Not Quite Sure What To Make Of This Week's Heroes

Obviously, "Five Years Gone" was a very exciting and surprising episode. Set five years in the future, it provided some possible futures for many of the characters, like Peter and Nikki hooking up, and Mohinder working for a morally corrupt President Nathan Petrelli, who isn't actually who he appears to be, and more. Most of what was shown was very cool.

But for the second week in a row, a significant part of the plot seemed to be lifted from an unrelated comic book! Last week it was Watchmen; this week they appeared to be borrowing quite heavily from the "Days of Future Past" storyline in X-Men # 141 & 142, from 1981. If that rings a bell, it may because I mentioned it way back when, after Hiro referred to it in an early episode, incorrectly attributing it to X-Men # 143. Was that foreshadowing on the writing staff's part, so that we'd have a clue that they were going to do their own "dystopian future in which heroes are outlawed and thus send a time traveller back to the past to try to change things" riff? I don't know, but it did seem a bit much to appropriate well-known comic sagas in back-to-back weeks like that.

Another thing that bugged me was trying to follow the timeline, as laid out in this episode. If I understand what they said, the original timeline had Claire dying at Sylar's hand at the Homecoming dance. That event happened, and then when Hiro tried to kill Sylar in NYC, Sylar healed, using Claire's powers. Thus, future Hiro travelled back to confront Peter Petrelli on the subway train, pre-Homecoming, to tell him to "save the cheerleader, save the world." Then he returned to his own time. Apparently nothing had changed, though, as NYC was still semi-destroyed, Ando still died in the explosion, and the authorities were still hunting down "specials." But something had changed, actually, because now Claire was still alive, and had been hidden away by her foster father and Parkman. Did nothing else change, as a result? Shouldn't there have been a ripple effect, considering a death had been averted and a hugely significant power not attained by the villain? And if there was such an effect, why did Hiro remember going back in a timeline that didn't exist anymore? Is he able to perceive both timelines? And why would he think, upon meeting his younger self and Ando, that they'd been able to kill Sylar - as he asks them - when the world's still mired in darkness as it is? This aspect of the episode really didn't make much sense to me.

A final minor quibble I had was regarding the Hiro/Ando relationship. Dialogue in "Five Years Gone" would make one think that Ando was extremely important to Hiro, which is certainly consistent with everything we've seen of the pair so far. Why, then, when future Hiro walks into the studio and sees Hiro and Ando standing there, doesn't he react at all to seeing his lost friend, instead simply saying, "You!" to his younger self? In fact, he walks by Ando and bearly acknowledges him, which hardly seems indicative of getting a second chance to spend some quality time with someone whose loss had hurt him deeply. That seemed poorly written to me.

I'll give the show credit for pushing the envelope, though. For the average viewer who doesn't read stories like this on a monthly basis, much of this must be of the mind-blowing variety...