Review: Heroes 3×02, “The Butterfly Effect”

Unless there’s a lot of demand, I won’t be posting very in-depth reviews of these episodes. There are plenty of new media people who do a much better job, most notably The 10th Wonder podcast. I still feel it incumbent on me to share my cursory musings.

A spirit walker, an ice queen, and the eponymous villains!

Just when I think the show has totally jumped the shark, Heroes redeems itself with a fun, fast-paced episode. The high point of this episode, for me, was Ali Larter’s new character, Tracy Strauss, is so far vastly superior to her Niki and Jessica Sanders split personality of the first two seasons. The writers aren’t taking the easy way out and pretending Niki never existed, though. Strauss is a dead-ringer for the super-strength-packing stripper, which is is jeopardizing her position in the New York political machine.

Mind-reading Matt Parkman ends up in a desert somewhere in Africa, where he meets a spirit walker who paints prophetic images on rocks, similar to the comic sketches of Isaac Mendez in the first season. I really enjoyed the divination-through-art motif the first time around, and I’m looking forward to its further development this season.

Given that this chapter is entitled Villains, it’s probably not letting too many cats out of the bag to reveal that, by the end of this episode, a dozen empowered and enraged bad guys are loosed upon the world. If handled ineptly, this could turn into a hydra of plot threads poised to strangle the show’s powerful storytelling. Done well, however, the appearance of these menaces could make for interesting power struggles and shifts in allegiance.

The major storyline of season three still seems murky and byzantine, but there are so many fun moments in this episode that the Theseus-like viewer is enticed to follow the labyrinthine path anyway.