Review:

I'm fast running out of hyperbole here.

I mean, there are only so many times I can say, "This episode is phenomenal," or "This episode raises the bar for the show," before I start to sound like a broken record.

The thing is, the show started out amazing, and it keeps getting better. The momentum behind the plot continues to build. The characters continue to develop and grow. The humor and attention to detail in every scene continue to be as beautifully crafted as they have been since the premiere.

It makes for a show with an unpredictable plot, strong drama and consistent characterization. But moreover, it makes for a show which is a constant delight to watch.

This episode? It raised the bar again. Not just because we're finally seeing the character arcs intersect and the story threads come together, but because the protagonists are becoming flawed. This week, the characters make seriously questionable decisions. They unwittingly begin to challenge our perception of them as "heroes" as we watch them use their abilities to gamble, assault and take revenge on the people around them.

The amazing part of that is how we continue to sympathize with the characters. When you take a "hero" and have them beat the crap out of another character, whether it's a villain or not, the show runs the risk of alienating the audience from that hero. When you turn a "hero" from a good-natured cheerleader to an attempted murderer, even if it's to punish a serial rapist, the show runs the risk of making that character less a "hero" than a vigilante.

And when you take the most popular "hero" and show him using his ability to gamble in a casino, well, that's played for laughs, and it is funny. But you know what I mean; it raises a lot of questions about that hero's code of ethics.

But then, that's sort of what makes Heroes extraordinary. This show seems to be fearless about challenging its conventions and making its lead characters as ambiguously heroic as possible. And the fact that we continue to like and sympathize with these characters no matter what is a testament to how well they're being written.

The episode begins with a recap. Mohinder breaks into Sylar's apartment; Niki and Micah are flagged down by a cop who takes them to Linderman; Hiro and Ando are headed to Vegas; Claire gets a tree branch through the neck; Matt collapses in a bar.

Mohinder throws in this week's voice-over: "Sometimes, questions are more powerful than answers. How is this happening? What are they? Why them and why now? What does it all mean?"

Voice-over-Mohinder seems to have cracked. The pressure of playing Regular-Mohinder, "Previously"-recapping-Mohinder and Voice-over-Mohinder has driven him to ask the same question we've been asking about his voice-overs since the premiere: WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?!?

Matt gets his one scene of the episode. Could the show please give this guy more material to work with? I mean, all of the other arcs are amazing, and it's not like I'd want the show to sacrifice a portion of Hiro's arc, or even Peter's and Simone's. It's just, one scene?! Even Isaac gets more than that this week.

In a lab filled with harsh blue light, Matt wakes up to find himself hooked up to a bunch of monitors. A caption appears to tell us that the location is "unknown." What? WHAT?! You're the frickin' omniscient caption-guy! You're meant to know EVERYTHING!

Daddy Bennet looks down at Matt, smiling benignly. I'm waiting for him to call Matt "ClaireBear" and start asking him if he's pregnant or doing drugs, but he never does. He just says, "Hello."

Matt asks Daddy Bennet whether he's part of the FBI or the CIA. Daddy Bennet replies that he's "not part of any organization that has initials." Aw, you mean the Merry Marvel Marching Society is out? What does that leave us with?

Matt insists that he's "not anyone." Daddy Bennet assures Matt that he's "someone very special." It's sort of a debate about the character's significance on the show, and whether he can really be judged alongside the rest of the cast regulars when his screen time this week amounts to two minutes. I'm reminded of Mohinder's line in the premiere: "Some people, it is true, are MORE special."

Daddy Bennet brings in the Anonymous Power-Inhibitor Haitian and asks him to "go deep and clean him out." Matt echoes our own thoughts: "What does that mean?" More importantly, would the same operation work on Mommy Bennet and Mr. Muggles?

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Hiro tries again to call Isaac and explain that he and the rest of the population of downtown Manhattan are going to explode in five weeks. Despite previously referring police investigators to Ando specifically because he possesses a near-fluent standard of English, it doesn't seem to have dawned on Hiro that he might not be the best person to be repeatedly making calls to Isaac.

