1. The Second Coming
2. The Butterfly Effect
3. One of Us, One of Them
4. I Am Become Death
5. Angels and Monsters
6. Dying of the Light
7. Eris Quod Sum
8. Villains
9. It's Coming
10. The Eclipse I
11. The Eclipse II
12. Our Father
13. Dual
14. A Clear and Present Danger
15. Trust and Blood
16. Building 26
17. Cold Wars
18. Exposed
19. Shades of Gray
20. Cold Snap
21. Into Asylum
22. Turn and Face the Strange
23. 1961
24. I Am Sylar
25. An Invisible Thread

In an otherwise normal world, a small group of ordinary people find themselves gifted with remarkable powers, but with great power comes a whole mess of trouble.

Following the difficult second season that was cut short by the writers' strike, HEROES bounces back with a season that, if not completely successful, is at the very least triumphant.

Tackling complaints raised about meandering storylines, lack of action and all but lost cohesiveness, not to mention too many characters, this season serves up a plotline that is centred around families. The Petrelli clan in central to the plot, providing a new and formidable enemy as well as problems between the brothers. Claire and her father struggle with their relationship as she finds out more about what he really does, Matt Parkman sees a family in his future, Hiro goes back in time to visit his family in less troubled times and Sylar learns more about the meaning of family than he could have ever have wanted.

The threat is revealed relatively early on and proves to be a formidable one, at times too formidable, but it allows for the groups to come together earlier in the series with a common goal in mind. New characters are added quite early on, but others disappear completely and the body count is significant amongst the lesser characters. Most confusingly, a character is introduced who looks exactly like Nikki from the first two seasons.

And if you want plot then this season has it in abundance. At times there is so much going on that it is hard to keep up and storylines don't get the room to breathe properly. It does all come together, though, in a final couple of episodes that show what the series should be capable of.

Having lost its way, HEROES is firmly back on track and once again the only superhero show in town.

In the future, the people with powers are hunted down mercilessly. In order to put things right Peter Petrelli comes back in time to the point where his brother revealed the truth to the world and prevents him from doing so. Hiro, meanwhile, is now head of his father's company and becomes privy to a secret of such danger that it must always be locked in the safe. He immediately opens the safe and loses the secret. A quick trip to the future shows a fight between himself and Ando, an Ando with powers. The way that might have happened is discovered by Mohinder. His research into Maya's condition reveals something that he hadn't considered and leads not to a cure, but to a serum that can unleash powers in normal people. And Claire, the invincible cheerleader, finds herself trapped in her home with a newly repowered up Sylar.

HEROES is back and back with a bang. After Season 2 was cut short by the writers' strike, the team have had a chance to regroup from the critical and fan backlash. They certainly make a statement with this opening episode which contains more incident than much of the last season combined. The second coming of the episode title refers to Nathan Petrelli's return from the dead and finding of God, so it will be interesting to see where that goes and hints are already being given with the return of an old enemy to his bedside and a Governor being 'handled' by Nikki.

The Hiro storyline is the most packed with him discovering the secret, losing the secret and seeing the results of that loss all in about ten minutes. There's a lot going on in a short time and that makes it feel rushed and more than a bit cartoony. Mohinder's discovery of the secret behind the manifestation of the powers and the creation of a serum to awaken them in normal people also comes around so quickly as to be rushed, but again sets up a plotline that we are itching to see followed.

And then there is the Sylar and Claire. Their segment is an exercise in old-fashioned horror (see HALLOWE'EN for the full version) and is the most effective by virtue of being the simplest. A young girl at home is stalked by a killer who wants her brain. Simple, but effective and again with all kinds of hints that take us back to the original 'save the cheerleader, save the world'.

The Second Coming has some nice ideas for setting up the new season, but gone is any hint of the slow burn that made Season 1 so memorable. It's trying to say too much too quickly and suffers as a result. Perhaps the style will settle down in later episodes.

