Heroes: Strange Attractors

Here's what I love about Heroes. It will happily spend forty minutes every week being unbelievably terrible, then just to rub some salt in the wound it will do something vaguely approaching awesome in the last two minutes. "Strange Attractors" managed to jam so much awfulness into one episode that it was like watching some kind of epic Olympic injury, then it ended with a glimpse into what Heroes really ought to be. Ya know, just to screw with us.

So, as it seems like the only way to really run down the "plot" developments of Heroes efficiently, let's break out the bullet points again.

• Claire is now bi-curious thanks to the ratings-bait kiss from a couple weeks ago. So that means we get to spend an episode focusing on the ways even supposedly "normal" people are different and special, too, right? Wrong. Instead, Claire, Gretchen and a couple stock sorority types get kidnapped by the Alpha whatevers and brought to an abandoned slaughterhouse where Invisible Girl tries to kill them. This episode's genre count: 1 (horror) and rising.
• Bennet, for no good reason, decided to hang out in town with Death Hands just so he could then trick the cops into letting him go and establish a false identity for him. Because being useless is her real power, Tracy shows up to have another boring conversation with the kid. Very, very long, boring, pointless, stereotype-laden story short: the hick cops figure out that Death Hands is "different" so they drag him behind a pickup truck until he dies, 'cuz that's how hicks solve all their problems. Genre count: 2 (thinly veiled racism drama).
• Parkman is losing control of his body to Head-Sylar, so he tries to drink him out of his mind. These were some really amazing scenes for unintentional comedy. Genre count: 3 (inner demons and addiction drama). Plus, this plot produced the following image:

Sylar doing his impression of me whenever I watch "Heroes"

• Lastly, Super Carny tries to get Tracy to join his magical troupe of evil, apparently because the collective has become too useful. Also, he gets revenge on the hick police for dragging Death Hands by making the earth swallow up the entire police station. On screen. It was pretty awesome, actually. Genre count: 4 (actual show about people with super powers).
  

Best Moment: The Revenge of Super Carny. While I would appreciate a show that consisted mostly of things like this, I can accept the maddening splendor of seeing it happen once in a blue moon on Heroes.

Notes: Evil people love apples, not just because they're nutritious and taste great, but because they make it really easy to look vicious and sinister when you bite into them.

Episode Rating: Good-bad. The comic stylings of Quinto and Grunberg are so good I'll be sad to see this plot inevitably disappear and I'm actually a bit surprised they went through with the dragging of Death Hands. Heroes is like the most bitter food on the planet and snark is Miracle Fruit.