Instead of offering to make the call himself, Ando suggests teaching the phrases to Hiro phonetically. It's one of those instances where you naively hope you're not being taught to say something dirty or obscene which is going to humiliate you when you try the line at, say, a CASINO! Ando sees families in the distance getting jackpots. Hiro's all, "Man, this is so lame," but Ando's not even waiting around to be talked out of it. New York is going to explode in five weeks, but hey, instead of taking the connecting flight from L.A. and finding the man who painted the whole thing, let's gamble at the Montecito!

Niki and Micah show up at the same casino. Hiro passes them. Sinister sound effects play. It's another of those cool moments where two of the heroes' paths collide without either of them realizing it. The amazing part is that it's happening so early on. Mercifully, it's not a case of the mains carrying on with their individual stories and never meeting or interacting until two or three seasons down the line. The hints are already being dropped so abundantly that you get the impression all of the heroes will have been brought together before the season is out.

Niki meets Hot Power Suit Lady. Discussion about Niki being a "whore" is imminent, and HPSL is discreet enough to suggest that Micah waits outside. Niki kneels down and presses her forehead to Micah's. It's such a brief moment, but it's the same as the moment in the premiere when Niki watched Micah building the logic board. It's so expressive and so well played by Ali Larter and Noah Gray-Cabey that you realize how much the characters care about one another. Brief, but very elegantly done.

Hot Power Suit Lady describes how a politician from New York is doing business with Linderman, and how Niki is going to provide "a little insurance" on Linderman's investment. It's all communicated in code by HPSL, so you sort of wonder why she bothered sending Micah out of the room.

Niki replies that she's "not a whore." HPSL calmly says that they've "established" quite clearly what Niki is. Does HPSL even know about the mobsters that are buried in the desert?

We get another "cool!/gross!" moment with the words Chapter Four - "Collision" being sliced up as a scalpel moves along Claire's skin. The coroner records the facts that reaffirm why Anonymous Jock is the most heinous villain of the show: Claire was pulled out of a creek after being found naked and after having being dragged.

As per last week, the coroner pulls the tree branch out of Claire's neck. She leaves the room to take a call. Claire's wound superheals, the color comes back to her face, and she sputters back to life, ribcage and internal organs exposed for all the world to see.

Then the "ooh, perhaps we shouldn't have done that?" moment. Claire's "Holy sh*%!" reaction to finding herself sliced open on an autopsy table is dumbed down to a less dramatic and far less believable "Oh my God!"

Bear with me here. You'd be surprised how much mileage you can get from one expletive.

This disappointed me. Not for the surface-level kick we'd get out of seeing a cheerleader swearing, but for the principle behind changing the original dialogue, and the lost impact to characterization by not having the character swear on screen.

I'd rally against the decision just to express my surprise that the show was apparently too spineless to stand by its original dialogue. But if I leveled criticism at the show for rewriting its dialogue to avoid complaints from the FCC, I know I'd be in danger of sounding like a hypocrite for saying I didn't think we needed to see Claire being raped, just as we didn't need to see Niki stabbing shards of glass into the neck of her attacker or Isaac shooting up.

But if the show can get away with mangled fingers (albeit with complaints from the manufacturers of garbage compactors who feel they're being unfairly maligned), if it can get away with heroin-addict protagonists, and stripper pseudo-whores who channel alternate personalities to butcher members of the mob, and RAPED CHEERLEADERS ON AN AUTOPSY TABLE WITH THEIR GUTS SLICED OPEN, are you seriously telling me someone thought the word "s**t" wouldn't make it onto the air?

Are you kidding me?!?

Some stuff doesn't need to be seen on screen. That goes without saying. It's why we only saw the early stages of Sayid torturing Sawyer on Lost. There's the fact that the show wouldn't have gotten away with much more, but there's also the fact that any more vivid detail of one protagonist torturing another changes our perception of both the characters and the show.

Equally, some language doesn't get past the censors. It's why we barely saw the 'f' forming around the alternate universe Willow's mouth on Buffy when she got impaled by a plank of wood. That the show would never have gotten away with the full word isn't the point; the humor is in the prospect of an alternate Willow firing off expletives when we know the normal Willow wouldn't.

Beyond that, some characters aren't supposed to know certain words. It's about maintaining the notion of an innocent la-la land. It's why Micah couldn't be in the room when Niki told Hot Power Suit Lady that she wasn't a whore, because if Micah started asking his mom about whores, it would open up a whole can of worms about which words and which concepts kids should know about these days.

