Thank you KellyH! I’m glad I’m not the only one thoroughly irked by their evasive non-answers (and it’s not all their fault either. Who keeps sending in stupid Mr. Muggles questions when there are issues of far more import to discuss).

I would love to pin all the blame for Loeb and Alexander for the faults of vol. 3, particularly since they’re gone, so we can only hope for better. This volume has been a step in the right direction, if not entirely perfect.

And I agree with your frustration about how ALL S2 elements are viewed as toxic.

I’ve been curious about Primatech: Odessa as well. The closest to an explanation we’ve gotten was Noah’s remark to Angela that just because the building in New York burned down that the Company is finished.

Part of the problem is that they never bothered to establish how the Company worked. Who ran the various offices? How many were there? What did they do besides abduct people?

Like many other things on this show, it seems the writers don’t want to back themselves into any corners by establishing things like that, in case they establish something that will void a cool idea they have that fits into their plot du jour (see also, the implication that shape shifting requires physical contact with the subject. By implying it but not stating it outright, they can still use their “Sylar as Nathan” idea despite it contradicting their implication. “But we never SAID that’s how it works,” I can hear them now…).

I’ve heard they plan to return to the “vault of relics” from the end of S2…hopefully that’ll shed some more light on the Company as a whole.

There are reasons why I am optimistic for both the end of this volume and next season. Is there any truth to the stories circulating that Kring had NBC axe Loeb and Alexander by proxy? This was supposedly not only to make room for Fuller to essentially fill their jobs, but also because L & A utterly refused to go back to character-driven arcs. Now, Coleite wrote “1961,” and while he’s no Fuller, he and Pokaski have given the show quite a few good hours (along with a plethora of thoroughly exapserating Q & A’s) so I can see why they are still there.

But I really think that the expanding influence of Fuller (and I can’t see why he’d venture into a new show creation project so soon after his best-ever creation’s demise) can only mean good things for the future. I really think that Loeb and Alexander were responsible for many of the ills in both Vols. 2 & 3.

As far as S2 goes, I don’t care how many problems it had at this point, but I still do bristle at the fact that they can drop S1 references all the time, even at the expense of timelines (HRG getting into Mohinder’s cab in 3.8, for example), but S2 is apparently so toxic that important elements just get dropped and never heard from again (not just Caitlin–also West, Monica, etc., and while Primatech New York was destroyed, nothing has been said about the fate of Primatech in Odessa).

That is a scary thought. Of course, also yay. So, I’m torn.