Peter's return from the future has seriously messed things up, as he is coming to understand. He is responsible for Sylar's new ability, taken from Claire, and the emotional fallout from that. Sylar is on the hunt for new powers and heads for the Company to get them from the inmates there. The woman working for the governor isn't called Niki, even though she looks just like her. She has a surprising offer for Nathan Petrelli and a different power. Speaking of different powers, Mohinder is about to learn that his comes with unexpected side effects.

HEROES storyline is firing off in all directions at the moment. Today's Peter is trapped in the body of another man and on the run. He is about to be hunted down by Mr Bennett who wants the inmates back in the asylum. Matt Parkman is wandering around the African veldt with a newly found spirit guide. The woman who may or may not be Nik (we're still not clear on this point) has a talent stolen from the X-MEN and Mohinder has become the new Fly. That's a lot of incident, but not a lot of coherence at the moment. This isn't exactly unexplored territory with HEROES, which never gives up its plot twists too easily, but if it doesn't slow down and catch a breath soon then it's going to run out of twists before we get to the end of episode 5.

The escapees from the Company cells plan a bank robbery and Noah Bennett is sent to deal with the situation. He is partnered with Sylar who has his own methods of ensuring that the criminals don't hurt anyone else. Claire gets a harsh lesson in survival from her biological mother whilst Niki's clone goes in search of her past. Hiro and Ando go in search of the second part of the formula.

HEROES has too many characters to comfortably fit into a single episode and seems unwilling to jettison any of the more major ones. Thus we don't see Mohinder or Maya at all, Parkman only gets a couple of minutes, Peter is definitely in the background. This also means that the plotline is shooting off in all sorts of directions.

The Bennet/Sylar team up is the more interesting of the plot strands and yet it is rushed through with unseemly haste in order to shoehorn in Claire's survival lesson. It is hard to believe that both her mothers (adoptive and biological) are stupid enough to think that she is going on cheerleading practice after that. It's hard to believe that cold as ice Mrs Petrellis is stupid enough to believe that she can harness Sylar. It's also hard to believe that Hiro and Ando are stupid enough to lose the second part of the all-important formula. Hiro was always the heart of the show, but now he is also the bumbling idiot of the show.

HEROES is a bit too disjointed and diffuse at the moment, not to mention going over old ground (remember Isaac and his predictive paintings from Season 1, but there is still enough going on to keep interest high for the moment.

Matt Parkman gets a peek into the future, a future that is being visited by Peter Petrelli in the company of...Peter Petrelli. His future self shows him the world that will be, a world where everyone who can afford it has powers and crimes have become huge ('man caused earthquake'). The only solution, apparently is for Peter to take Sylar's power for his own so that he can understand how the situtation works. Sylar in the future, however, is not the man Peter knows, but he is the man who will destroy hundreds of thousands in one moment of hate and revenge. The key is the formula, a formula that Hiro and Ando lost and which they must now resort to desperate measures to regain.

Once again there is a huge amount of plot in one episode, but as it is mostly focussed on the future that Peter is visiting it works pretty well. That future is actually quite interesting, more interesting that the current world. Sylar is a loving family man who has come to terms with and mastered his power and the need to kill to use it. Matt has a family with Daphne the speedster, but she is working for the company and a vengeful, murderous Claire in order to kill Peter, the one man who has seen that unlimited powers for all will lead to the destruction of the planet. He is, therefore, deemed to be a terrorist for trying to stop the spread of the serum. This is all nicely portrayed with hints of other events (Sylar's son is named Noah, after the absent Mr Bennet) and an apocalyptic turn of events.

Back in the present, Hiro and Ando are locked up in a cell, which actually allows them to be better comic relief because they don't get to do anything too stupid, but are allowed to be their own funny selves. Hiro's surprising last action will hopefully be explained in future episodes.

Tracy learns that she was Niki's sister, one of identical triplets and that she is not alone with powers, a relationship building with Nathan who is still seeing Mr Linderman in his head. And poor old Mohinder is turning into something and it's something with a temper. Could he be turning into one of the villains of this series? Now that would be a twist.