Now, all of this ties in with Claire swearing: the implication here seems to be that Claire is too sweet and pure and innocent to use the word "s**t." Which is so unbelievable that it's laughable, but also plain inconsistent with the development to Claire's story arc this week, one which reveals a much darker and more ominous side of the character than we'd assumed.

My point here isn't that the line shouldn't have been changed, although why the show thought it wouldn't get away with it when it's gotten away with so much else is beyond me. My point is simply that it shouldn't have changed an attention-grabbing line to a weaker alternative purely out of fear that it might generate complaints or sully the chaste perfection of the character. In a show with the courage to defy every other convention of hourly drama, you wonder why it didn't have the conviction to keep the original line, one which would have been more believable, but also one which would have been consistent with the character delivering it.

Anyway ... Claire 'folds' her skin back together, superheals, grabs an operating coat, and makes off before the coroner returns from her call. The audience's attention at this point is mostly on Claire, the fact that she's alive and well, and the fact that she's going to escape and make it home safely. But hey, imagine the hell this coroner's going to get in the morning after her boss arrives at work and discovers that their morgue "misplaced" a body recovered the night before.

Cut to another montage of the characters, as per the premiere. There's music accompanying the montage, just as there was before, and the music is ... the exact same song as it was in the premiere. It's nice and all, but this seems less an attempt at a musical motif than a lazy attempt at internal consistency.

Still, Isaac serenely watching the sun rising over the New York skyline and sunshine streaming through the apartment window as Peter wakes up with Simone is beautifully shot.

Nathan emerges from Petrelli-for-Congress HQ. He's wearing the sophisticated designer alternative to Keanu's shades, and looking like he could really use Rage Against the Machine more than this Rogue Wave track to accompany the whole soaring-into-the-sky sequence.

There's a hint that Daddy Petrelli was doing business with Linderman, which is likely one of those things which will turn up later in the story when the show decides to shed some light on the extent of Daddy Petrelli's ability to fly and the circumstances surrounding his suicide.

Mohinder shows up babbling hysterically about how someone might be targeting Nathan. Nathan gets the best line of the episode: "Can you be a little bit more specific? Twelve percent of the electorate strongly opposes me." Perfect deadpan tone, perfect indifference. Sometimes, it's fun playing a hated politician.

We get the same FX-laden Spider-Man homage we saw in the premiere, with the camera flying between the buildings. Still as cool an effect as it was then.

Peter asks Simone about the toast to love which she made the night before. Simone assures him that she wasn't talking about him, "clearly."

Extrapolate what you want to from this scene. Me? I see a lot of insecurity in Peter about whether the woman he's in love with feels anything towards him. I see Simone telling Peter what he wants to hear, even though (as she'll reveal twice in this episode, to Peter and to Isaac) she has no idea how she feels about Peter or her relationship with him.

Peter broaches the topic. Simone takes the role of the woman who's beyond reproach and who never needs to explain herself to anyone. The door buzzer comes to her rescue. See? Even the door buzzer loves her.

Nathan shoves a copy of "Activating Evolution" in front of Peter and asks him whether he's the one who sent Chandra Suresh to accost Nathan.

Read that again. If you didn't spot the plothole on your first viewing, I guess the people making this show got away with it. Suffice it to say, no one this week seems to care much about comparing the picture on the back of this book with the individual they meet.

Nathan nabs the second funniest line of the episode: "Don't insult me, I've got trained professionals to do that."

Somehow, the door to Peter's apartment opens and reveals Simone in a white blouse, searching through the cupboards looking for a mug. Nathan is all, "Aw, gimme a break," before offering an envelope containing the money to help Peter "disappear for a while" and stop being a "liability."

Is it Nathan trying to pay Peter to get out of his life, or underhandedly trying to push Peter away from him because he knows that Peter's ability is channeling the powers of the people around him? It's your call. The overwhelming majority of you seem to think this was another instance of Nathan acting like a %*@#. I still maintain that Nathan has Peter's own interests at heart by impeding his search for the truth. This scene suggests that Nathan is only interested in his career, and that he's giving Peter the means to carry out a search for the truth without Nathan's involvement. But perhaps it's really just Nathan's way of making Peter think he's only interested in his career.

