(S03E023) Hot damn, Tim Kring, you did it! The show's creator stepped up to the pen flying solo on the writing for this episode, and by golly, he made a Petrelli family episode interesting. Angela finally stopped abusing her kin by having them dig up skeletal remains, all the while refusing to tell them why they were doing it. She finally opened up a little bit and we got some flashbacks as to just what happened at Coyote Sands and what it has to do with the Petrellis and Mohinder's father.
And while it was interesting from beginning to end, primarily because it did answer some questions as to what happened in the past with Angela and, ultimately, with the genesis of what would become "The Company," it wasn't great. I did find the story of Angela and her sister Alice intriguing, but there were just as many questions left unanswered as there were answered, which I guess is a goal of a long-term series like this. What I do want to know is if Angela went back to Coyote Flats after she left that night to dance with a colored boy, not that anyone remembers that.
The reason is I'm wondering how Angela, with all the resources she's had at her disposal over the years, never sought her sister out. Did she never go back to Coyote Sands in the past 50 years? Surely there would have been legends about the crazy weather lady who lived at the old abandoned army base. Especially after Alice started coming out to go on food raids. It's a small town; they'd notice someone like her.
Also, Alice didn't seem so young that she would be so completely obedient to her older sister and stay there for decades based on a dream Angela told her she had. It was as if she was mentally challenged. I'm guessing we're to believe she just went crazy when her parents were mowed down, which I suppose is plausible. Still, the whole sequence was a little odd. And then, in the end, with no resolution of anything, she was gone.
Honestly, the episode would have worked just as well without Alice appearing. In fact, it may have been more powerful if she'd been dead and Angela had just been hoping that she was still alive and out there. The flashbacks themselves did a good job of establishing what Coyote Sands was, but I would have liked a better idea of just how many people with abilities were there. Were they testing the parents in the same way they were testing the kids?
I know we were getting Angela's story, so how could she have possibly known what was happening with other people there? But that doesn't mean I don't want to know more about what was going on. I suspect that's a reason why Mohinder didn't go with them; that and the fact that he doesn't have a Petrelli family badge. But now he's free to find out more about what his father was doing there.
The point of this installment seemed to be to bring the extended Petrelli family back together so they could establish the new generation of The Company. Only this time with compassion. Or something like that. The concentration camp Angela was in didn't necessarily seem nefarious from what we saw. The violence erupted almost by an accidental series of events when Alice was brought in for testing and whatever that drug was. I'm not saying it was a spa and resort by any means, but it also may not have been as aggressively awful as Danko's current operation.
With two episodes left this season, they've done about as good as they can in brushing off this past season and wiping the slate clean for whatever stories are coming up next. They just need to get on track with establishing where they're going. Sylar as a shapeshifter pretending to be Nathan hearkens back to the earlier stories in a sinister way. Now there's a threat we can sink our teeth into.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
4-14-2009 @ 4:54AM
Joseph said...
I just wasn't feeling this...
First with the digging... The only probable motive, I'm guessing, was to find the actual skeleton of her sister, but by the time they got into the meat of the episode, all the digging was long forgotten.
Plus, Angela should know her dreams well enough to know that her sister was definitely alive.
Which I also found pretty dumb. Plus that's a massive power for someone to have been able to keep under wraps for so long, especially from people like the former company who could track pretty much anyone they wanted.
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4-14-2009 @ 7:56AM
GL said...
I agree. This didn't resonate for me at all. The whole bit about Alice not only not dying, but staying out of sight for 50 years was really silly.
4-14-2009 @ 6:03AM
Val said...
So Deveaux was hot for Mama Petrelli? could Simone Deveaux be Mama Petrelli's daughter and he, for some reason, made her forget?!! that would be pretty good.. pretty disgusting for Nathan... Half sister and all... but pretty good indeed
I'm glad we finally got to see Deveaux's power... So does he make people forget or just mass mind control?
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4-14-2009 @ 7:33AM
LC said...
I think you mean pretty disgusting for Peter. Nonetheless, I don't see any reason to believe that she would be Angela's daughter.
4-14-2009 @ 8:47AM
John Howard said...
Wow, seriously? You thought this was interesting? I thought this was easily the worst episode of Heroes ever. And by a long way.
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4-14-2009 @ 8:55AM
laura said...
Was I watching Heroes? Or COLD CASE. with all the black and white flashbacks and they "hey we are in 1961, and to remind you of that we are going to play SLEEPWALK by Johnny and Santo a couple of times" Plus the "goodnight alice" about 4 times to make sure we know that that was thier "thing"
I hated this episode, it wasnt up to my viewing standards at all.
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4-14-2009 @ 9:06AM
Abe Simpson said...
Dear Mr. Head Writer,
There are too many Petrellis these days.
Please eliminate three.
PS: I am not a crank.