More streamlined and focussed, this is the best episode of this season so far and gives us plenty to ponder before next week's instalment.

Claire has gone on a revenge trip against the escaped prisoners of Level 5. Her choice is a man who can create vortices to, well, who knows where. Noah Bennet takes Sylar on a mission to get her back, but he has another agenda as always. Maya learns of Mohinder's continuing descent into madness, to her cost. Hiro releases Adam Monroe, looking for his help only to lose him and the truth is revealed about why Mr Linderman is appearing to Nathan. Nathan himself finds out some not very nice truths about his mother.

With this episode, following on from Chapter 4 - I Am Become Death, HEROES is back on track. Whilst Hiro continues to be an idiot, all of the other plotlines are coming together nicely. Claire's revenge trip and the insight it brings into her father is the central one and begs the question at the core of the episode - who are the angels and who are the monsters? Some of them are obvious, step forward Angela Petrelli, but the blurring of the lines between the reforming (or is he?) Sylar and the ever-duplicitious Sylar is a continuing nice touch.

Linderman's reappearance in Nathan's life and the older Petrelli's sudden taking to religion gets explained in a nice revelation and the so-far sideline character of Claire's real mother is left in a nasty situation.

This is what we like about HEROES, quality character work, plot twists and a bit of action along the way.

Claire goes after her birth mother and finds herself locked in a three way struggle with a man who can control people like puppets and has a penchant for russian roulette. Hiro and Ando, having worked their way into the Pinehearst organisation attempt to capture a man who can see their every move before they make it. Matt Parkman tries to connect with Daphne, his wife in his future vision. Nathan and Tracy go to Mohinder for help, discovering along the way that he is not the man he once was. Peter storms into the Pinehearst building and learns the true identity of the rival company's leader.

Wow, there really is a lot of incident in this one episode, so much that it's almost hard to keep up. Claire vs the puppetmaster is the one that gets the most screen time and turns out to be both the most horrifying and the most satisfying as a result. The other plotlines are rushed through at such a pace that it's almost impossible to appreciate them fully. Hiro and Ando's comedy routine is actually funny rather than pathetic this time around. Mohinder's encounter with Nathan and Tracy is a full episode crammed down into a small part of one and is therefore forced and pointless. Adam Monroe was brought back only to meet a grisly end without actually ever doing anything.

This is all really to get us to the big reveal in which yet another Petrelli family secret is revealed and the cliffhanger mounted. It's a good one though.

Without his powers, Peter is a prisoner of his father, about to be used in Mohinder's experiments, when Sylar appears and gets taken in by his father. Or does he? Matt finds a way to get Daphne out of the clutches of Pinehearst. Or does he? Hiro refuses to go back in time to find out what he needs to know to battle the new evil, a decision the african painter accepts. Or does he?

The battle lines are being drawn. Daddy Petrelli (Robert Forster) has got a tightly controlled army of loyal talents behind him and the aim of the destroying the company run by his wife whilst the heroes are running around in their various directions slowly heading towards the same point. As things come into focus, the show is getting better and better. The enemy is known and is brutal and must be stopped. The characters are starting to come together as plotlines start, ever so slowly, to converge and there is a sense that this is actually going somewhere.

HEROES is starting to become unmissable again.

Hiro is on his vision quest into the past. He sees events that took place a year before, just as the the first of the heroes were starting to discover their powers. He learns how Nathan Petrelli's wife was crippled, how Nathan's father became a cripple whom everyone believed to be dead and what made Nathan's mother the cold-hearted manipulator that she now is. He sees how Gabriel became the monster that is Sylar and how Clare's mother escaped Primatech. He learns all of this in time to....

HEROES is back with a stunning episode that takes the established mythology of the show and starts to play with it again, filling in the blanks. The softening of Sylar continues, showing how conflicted he was until he was pushed over the edge by Primatech. One the other hand, Petrelli Snr is painted in black and white (mainly black) as the most implacable villain. This is all beautifully done with sequences coming together in inspired junctions (the burning train that Clare encountered back in Season 1 turns out to have been caused by her mother, Elle is partly responsible for the creation of Sylar etc) that will leave the casual viewer cold (if this is your first episode then go back to the start and try again) whilst making the fan jump up and down ecstatically.