Meh. It's fun to speculate.

Claire returns home, deftly dodging Mommy Bennet and Mr. Muggles on their way to the kitchen to make waffles. How did Claire make the journey from the morgue without money or ID? Who cares! Hayden's performance in this scene is so stellar that it overcomes implausibility.

Daddy Bennet sees Claire's dirt-caked feet and immediately suspects a wild night with the quarterback. He looks like he's about ready to shoot laser beams from his eyes. A stern exchange about how much he loves Claire and how she can tell him anything follows. Between the portable DVD of Claire's six attempts to kill herself and the scene with Matt at the lab this week, you kind of wonder whether she could tell him how she was raped and murdered and stripped and dragged and autopsied.

Then the moment which just plain stunned me. Claire sits down on the staircase and looks like she's never felt more alone in her life. The insufferable little brother shows up and, surprisingly, tells his sister that her waffles are ready in a near-civil way. And the thought of a normal day of waffles and school and homework is so remote from the hell which her life has turned into that Claire begins sobbing.

It's not just that I'm a sucker for Hayden. This was the kind of moment which could so easily have suffered from being sentimental, contrived or over-the-top. Hayden sells the performance with such feeling and sincerity that it doesn't come across as anything other than gut-wrenching.

Unlike, say, any scene with Nora Zehetner playing Eden McCain. Like this one, in which Mohinder mumbles about being "humiliated" while Eden lets herself into his apartment carrying an urn with Papa Suresh's ashes. Mohinder tells Eden about how Papa Suresh's body was misfiled, and how he needed to identify the body at the morgue. Eden tells Mohinder that she's "really, really sorry." It should have been a touching scene. You know what kills it? Eden doesn't look sorry. She doesn't sound sorry. IS she sorry?

The ambiguity over whether Eden is genuinely evil or just being played by a bad actress is now intruding on the impact of the story. It's ruining half of the scenes which Mohinder appears in.

Mohinder articulates what had been implied since the start: that his research and continuation of his father's project form an attempt to "validate" their relationship. Well written, and well performed by Sendhil Ramamurthy, providing a half-believable explanation to why Mohinder would decide to abandon the project and return to India.

It doesn't quite come across as believable. If you recall how determined Mohinder was to solve his father's death in the premiere; if you recall how resolutely he relocated to Manhattan, got a job as a taxi driver, spent days trying to decrypt his father's hard drive and then broke into Sylar's apartment. After all that, would one mishap with a politician on the street and the sight of his father's urn really change Mohinder's mind? It doesn't ring true.

In a Very Significant Turn Of Events, Peter appears at Mohinder's apartment. He has a copy of "Activating Evolution" in his hand. Lots of Post-it notes can be seen lining the top of the pages. Peter has evidently studied the entirety of the book very carefully in the one day since he showed it to Nathan. The one part which he hasn't studied very carefully is the picture on the dust jacket, because he now asks Mohinder whether he's the author of the book.

Mohinder resists the temptation to grab the book, show Peter the picture of Chandra Suresh and scream "DOES THIS LOOK LIKE ME!?!" before thwacking Peter unconscious with it. [Note to producers: Deleted Scene? Please?]

Instead, Mohinder politely tells Peter that Chandra was his father. Peter's all, "Yeah, well ... [Dramatic pause to wipe the bangs from his eyes] ... I think I may be one of the "special" people he wrote about."

Back at the Montecito, Ando gives roulette a try. The guy who represented the voice of reason as a counter to Hiro's exuberant insistence that nothing is the way it seems over the past three weeks turns out to be a sucker for gambling. He also turns out to be the kind of fool who'll bet every cent he can round up on one game. Meaning Hiro can either (1) watch his plan to drive cross-country in a [PRODUCT PLACEMENT] Nissan Versa to meet Meester Eeezuk go to waste through the lack of money to pay for food or gas, or (2) use his powers to freeze time and cheat his way into winning an exorbitant amount of cash, which he'll use to travel to New York and then donate to any number of organizations, preferably ones which do have initials.

Or, Hiro could do what ANYONE with the ability to bend space and time would do, and TELEPORT into the vault where the money's kept, grab as many sacks as he could carry, then teleport to the [PRODUCT PLACEMENT] Nissan Versa where Ando would be waiting with his [PRODUCT PLACEMENT] Apple iPod and make a swift getaway.

