Heroes Reborn - S1E1/S1E2 - Brave New World/Odessa
Welcome back Heroes, you magnificent bastard. I’m excited, but I hope this isn’t like that time Kevin James lulled me into a false sense of security and I rented Mall Cop 2. I want those 90 minutes of my life back!
In this brave new world of Odessa, Texas, people are gathered in the street at a peace summit between humans and EVOS (those with powers) as the EVOS show off their powers. Also, God hates EVOS. It says so on a picket sign. HRG searches the crowed after leaving an apology voice-mail for Claire, whom he apparently has not seen or spoken to in years. Then the sky darkens and Odessa explodes. HRG crawls out of the rubble, because he is invincible, I guess, but everybody else seems dead, including, presumably Claire.
Cut to a year after the explosion and EVOS are either being persecuted or going into hiding. Some are even fleeing to Canada, because people in Canada are nice. But then we see one get tazed at the border crossing, so maybe not so nice. Underground groups are getting together to plan for their future survival. At one such meeting, Luke Collins (Played by Zachary Levi. You know, the other Zachary. The poor man’s Zachary Quinto, as I like to call him.) tells the EVOS how unnatural they are and then opens fire, along with his wife Joanne. A young boy named Tommy gets away and they plan to hunt him down as well, all as vengeance for their son who was killed during the Odessa explosion.
Tommy gets a warning text while at school from an unknown sender, telling him to trust no one. Instead, he decides to trust people and go on a job interview at an ice cream parlor AND sits down at a booth with Luke. Luke and Joanne have found him, and again, he trusts someone and leaves with them. They try to take the girl from the ice cream shop with them, but Tommy uses his powers and makes both Luke and Joanne disappear. Then he runs away. Finally, he gets it. The girl chases after him and insists that she will keep his secret. He appears to trust her. Maybe he doesn’t get it.
HRG is now a car salesman and going by the name Mr. Barnes. He has a new life with a new wife. A guy named Quentin starts tailing him and says he knows Noah’s real name and wants to know what really happened on June 13th, the night of the explosion. He has a manuscript Mohinder Suresh was going to publish. I’m not sure what happened to Mohinder. I’ve blocked out season 4 of the original series, so I don’t remember if anything happened.
Quentin insists the EVOs are still all around and they are there to save everyone. HRG doesn’t believe him. He thinks they’re all either gone or in hiding and if they weren’t, he would know it. Quentin implies HRG’s memory has been changed so he doesn’t remember exactly what happened that day. He’s then carted off by police.
No episode of Heroes is complete without a pair of Asians, English subtitles, and a comic that proves one of them has super powers. Come on. For real?
A young Japanese girl finds a sword under the floorboards in her house after a strange young man arrives and tells her she is a character in a video game. The character, Katana Girl, finds a sword hidden in the floor, left there by her father who she needs to rescue. Maybe it’s the same sword Hiro used may years ago, but either way, she holds the sword above her head she is immediately transported into video game, Evernow.
This is the worst part of the episode.
In Los Angeles, we witness a pretty cool fight scene involving a masked hero, El Vengador. He kind of reminds me of Nacho Libre. It turns out he’s a man named Oscar. He became El Vengador the night of June 13th because he wanted to make a difference, and he did, by starting an underground railroad to help rescue EVOs. But then he dies before we even get to know him.
HRG starts of his new life with his new wife on a high note, by killing the Haitian. To be fair though, the Haitian did try to kill him first. But nobody kills Noah Bennett. He’s upset and asks The Haitian why he attacked him. He says that Noah told him to and that he made Noah forget something, but of course Noah can’t remember what. The Haitian repeats “it’s coming” twice before dying.
Noah washes the blood off his hands and stares in the mirror trying to remember what he was supposed to have forgotten. He now believes Quentin was telling the truth and bails him out of jail.
Noah and Quentin drive to Odessa to get Noah’s files so they can track down Molly Walker. You remember Molly. They put her on a plane years ago and there she stayed. I guess he needs to get the flight number so he can find her again.
Noah needs her to find Mohinder, who everyone believes is responsible for the June 13th explosion. He doesn’t think Mohinder is capable of it, but I saw that guy turn into a bug so I don’t know. He’s potentially capable of it AND he’s on the run for some reason. They sneak into the remains of Primatech looking for Noah’s old files. He tells Quentin to look for anything with Molly’s name on it or the name Renatus. Quentin finds a sheet of paper that leads him to believe Claire was not among the dead people at the summit. But Noah can’t remember anything. Quentin freaks the fuck out about where Claire is and how she really died and what they’re really doing to the EVOs now. Noah chokes him until he admits he’s really doing all this because they took his sister, Phoebe, and he wants to find her. He doesn’t believe she died in the explosion either.
Luke and Joanne are trapped in a room that is decorated like a child’s room, teleported there by Tommy. They fight over whose fault it is and Luke realizes there’s no light switch in the room. Luke wonders what happens if the room goes dark, so he grabs Joanne’s gun and shoots out the lights. If you remember the glass that was supposed to hold the villains in level 5, Luke takes a child’s small wooden chair and breaks the glass. Some secure setup that was. They kill a bunch of Primatech people who are still working there, in secret since the whole decimated town has been sealed off from the public. Noah, hearing the gunshots from the area he’s in, goes to investigate. Luke and Joanne escape - after shooting Quentin in the arm and stealing Noah’s car - with a list of EVOs names and addresses. She seems excited by the prospect of so many people to kill. He just looks like he wants to go home.
Tommy and Emma realize where stuff goes when he makes it disappear. It goes wherever he’s thinking of at that moment. He must have been thinking of the room he was held in - the room he was afraid they were taking him to - and it was an observation room at Primatech.
Noah finds one of their victims inside the building. Before he dies, he tells Noah that tomorrow something called Epic will be launched by Renatus and it is powered by none other than Molly Walker.
I was just going to say that I bet Molly is a skank now. It turns out that a girl named Zoe, who I’ve purposely ignored this entire recap cause her scenes were boring, is actually Molly. Molly’s flight has landed! And she is kind of skanky. I’m excited now. She’s kidnapped by a man she tried to rob and his girlfriend. The man makes a call to inform someone that they “have Molly Walker.”
Aside from a couple of boring storylines (they’re trying to cram too much into a mini-series) I really enjoyed this and I can’t wait to see another episode. But if Matt Fucking Parkman shows up, then I don’t know what I’ll do with myself.
