“June 13—Part One” is about Hiro taking HRG back to a year ago, the day of Claire’s death and the Unity Summit explosion, ostensibly for HRG to get some answers. As the two arrive at the Summit thanks to Hiro’s time-traveling powers, they discuss how they need to find Claire and figure out who or what destroys the summit. It’s at this point that Hiro tells HRG that they should hurry. Why? “We only have three hours.”
Yes, a time traveler, who has literally just traveled back in time, and who can also pause time, just told another character that they don’t have much time. It’s this combination of stupidity and laziness that makes this Heroes so special, and so obnoxious.
Spoilers follow, of course...
This is also the most egregious example of Heroes Reborn having no idea how to handle Hiro and his powers, but hardly the only one. It’s actually one of the original series’ biggest problems, too; in order to keep the basically omnipotent Hiro from instantly solving all problems, the original show used dumb excuses for his powers not to work or, more often, stranded him away from the main plot entirely. Heroes Reborn has improved a little bit in that Hiro claims, a la Doctor Who, that some past events can’t be changed without making things worse—and at least he seems to pop into alternate timelines to check ‘em out. However, Hiro and HRG are already messing with events willy-nilly, and this amounts to an arbitrary rule that the writers bust out anytime they write themselves into a corner, which happens at least a dozen times in this episode.
The tragedy is that “June 13—Part One” is a better-than-usual episode of Heroes Reborn. Yes, it’s a narrative mess, but figuring out what happened to Claire and the Summit are easily the most interesting mysteries of the show, and there’s at least one solid twist I was not expecting. Here are the answers: 1) Claire died giving birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and 2) Erica destroyed the Summit (with help from a bunch of Harris clones with bombs strapped to them) in order to kill the EVOs she knows may be able to prevent the solar flare/extinction-level event and save the world.
Meanwhile, we get the return of classic Heroes “favorites” Mohinder and Angela Petrelli. I really have no idea why Mohinder was in the episode other than fan service, which, well, “Mohinder fan service” makes me depressed to even type; Angela is there to use her prophecy powers to make sure HRG and Hiro all know about the big extinction-level event coming in a year, and that one or both of Claire’s twins will save the world.
This leads to what I thought was the interesting bit: HRG, Hiro and Angela decide to hide the babies in the past—in 1999, so when “the healing” does happen, they’ll at least be 15, which is when Claire’s powers first manifested themselves. Hiro and Angela teleport them to the past… right after naming the kids Nathan and Malina.
Yes, Malin the Last Airbender and Teleportin’ Tommy are Claire’s kids! I… I didn’t think Heroes Reborn even had that much creativity in it. So, hey, credit where credit’s due. Now, that said, I still have many, many questions that Reborn has yet to answer:
• Why was it so important HRG not remember the twins or the big plan?
• Why would HRG tell the Haitian to kill him if he started trying to remember?
• What possible reason could be there be that Molly Walker would rather kill herself before telling HRG about this nonsense?
• Why is Erica Dravid so excited about the near-extinction of all humanity?
• How and why did they give Nathan/Tommy to the nurse at the hospital?
• How the hell does Hachiro Otomo think EverNow is going to help save the world?
• Why did Hachiro believe trapping Hiro in the EverNow game would be at all helpful?
• Who knocked up Claire, and where the hell is he?
Will all these questions be answered in future episodes? Of course not. In fact, that’s the other big problem Heroes Reborn inherited from its predecessor—it’s impossible to tell which mysteries are intentional, and which are actually just lazy writing. There’s no way to know until the final episode. But I’ll be pleasantly surprised if Reborn answers even half of these questions.
Assorted Musings:
• So the Collins’ kid Dennis has that condition where sunlight makes their skin burn. But then they take him to the Summit where he has a hat on, but his face is exposed to the sun and he’s still totally fine. LAZY. Also, Dennis is totally alive.
• NBC could not afford to have Hayden Panettiere make a cameo, even as a corpse, so HRG was forced to make his tearful farewell to his daughter while she had a sheet over her face the entire time. It was humorously pathetic.
• It appears that Miko is indeed a purely video game creation, and her dad has the suspected “turn things digital/turn digital things real” power. That’s nice, but I highly suspect that this EverNow video game nonsense will not factor into saving the world at all.
Contact the author at rob@io9.com.