Only Hiro won't do that. Because he's a hero. One who doesn't cheat and gamble and use his ability for financial gain.

Except if it's his "last dollar," and if Ando compares the situation to Peter Parker selling pictures of Spider-Man to the Bugle. Thing is, Parker's doing that because he needs a roof over his head. Hiro effectively buys into Ando's perspective out of greed, and doesn't snap out of it until he and Ando are being beaten up because of it. Which is a substantial development for both characters because it underlines how Ando has the ability to corrupt Hiro's high-minded principles about what it means to be a hero, as well as Hiro's readiness to compromise those principles if he thinks it's the most effective way to achieve his goal.

Elsewhere in Nevada, Niki and Tina talk about the dead mobsters and Niki's inner demon. Micah needs to remind Niki that it's "game night," and that she should be playing Scrabble with him. Beyond the crude subtext about Tina's "excellent" vocabulary from romance novels, the scene encapsulates what little there is to make the Niki/Micah story thread effective: Niki's guilt over Micah's upbringing, Niki's determination to make things right, and Micah's awareness of what's going on around him. The discovery that Micah really does know why Niki's going back to the casino, and that he realizes the differences between online stripping and arranged meetings, establishes how much Micah has kept what he knows under wraps. It also pretty much establishes that Micah is beyond the sheltered-kid stage where people worry about whether he should hear talk about his mom being a whore.

Peter puts forward to Mohinder the same theory we'd formed ourselves: that he doesn't possess an ability of his own, but instead has the power to "do things" when he's around the heroes who can "do things." Even Peter asks if it sounds as lame as he thinks. It does.

Isaac gets in a brief appearance, pointing out that Simone is denouncing his heroin addiction at the same time as visiting him to collect the pictures which it inspires.

"I can save everybody," says Isaac. "I'm gonna be a hero." Which sounds delusional, but next to the "cleaned out" lab-rat, the gambler, the basket-case cheerleader, the alternate-personality stripper and the clueless conduit for everyone else's power, it's about as likely a possibility as any. If nothing else, it highlights that Isaac is one of the few characters interested in using his power for a defined purpose.

In a neat contrast, we cut to the character who's also going to use her power for a defined purpose, albeit one that involves destruction to property and grievous bodily harm.

"He was drunk!" insists Claire. "It was an accident." Zach, ever the loyal and supportive friend, can't believe his ears. "Which part was an accident, the rape or the murder?" It's veiled beneath the excuse that Claire no longer has any evidence of what happened, but the conversation between Claire and Zach is the precursor to what's effectively a thinly-disguised debate about women defending male violence in the interest of avoiding attention and maintaining the veneer of normality.

Did Claire intend to take revenge on Anonymous Jock all along? If she did, we didn't see it here. Here, all we see is Claire effectively acting as an apologist for Anonymous Jock and resigning herself to the fact that it would be the girl's word against the guy's. Which rings true if you figure that all Claire wants is to live a remotely normal life and deny everything relating to her invulnerability, but also feels awfully questionable for the way it raises an entirely separate social issue about whether "normal" means keeping silent over attempted rape and murder.

As a reward for his performance last week, Anonymous Jock becomes Brody Mitchum.

Lord, the guy drags a body to a creek, and THEN he gets a name?!

Jackie and Brody appear. Claire makes a joke about having drunk too much to remember what happened the previous night. Brody looks like he's just had the wind knocked out of him and makes a conspicuous exit. The Anonymous Very Worried Girl from the bonfire last week looks on from a distance and seems to figure out what's going on.

Back at the Montecito, logic gives way to hilarity. It seems that no one in the casino thinks it's remotely odd if one Japanese guy nods to another, if the other scrunches up his face and looks like he's about to burst a blood vessel, and if everyone's cards then switch from 7's to Aces.

It's funny, sure, especially when we see what are ostensibly seasoned card sharks losing to Japanese tourists without realizing why. But at this point, Hiro's clearly enjoying himself, and I wonder what that says about the integrity of the character.

Unlike, say, Niki, who "accidentally" knocks into Nathan and seduces him into inviting her to his room because she needs to in order to protect her son from the mob. Here, we see Hiro abusing his power long after he needed to in order to continue his journey to see Isaac. He's now gambling out of greed, just as Ando was from the start.