The concentration on the few stories and the simplicity of each makes this the most successful episode of the third season and manages to balance the action with the character development, shortchanging neither. This is the pinnacle of what the show can acheive and it even manages to throw in a major cliffhanger just to top things off.

Hiro manages to escape from Arthur Petrelli's clutches, but has regressed to a ten year old. Matt attempts to free Angela Petrelli from her trance, but Arthur stands in his way. Nathan faces his father and picks a side. The truth about why the serum won't work for Mohinder becomes clear and Sylar finds a new way to acquire powers that doesn't involve taking people's skulls off.

The teams are coming together nicely with Arthur Peterelli on one side and the rest of the family on the other. The truth about the target of all this, Claire's blood, finally comes to light and it's once again a case of 'Save the cheerleader, save the world'. There are character moments in abundance as the focus closes in as the sides are drawn up. Arthur Petrelli stands astride them all, pulling the strings and beating the daylights out of all of them, but there's an eclipse coming and that is going to make a significant difference, apparently.

Ten year old Hiro, is fun, but who is writing the comics that tell his future now that Isaac Mendez is dead? And it's nice to see characters changing side, sometimes in surprising ways. This third season is really starting to come together in all kinds of good ways.

Arthur Petrelli comes up with a series of drawings that show an eclipse and Claire dead and Sylar and Elle kissing and Hiro in a corn field and his two sons falling. All of these things come to pass when a solar eclipse occurs and everyone finds that their powers have gone. This leaves Sylar and Elle no match for Mr Bennett, but it also means that Claire can't heal after she gets shot.

Wow there is so much plot going on that it's hard to keep up. The sudden withdrawal of everyone's powers by the eclipse (and please someone explain to us how that works) throws all kinds of spanners in the works, but it does give us the wonderful sight of seeing Mr Bennet kick eight bells of crap out of Sylar. The sudden appearance of a villain in Haiti is shoehorned in to give Nathan and Peter some sort of threat to contend with and is a stretch too far, but the reason that Matt's speedster girlfriend won't see him is a touching surprise.

HEROES is on a roll again and whilst it might not be making much sense in some places it is still fascinating.

Claire dies, Sylar is executed by Mr Bennett, the Petrelli boys help the Haitian with Baron Samedi, Hiro learns the truth about himself through the comic books detailing his life (published posthumously following the death of the artist it is explained). And then the eclipse ends and things get busy.

Is anyone managing to follow all this. There is so much happening that it's hard to find time to take a breath. That's not such a bad thing, but only in the storylines where it's less artificial. Events surrounding Claire and Sylar are brilliant. Mr Bennett becomes the man with the power when the heroes are rendered helpless and he shows it in no uncertain terms. Sylar's manipulation and sudden about turn is shocking.

OK, so the whole eclipse things was a big, fat reset button that allowed all kinds of things to happen only to then reset them back to the beginning again, but it was handled pretty well. Bits that didn't work were the continuing story of the sudden fight against Baron Samedi, finished with the same abruptness that it arrived and just as pointless. Hiro's hanging around a comic book store is fun, but ultimately goes nowhere, at least until it intersects with the Sylar story.

Whatever the flaws, there can be no doubt that HEROES is back on form and edging towards becoming unmissable again.

Hiro and Claire go back in time and both meet their parents when they were much younger. They learn how much they were loved and also how to prevent Claire from being given the catalyst that will cause so much trouble. Hiro is healed and receives the catalyst, but Arthur Petrelli turns up and takes the catalyst, and Hiro's powers before returning to the present and facing a showdown with his son Peter and the newly-restored villainous Sylar.

