the characters moved into a more action-oriented frame of mind. Like I said, maybe next week.