Meanwhile, on the Manhattan subway, there's another exceptional scene between Peter and Mohinder. The show's writers and producers have obviously figured out that these two characters generate the strongest thematic discussion because of their opposing outlooks: Peter represents idealism, Mohinder represents skepticism.

Which isn't always the way Mohinder was written; if you recall, he was the one who started out spouting unsupportable theories to a class of students about the "new gateway to evolution" before moving to Manhattan and chasing the ghost of his father's research on a whim. But regardless, the way the two characters represent the opposing viewpoints works extremely well, particularly in this scene.

The banter leads to Mohinder talking about "overpopulation, global warming, drought, famine, terrorism ..." Which leads Mohinder back to the concept which he put forward to the class in the premiere: that the superheroes portrayed on this show are a sign of the species adapting to environmental change.

Isaac shoots up. In what's possibly a throw to Trainspotting, we get a surreal succession of shots of the character from several blurred angles, leading to a vision of Claire running through her empty school and screaming as a monstrous shadow pursues her.

Peter knocks on the door to Isaac's apartment. We see that Isaac's eyes are glazed over while he's painting. Oddly, Peter doesn't suspect another overdose, and doesn't try to enter the apartment to check whether Isaac is conscious. You'd think that Peter would at least try the door, given that it had been open on the last few occasions when characters wanted to get in. But for the sake of the plot, Peter decides not to even call Simone to find out whether Isaac is alive and well.

Anonymous Very Worried Girl becomes Laurie. Laurie, it's established, was another of Brody's conquests. Though, one would imagine, not the kind who was stripped and dragged to a creek before ending up on an autopsy table.

We see Brody in the distance, necking another anonymous blonde. Spooky music plays. The camera zooms in on Claire, who has become Very Contemplative. You figure it's at this point that she wonders whether it might logistically be possible to drive Brody into a wall at 70mph.

In a subtle homage to Rain Man, Hiro and Ando descend an escalator wearing matching gray suits. Hiro seems to have realized that he's straying to the Dark Side, and objects to the way that he and Ando are using his power "for personal gain." Two security guards approach the bottom of the escalator to cut them off.

You know there's about to be trouble.

Hiro knows there's about to be trouble.

And yet, for reasons which defy plausibility, Hiro is unable to decide whether he should (1) freeze time and teleport to safety, (2) freeze time and carry Ando to the other side of the casino, then suggest that they both run to safety, (3) freeze time and amass a collection of olives from drinks around the casino, which he would then throw at the security guards one by one and attempt to escape from them while they collapse in hysterical laughter, or (4) watch in a stupefied daze as the security guards grab hold of him and Ando and throw them out of the casino, along with their luggage.

It's in the interests of advancing the plot, so let's say Hiro goes with (4). It still doesn't make much sense.

But it provides what's possibly the funniest moment of the episode when Ando gets to riff on an assortment of movies, telling Anonymous Cowboy Guy from the poker table that he'd "better back off." It's in a weird half-American accent, and Ando gets this look of delight as he recites the lines: "My friend has very big power! Can take you all out! Make you wish you'd never been born!"

Anonymous Cowboy Guy's henchman pwns Hiro. Hiro lets out a muffled moan as he considers the pack of ice he'll need for his jaw in the morning. Ando looks on in horror as he realizes that he just cheated a card shark flanked by a henchman with a proclivity for pwning tourists with Rain Man suits.

Yes, I know I had a lot of issues with the implications of Hiro misusing his power to cheat at gambling. But it led to this wonderful scene, and it's so hilarious that it almost seems worth it.

Nathan takes Niki to his hotel room, from which we see a sprawling view of Las Vegas. Niki is mightily impressed.

Nathan starts mumbling about what it would be like to "soar over that desert." It's one of the clear indications that Nathan might have a latent wish to use his power, if only to indulge a romantic notion about what it would be like to act out "Can You Read My Mind?" over Nevada.

Niki's all, "Flying? Nah, DRIVING! Take a road trip with two corpses in the trunk and your son asleep on the back seat, and see where it takes you!"