This episode concentrates on the story of Hiro and Claire in the past and the creation of the superformula in the present, making things tighter and better than they have been for a while. There is a real sense of the story going somewhere now even though the pace is not falling away at all. The return of Sylar to his previous bloody ways doesn't quite ring true, but it couldn't have come at a better time whilst the showdown with Arthur is surprising, but effective. The story continues to twist and turn like a snake in pain, but that just makes it more interesting to see where it is going to go next.

Sylar decides that it is time to avenge himself on those that created him and locks them all in the Primatech facility. His aim is to show them all that they are monsters just like him. Their aim is to get out alive. At Pinehearst, now that Arthur Petrelli is dead, Nathan takes up his plan, but Peter isn't about to let that happen.

It's the season finale and this is what HEROES should have delivered at the end of Season 1, an apocalyptic all out battle of abilities between the good guys and the bad guys. There are going to be casualties on both sides, but where villains fall there are others to take their place.

Nathan Petrelli's fall from grace is a too abrupt to be believable, although it does set up the next season, which is to be called 'Fugitives'. Sylar's return to villainy once again is a bit over the top, but since we've been there before and since he's providing all the action we can forgive that. Ando gets a power at last and Peter gets his back. An apocalypse is averted, but at what cost?

Dual confirms the promise that the show has aspired to, but never quite managed to pull off. Now we can look forward to it building on that and becoming unmissable once again.

Following the destruction of the two companies Primatech and Pinehearst in the civil war over control of the people with powers, everyone has been laying low and trying to live a normal life - all except Nathan Petrelli who has risen from new Senator to having the ear of the President. When the empowered suddenly start to go missing, kidnapped by people who know who they are and what they can do, it becomes clear that the country has set in motion an operation to take them off the streets and incarcerate them forever.

Starting off 'Volume 4 - Fugitives', this is a whole new story, but it hits the ground running. Within the space of a single episode several of the heroes have been captured, two have escaped, Nathan has been revealed as the big mind behind the whole operation and Noah Bennett is helping run it for him. Both of them have made deals with the devil to keep their families out of the situation. Nathan believes that the empowered can't control what they are and need to be restricted, drugged and kept locked away. The sight of the captured people in orange jumpsuits, shackled, drugged, blindfolded and with their ears covered is shocking and it is ironic that this was originally broadcast at a time when the Guantanamo inmates were finally being released and the infamous place closed down.

The the plot borrows a leaf out of CON AIR by putting them all together on a plane and allowing one to get free. This isn't exactly believable as security of the operation is laughable. Claire is set free and sent home with just a driver. There is nobody watching the plane take off and nobody sees a woman in orange run across the tarmac and climb inside. The guards inside then don't notice her as she moves to free all the others.

Sylar's encounter with the bad guys is the only real flash of high action as he manages to take on the assault team and win.

HEROES is trying too hard to keep the pace up and the story moving and is losing sense as a result.

On the run from the crashed plane, the empowered are chased by the military relentlessly. Matt Parkman has another vision of the dead shaman from Africa and draws some pictures of the future where Daphne is shot. For their individual reasons, they all converge back on the plane and a fire fight takes place. Meanwhile, Sylar engages in a spot of torture and makes a new friend.

This starts off well enough with everyone running from the aftermath of the plane crash (although Peter chooses not to fly anyone to safety for some strange reason) and Sylar takes an innocent family hostage to force an agent to reveal where his father is being hidden. Matters start to go downhill, however, when Parkman starts the whole drawing the future thing that has been overused as a plot device throughout the three seasons to date. Sylar's little torture scenario is also chilling until he makes the discovery that one of his randomly chosen victims is actually empowered. I mean, what are the odds? Instead of just killing him, Sylar decides to go on a road trip with him? At least he justifies it by telling the boy that letting him live 'is a big thing for me'.

The episode's big moment, when the military and the empowered find themselves in a firefight and both sides take casualties is badly messed up by framing it with an impassioned phone call from Nathan to his mother explaining what happened, losing the impact in the attempt to give some sort of moral depth to the character. It doesn't work.

Oh, and Claire is both let go and recaptured again.

