Finally! "Heroes" sure heated up last night, bouncing back strongly after last May's anticlimactic first-season finale. Ending four months of anticipation, the faithful were rewarded with a white Japanese legendary hero, a new flying boy, a Company man who's a Midas, and more than a few of our "heroes" reinventing themselves in new locales.
And still, satisfyingly, Claire in full flower as the nucleus of our story -- the bleeding heart and aching soul whose hardly shallow teen dream to "be who I really am" is the essence that makes "Heroes" not some superfluous sci-fi romp but a resonant portrait of our human thirst for purpose, identity, belonging.
Way to go, Tim Kring, creating a show where a blonde high school cheerleader profoundly represents the truest and strongest in us. Of course Kring would cast some sandy-haired Englishman as a godlike Japanese myth, again subverting our expectations with a bracing jolt. Not to mention the expectations of Masi Oka's Hiro, who'd teleported back to a 17th century version of his homeland in the season finale. His discovery that celebrated samurai Takezo Kensei was a dirty-fighting pirate, whom it seemed it was his responsibility to rehabilitate -- "I broke history," Oka moaned, wonderfully -- marked a nice, if oddly far-flung, twist of fate.
Too bad that last night seemed to be the end for Hiro's father, Kaito, who'd been sitting vigil for four months at that bland urban-square site of the season finale's big (little) showdown, which Hiro had squinted himself into time-traveling away from. George Takei's character, and Cristine Rose as the Petrelli matriarch (and his fellow hero "elder"), were both marked for death on photographs by that mysteriously meaningful symbol otherwise seen in tattoos (and fleetingly revealed last night on the historic Kensei sword).
But as Takei took a seemingly fatal plunge, another possible "hero" took flight. After Claire met an interesting boy at her new high school in the California town where her Texas family has resettled, the kid was revealed to be levitating his way into peering into her bedroom window. Interesting this should happen while she was on the phone with dissolutely depressed daddy Nathan, in the form of a newly bearded Adrian Pasdar, who mopingly gazed into a mirror and saw a bloodied, skin-stripped face staring back at him. He'd flown off in the finale with younger brother Peter, whose death he and his murder-marked mama seemed to be mourning -- though at episode's end, an amnesiac Peter was seen huddled in an otherwise empty shipping container in far-off Ireland.
In other words: The start of "Heroes" second season seemed to lay out as many disparate threads as last fall's very first episode. Canny professor Suresh was seen off in Cairo laying a trap for The Company, in cahoots with now-Californian Claire daddy H.R.G. Mind-reading California cop Matt has become an NYPD detective -- and the protector of sight-gifted kid Molly, suddenly afflicted with hero-symbol nightmares. Down in Honduras, we met new "hero" Maya and her brother Alejandro, fleeing toward the United States after being hit with a murder rap. Seemed after their smuggling-truck mates wound up bloody dead that maybe Maya sometimes goes uncontrollably postal.
And these folks are hardly the half of it. The post-show previews of future "Heroes" action reminded us that we hadn't yet seen Sylar, or Niki, or Micah, and what about The Haitian?
Of course, we're lucky if we can see any of them behind those obnoxious NBC series promos that plaster themselves over the bottom part of the screen as "Heroes" action unfolds. If Wednesday's new "Bionic Woman" series weren't already known to me as a dreary stinker of a remake, I'd boycott it anyway, to protest these distractingly moving, garishly colored intrusions. My hero would be anyone who can get these atrocities gone for good.
(Watch "Heroes" video online here.)
[Above: The new kids. Dania Ramirez as Maya, Shalim Ortiz as Alejandro, in NBC photo by Trae Patton.]