Niki tells Nathan that her husband's a criminal, and that her son is a "boy genius." Yeah, one who's likely kicking Tina's butt at Scrabble right about now. Nathan reveals that he has two boys, though admittedly they won't be beating anyone at Scrabble in the near future.

Nathan starts off on how it's so "weird" having children because you need to be two different people. Niki wonders whether he's talking about being the person that the kid sees, and the person you really are. Nathan claims that he's happily married, then kisses Niki. She pulls back and tells him that she can't.

What, not even if there's thirty grand riding on the not-too-horrible prospect of making out with Adrian Pasdar?

Niki leaves Nathan's hotel room and heads to the elevator. We get an extremely cool effect showing the dual sides of Niki reflected in each of the doors to the elevator. Niki's reflection is on the left and looks totally freaked out. Mirror-Niki's reflection is on the right, and looks like she's about to do something pretty extreme.

Like, say, push a heel spike through a guy's head.

The goon threatens Micah, the camera moves behind him so that Niki's face disappears for a moment, and when the camera moves around again, Niki's expression has changed. "Niki's not here right now." Mirror-Niki proceeds to beat the crap out of Linderman's goon, promising to kill him if he threatens Micah again.

We cut to Niki returning to Nathan's apartment and doing what Niki wouldn't: sealing the agreement to sleep with Nathan for Linderman's benefit. In the course of this affair, it's conveniently revealed to the audience that Mirror-Niki possesses a tattoo of the frilly 'S' on her right shoulder blade, and that Daddy Bennet was instrumental in the meeting which was arranged between Niki and Nathan.

Then the first of two shockers: Claire tricks Brody into letting her behind the wheel of his car, and she drives him into a wall, crumpling the car.

Yay for Claire. I was betting it would be Daddy Bennet who'd exact punishment on the Anonymous Jock. In an instance which I think we'll all agree involves a character getting what he deserves, Claire metes out punishment herself. It's the first time we've seen Claire actively want to hurt another individual, but perhaps more importantly, it underlines the fury boiling inside her because of the injustice she witnessed. Claire's decision to try to kill Brody (and forget what the online comics say. I'm going by what's actually shown on the screen, here) turns her into a much darker hero. That said, the fact that she's actively looking to right a wrong hints at the way Claire could soon relinquish her dream of a normal life in favor of preventing monsters like this from hurting other people.

Which is significant when you realize that it's perhaps the most radical change in a character's outlook and perspective on the show so far. In the space of four episodes, Claire has gone from the good-natured girl, desperate to lead a typical life, to the hell-bent, self-nominated upholder of justice.

It also, you’ll note, makes Claire as much of an attempted murderer as Brody.

Finally, we get what's undoubtedly the highlight of this episode, and likely the highlight of the season so far.

Peter's subway comes to an eerie stop. The lights go out. Everyone gets frozen in time except Peter, who's still walking around the carriage and trying to figure out what's going on. Ominous footsteps can be heard.

Peter turns around and sees Future-Hiro.

It's Hiro, only without the glasses, and now sporting slicked-back hair, a samurai sword strapped to his back, and a very solemn expression in place of the youthful vigor we'd seen over the past four weeks.

Man, life really %*@#ed this guy up.

Without any trace of an accent, Future-Hiro greets Peter. Apparently, Peter's going to get a scar so enormous that he's barely recognizable without it. Spooky strings play along as Future-Hiro tells Peter that he has "a message" for him.

To Be Continued ...

As with the conclusion to each of the previous three episodes, the story is suddenly filled with possibilities. If Future-Hiro can travel back through time as well as forwards, why now? If he could contact any of the superheroes, why Peter? And if Peter can channel the other characters' powers, does that mean he's now going to channel Future-Hiro's and teleport to Vegas to become a card shark?

As has been the case repeatedly over the past four weeks, the questions are endless. You only hope that Mohinder's voice-over at the start, when he said that questions are often more powerful than answers, doesn't prove prophetic. On the strength of the series so far, I don't think it will.

For me, scoring this episode is a no-brainer. My impression based on the entire episode, from start to finish, is a 5. That said, even if the first 40 minutes had been filler, a word which doesn't seem to be in this show's vocabulary, the final scene on the subway is so awe-inspiring that this would still have been a 5.

Either way, it's an easy 5 out of 5.