When a Presidential advisor shows up intent on shutting down his operation, Nathan needs a fortuitous breakout to convince her that people with powers are dangerous. Sylar certainly is dangerous, evading a second capture attempt and gaining the address of his father into the bargain. Claire, meanwhile, finally breaks out from her father's shadow and Noah Bennett is asked to move out of the family home.

Nathan Petrelli's operation is looking shakier by the minute, a hastily assembled, barely thought through scheme always on the edge of disaster. It doesn't help his cause that he doesn't have the guts to do what the operation really requires, to go all the way and be willing to sacrifice lives. That this is a condemnation of America's treatment of people that it fears, people that are different, people that are foreign has never been more obvious or more heavily rammed home.

The main focus is Claire finally taking a stand and defying her father. In doing so, he finally grows up and becomes an adult. It's an important moment for the character. Sylar is also having important character moments as he bonds with his young companion whilst slaughtering all and sundry who get in his way. He is providing the action for the moment.

As for Hiro and Ando's thoroughly pointless and utterly unbelievable trip to India, the less said the better.

Matt Parkman starts to probe the mind of Noah Bennett whom he has kidnapped with the help of Peter Petrelli and Mohinder Suresh. As they learn the truth about the government's plan, who is in charge and who knew about the plan, but didn't see fit to tell anyone, Nathan Petrelli's troops close in on their location.

HEROES concentrates on a single story for an entire episode and as a result comes up with the best episode for a long time. There are surprises along the way, as there always are in the twisty, turny plots that the show comes up with, but this is more a tight, claustrophobic story that concentrates on the characters and their relationships to each other and their own inner demons.

There's not a lot of action, but there is a lot of shouting and a lot of plot revelation. Most of it is merely filling in the details of what we already know, but it fills in some of the gaps in what we know of the characters and what we know of Noah Bennett's true motivations. When he says that he has always been comfortable with morally grey he's not lying. He is simply the best character and Jack Coleman is having a great time playing him.

More episodes like this might be enough to pull the show back on track.

Matt Parkman and Peter Petrelli decide that it's time to take the fight to the organisation chasing them and invade Building 26, gaining information that could expose the whole operation. Sylar arrives at a place that leads him to some long-buried memories about his father. Claire learns a little something about her mother when agents come to their home looking for the boy that she has hidden there.

The focus is kept narrowed on the few stories that are featured here and that again keeps the pace up and the action neat and controlled. The battle between the two mind controllers (yes, two) and the military has a nice set of switchbacks as both sides gain and lose the upper hand. By comparison, the story of Claire's adventures is staid and Sylar's story is positively navel-gazing. Both sides of the battle are starting to use underhanded tactics and Nathan has finally figured out how trapped he is in the machine that he created, but can no longer control.

And the cliffhanger is a smart one that promises more good stuff to come.

Matt Parkman has been set up as a terrorist in part of the power play between Nathan Petrelli and his second in command. Claire is asked to help a man who once killed her and Sylar finally locates his father.

There is a horrible sense of deja vu about this episode of HEROES because for all the activity it doesn't go anywhere except in circles. The whole power struggle for control of the organisation hunting down people with abilities has been done before for the past three weeks and is getting exceedingly tiresome. Filler doesn't even begin to cover it.

Thank goodness, then, for Sylar's homecoming. It's a nice character sequence as Sylar is first cheated by his father's illness, then fascinated by the man and then finally gets the revenge that he so desperately needed. If not for this strand of the story then the whole episode could have been dealt with in five minutes.

Only the end montage, promising directions in which the show is looking to go holds out any hope for better things.

With Nathan now out of the picture, his bloodthirsty second in command, Danko, goes after the heroes in a big way. Noah suggests that Tracy Strauss can lead them to the thorn in their side 'rebel', but she manages to free Matt and Suresh along the way. Then she meets up with Rebel and faces a showdown.

Finally the show gets back on with the job of telling a story that moves. Character is far from ignored as Matt and Daphne face her gunshot wound and their relationship together, but it is the scattering of the heroes that is the story and the renewed, ruthless attack on them. There are surprises, deaths (permanent ones this time) and some super action as Tracy turns on the deep freeze (although the CGI death wink is a bit much).

