In Part 4 of the commentary, they mentioned a cut flashback of Claude giving Claire her first bear and how Claude was a surrogate uncle and father figure in the early stages, because HRG was trying to follow orders and keep his distance.

Otto,

Re: not telling Meredith about Claire - If they go that route, I see two scenarios.

A. Claude feels betrayed over Meredith’s leaving Claire behind and figures she’s unfit to know.

B. Claude figures he has two lives to protect — one adult, one baby. He decides that Meredith, as the adult, can take care of herself. On the other hand, a helpless baby who is brought into the Company will have the protection she needs until she’s old enough to run herself. To ensure Meredith doesn’t unintentionally endanger Claire, therefore, she isn’t told.

So Claude definitely heard her name, which should have warned him then and there that Peter was a magnet for HRG, but it didn’t seem to.

Do you think he would have kept Claire’s survival from Meredith, though, and do you think he would have kept the identity of Claire’s biological mother from HRG?

I’m not sure. That’s a whole backstory waiting to be told.

KellyH, neat theory on HRG shooting Claude. It looked to me like Bennet was stunned that he shot at all; compared with the way the Haitian shot so precisely, it didn’t look like HRG was paying much attention to where the bullet went until the second shot.

I don’t know whether that’s the parallel with the bridge scenes. To me, that’s the contrast; HRG has gone from blindly following instructions to doing whatever it takes to protect his daughter.

Did Peter mention Claire’s name in “Distractions”? He refers to “this girl [he] met in Texas,” but he doesn’t name her (at least not in the version I’m looking at). Claude still has this expression, though, like, “WTF? Is that Claire he’s talking about? So HRG didn’t turn her in and vivisect her?”

Not sure if it’s a plothole. Kring’s networking of the characters has been airtight so far, so I’m tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Raissa, I haven’t seen the commentary. Is there evidence for your Claude-hiding-Meredith-and-playing-surrogate-uncle-to-Claire theory, or is it basically speculation? I didn’t see any evidence that Claude ever interacted with young Claire, although he obviously knew Claire’s name, which begs the question why he didn’t seem to put two and two together when Peter talked about her (he did mention her name). Why wouldn’t that have tipped him off that HRG might be on Peter’s trail? Seems to be a bit of a plot hole to me…

Apart from everything else, I’m just looking forward to Claire and Claude meeting. Claude will be mush within half an hour. Peter won’t even mind that he gets tough love and Claire gets proverbial teddy bears, because he’ll be having to much fun ribbing Claude about it.

Not sure about Claude warning Meredith; I didn’t get that impression from the graphic novel. It seemed like he was just stunned that the super he’d been sent to bring in had such a destructive power.

KellyH, I like the theory on the Claude/Petrelli connection. There could have been evidence in Meredith’s apartment which led to Nathan, or it could be that whoever identified Meredith as a super also identified Nathan.

But … do you think The Company would have cared about Nathan if he hadn’t manifested a power back then? It seemed like the first time he flew was in “Six Months Ago”.

Not saying the theory doesn’t work, just that on the strength of what we’ve seen so far, The Company only bags and tags supers after they’ve demonstrated some kind of ability. They probably don’t have a way to track supers without evidence; I think that’s why HRG was so keen to get a hold of Mohinder’s list of names.

There’s also the moment in “Distractions” when Claude made a jibe about wanting to put his fist in Nathan’s face; he might not have said that about a guy he nearly died protecting.