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4-14-2009 @ 9:07AM
Martin said...
It would be easy for Alice to stay out of site. An area that starts to be constantly raided by wind storms would start to drag people into shelter every time she came around, and apparently she can travel pretty well through the storms without even someone who knows she is there to be able to find her, so why couldn't she stay undiscovered for 50 years or so... All the other people with abilities have gone unnoticed by the majority of people for so long and they are out in public not hiding from anyone.
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4-14-2009 @ 9:24AM
ConspiracyGuy said...
It was an interesting episode, but why was Chandra Suresh so amazed at Gabrielle Gray (Patient Zero) later in his life (i.e he found proof that his book was correct), when he was already studying people with abilities 50 years earlier?
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4-14-2009 @ 12:52PM
fsu120 said...
Maybe he had his memory wiped out by someone in "The Company"
4-14-2009 @ 9:36AM
MDR said...
I have to agree with some of the other comments. This episode was interesting but disappointing. The writers seem lost with the direction of this show and just seem to be pulling ideas out of the blue to fill the rest of the season. Why would it take Angela almost fifty years to finally look for her sister? Maybe she couldn't find her before because she went from being a brown haired, brown-eyed girl to a blonde, blue-eyed woman. C'mon, at least make the casting a little bit more believable. The history of Coyote Sands could have been presented differently without having to make up a convoluted story about a lost sister no one knew about. And what was the point of digging up the dead bodies just to leave them there? I give this episode a C-.
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4-14-2009 @ 12:24PM
Dan said...
But at least it explained why Angela was shoplifting socks in season 1...that was a good connection to the past.
I liked parts of this episode, the young Deveaux was great, I wanted to see more of him. But there were parts that I said "those Heroes haters are going to have a field day with this"...the sister story was cool, but there were holes, and the only way to believe that Suresh was there is to believe that his memory had been erased at some point before Mohinder's sister was born.
But I love the connection to the first season with Sylar posing as Nathan...
4-15-2009 @ 5:08PM
RIFRAF said...
It all depends on when Angela started to have the dreams that Alice was alive. Again she said it a million times in the episode that the dreams were not all that clear. Also, even the young Alice seemed to be not all their mentally. Staying out in the desert of 50 years could have made anyone crazy...
4-14-2009 @ 10:18AM
Parl said...
The story was pretty decent, but the execution was awful. Those flashbacks were almost as painful as the accent on the kid playing Lindermeyer. I have to say I did really enjoy seeing Bob though.
But yeah, it was nice to get some backstory, but it was a slow and trudging episode injected with more melodrama than entertainment.
It certainly can't hold a candle to Company Man.
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4-14-2009 @ 10:58AM
Wintermute said...
I got the feeling that they were trying for another "Company Man" with this episode, but they failed miserably in that regard.
That said, it was a pretty enjoyable episode overall. My thoughts on why Angela never went looking for her sister before is because she thought she was dead. Until she started having dreams of her, there wasn't exactly a reason for her to go looking, was there?
Then there's the throwback to the episode where Angela was arrested for shoplifting. Turns out she was stealing socks for her sister. I can understand the guilt that would drive her to do that.
Like I said, I enjoyed this episode. Not the strongest by any means, and definitely no "Company Man," but not horrible either. I'd give it C+ (which is still better than many series' A+ episodes).
4-14-2009 @ 2:09PM
Chadwick said...
This episode was boring and I about feel asleep. They could have wrapped this little story in twenty minutes. Geezz. I am getting sleepy just thinking about it.
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4-14-2009 @ 10:56AM
Shaun said...
I think it would be cool going forward if Alice turned into a bad guy. I think she would make a great "Villian" being that her only motive would be sisterly revenge.
Oh, and for the record, the credits on the show have the writer being one Aron Eli Coleite, not Tim Kring. The episode was just too interested and nuanced for Kring to have written it. Seriously, I think the best thing for the show would be to sack Kring.
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4-14-2009 @ 12:29PM
RTMS said...
I always like these sorts of episodes so I wasn't put off as other were. And I agree with others, Angela thought her whole family died that day, when the news cast said a severe storm was over Coyote Sands. I m guessing that the group did go back but by then the gov't had bugged out and they could see all the graves hence they all thought everyone was dead. As for Chandra Surresh, remember Angela said they made everyone forget what happened and who they were. They probably singled out Surresh after they found out he lived and mind swiped him.
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4-14-2009 @ 1:05PM
Martin said...
What would be interesting is, is to find out how Suresh had a daughter with powers, maybe someone he met at the camp or the after effects of the camp. Also, sorry but still agree Alice could go unnoticed... And want to know how eeriely the girl playing young Angela was able to really pull off Mama Petrelli behavior and nuances...
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4-14-2009 @ 1:16PM
JScor said...
"Colored boy"? Really? In 2009? Wow.
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