The Hiro/Ando sideshow finds a reasonable way to give Hiro his powers back (sort of) and provides some very lame comedy that misfires in all directions, and Sylar changes his spots once more, it seems.

A much better episode promising better things to come.

Nathan goes into hiding with Claire in Mexico and they both get involved in a drinking contest to earn a little cash. Peter takes refuge in a church where his mother hopes to get some sleep so that she can dream about the future. Sylar enters Danko's life and offers to team up with him to hunt down others with powers.

There is an awful lot of activity in HEROES, but most of it is signifying nothing. Claire and Nathan try to work out their issues, Peter and Angela try to work out theirs. None of it really means very much and progress has slowed almost to a standstill whilst all this meandering is going on.

In fact, it is ironic that it is the Sylar/Danko show that provides most of the action and forward momentum of the episode.

Sylar uses his new skill of shapeshifting to play havoc with Noah Bennet's marriage and life. The agent ends up on the run for both his life and from his wife. Matt Parkman, however, takes the fight to Danko, locating the closest thing the man has to a loved on and taking her to meet her lover, explain what he really does for a living and then kill her.

This is significantly better than Into Asylum thanks to Sylar's shapeshifting activities and their effect of Noah's mental state and to Parkman's revenge that is almost taken on Danko. This is tension and action interwoven with real character development, something that has always been a strength of the show.

One of its weaknesses, however, has been the comedy and the Hiro/Ando double act descends even further into hideously unfunny territory.

Angela Petrelli has brought her sons, grand-daughter and Noah together at a place where she first started the Primatech company following the murder of a generation of people with powers, including her sister. Gatecrashing Mohinder finds that his father was a doctor at the internment camp.

Everything grinds to an absolute halt whilst Angela Petrelli delves into a past that could have been presented in a few short passages of dialogue with just as much impact as the black and white flashbacks that we are presented with. These lead to the inevitable conclusion that her sister isn't actually dead, but that doesn't take us very far either as the whole overly-artificial plot development just fizzles out with nothing gained and an hour lost.

Sylar finds that the constant shape shifting that he is being required to do for Danko is causing him to lose his identity. He summons up his dead mother, looking for some sort of redemption. A meeting with Rebel gives him a hint of how he can make a difference, but he decides that he way to go is to become the President of the United States of America.

After 1961's pointless rummage around in the psyche of Angela Petrelli we take a dip in the troubled waters that are Sylar. I Am Sylar, apart from cleverly riffing on Leonard Nimoy's pair of memoirs (Zachary Quinto about to play the young Spock in the new STAR TREK movie) for its title, gives us a compelling portrait of a man in torment, from extra teeth, unexpected transformations, attacks of guilt, murder to conversations with his dead mother. Major attempts have been made to humanise Sylar from the comic book villain that he first appeared to be and this is part of the process. Will he turn to good this time? On past record, that's unlikely.

The other strand of the story is Hiro and Ando getting over their power envy issues and Matt Parkman deciding that it's time to take a stand. Compared to the Sylar story, they are merely distractions, however.

Still, it would be nice to have some plot please.

Nathan and Peter face off against Sylar in order to prevent him from taking shapeshifting into the President with tragic consequences that lead to desperate measures. Hiro learns that to use his power is to risk destruction and Noah Bennett finds himself locked up with one of his worst enemies.

There's something about HEROES that seems destined to provide the show with weak and unfulfilling finales. The way in which Sylar is dealt with, both in terms of his aim to take over the President and what happens to Nathan, is clever, but hardly monumental on the action front. The big action scene takes place, once again, behind closed doors. This is either because of a lack of money or a lack of imagination, but if you can't stage superhero battles then perhaps you oughtn't to be staging a superhero show.

Death, it seems, is also an impossibility for the major characters in this show as at least two come back from untimely ends.

HEROES still has its problems, but it would be a shame to see it go without ever coming up with the kick-ass series that we really feel is in there somewhere.