• When we left last week, Angela delivered a bombshell that she gave Sylar up for adoption. Now, she’s deciding to let
him out, to partner up with Noah, as called here earlier. Angela strings along Sylar’s addiction by giving him a fresh body or two, and looks the other way in order to complete the mission. Kind of like any Dallas Cowboys football coach from 1989-1995. The Level 5 detainees holdup a bank and its customers, despite Peter’s resisting, which is a little submissive. However, future Peter gets present Peter out of the Level 5 guy’s body, just before the guy does damage to the bank. Sylar saves Noah from bearing the brunt of it, just like Noah shot one of the others to save Sylar. So I guess things are still even up. But check out Sylar in a suit. Spiffy!

• Hiro and Ando get to Berlin, where they’ve tracked Daphne to a movie theatre, where she’s about to trade her half of the formula to someone. That someone is the Haitian, who was not available as Noah’s partner, because Angela had him “doing something for her.” Maybe Angela and Mr. Nakamura were a bit of a fractured group, or maybe Angela is working for the good, or the containment of some of these folks who have mysterious powers. Nevertheless, aside from seeing the Haitian again, the only other thing that was really advanced was the blossoming friction between Hiro and Ando.

• Tracy goes to New Orleans, where she sees Niki’s body, and meets Micah, who tries to find some sort of common thread between Tracy and Niki, and as it turns out, they had the same doctor deliver them, because they were twins? Well, something along those lines wasn’t a real surprise I guess.

• Claire is still angry at what Sylar did to her, and also angry that Noah didn’t take her along for all this. So Claire wants to learn how to fight, and Meredith, after some initial pushback from Claire’s adoptive mother, decides to teach her, or tries to, in some degree, before Claire gives in. It’s clear that Claire has a ways to go in fighting, even though she can’t be killed. Kind of ironic somehow. The episode ends with Claire sneaking out of the house after spotting a box full of Primatech documents. Smells like a reunion in Odessa of the awkward kind.

• While we didn’t see more of the Mohinder and Maya show this week (thank God), we did see more of Matt Parkman’s “spirit walk” as he called it, with Usutu. After walking, and walking some more, they run into a series of rocks that Usutu has painted that, simply put, is Parkman’s life, plus a couple of sequences that involve “future” Matt? None of them involve him finding the honey pot, so go figure. Nevertheless, Usutu is another Isaac Mendez, minus the drug problem and all.

Onward, for your thought and opinion segment!

I don’t know, maybe it was the novocane talking, but overall I thought that there was some minor story advancement/character development, but it felt a little more conventional/disappointing than I was hoping or expecting, and the jury is still very much out. Tracy’s a twin of Niki, great, but let’s see what’s done with it. She’s in a high place of political power, and Nathan is talking to a ghost Linderman, I hope this isn’t part of some weird Ghost tribute or something.

The Noah-Sylar partnership was really done more out of shock; at the end of the day Noah still doesn’t trust Sylar, and Sylar still cuts open people’s heads. There’s still an awful long way to go with it, and seeing Sylar in a housekeeping apron as part of next week’s teaser? Doesn’t really help matters.

Hiro and Ando starting to not be friends anymore (or more specifically, Ando disliking how Hiro’s powers are getting to his head) is interesting, but like above, there’s still a long way to go with it. I still feel that it could be potentially be the strongest storyline for the show (shoot, Hiro’s Season One arc was the best in my opinion), trying to mix it with the usual Hiro humor seems to dilute the product a little bit. Not reading any spoiler sites, my guess is that Daphne will get in between them more than they could anticipate, which if done right, could wind up being pretty good.

The Claire bad-ass thing, or whatever it is, appears to be a little more prominent next week in the teaser? But this week, like last week, you don’t feel her epiphany for wanting to do this. In Season One I could have understood it a little bit, but Sylar coming in and taking her power being the catalyst for it? Not buying it. Besides, once Sylar Petrelli gets introduced to the world, what’s she going to do?

The only real stride made this week I think is the Parkman arc. Granted, he went from walking in the desert, to still being in a desert full of painted rocks with his face on them, but follow me for a second; Joe Pokaski, who wrote this ep, also wrote Season One’s “Five Years Gone,” which made Parkman a DHS crony who killed those with powers, under the service of President Nathan Petrelli.

So, did I miss anything? What do you guys think?

Done? Good, we’ll here’s the second part of “The Butterfly Effect” after the jump, replete with non-linear thought and speculation.

• Getting future Peter to realize the ramifications of telling Claire NOT to come to Odessa after Nathan was shot, and having Angela convince him of this, was interesting to watch, and definitely helps you see how he runs into Claire holding a gun on him in “The Second Coming”. What I did not expect was that present day Peter is inhabiting the body of one of the Level 5 detainees who had been freed. Those detainees include the previously mentioned Jamie Hector (The Wire). The detainee in question is played by Francis Capra, who you might remember as Weevil on Veronica Mars.

• Speaking of Veronica Mars, that segues me into what Elle (Kristen Bell) now. Elle is dispatched by her Dad to try and find Sylar, but the search doesn’t last long, as Bob is killed by Sylar. Elle isn’t sure what to do at this point, so she decides to free Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman), who was spending time in level 5 Steve McQueen style, and is asked to help Elle find Sylar. But Sylar finds Elle and Noah first, and as he tries to kill Elle and take her powers, she does what I can only describe as “resisting a lot”, and knocks out Sylar, who is detained in a level 5 cell. More on Sylar in a minute.

• Nathan continues to have spiritual conversations with Linderman (Malcolm McDowell, A Clockwork Orange) which help shape his career after being shot and discovering a revival of sorts, but the intriguing wrinkle in all this for everyone was that these conversations are with a ghost. Thank God, at least Linderman is staying dead in one sense. However, Ali Larter, who’s played the badass Gina, then the rational single mom Niki, comes Tracy Strauss, the calculating political aid to a Governor who asks Nathan to be a U.S. Senator. Tracy is asked about her Niki/Gina past by a reporter (William Katt, The Greatest American Hero), and as the evidence mounts that a gubernatorial aid might have been a Vegas stripper and had a torrid affair with Nathan, she decides to physically stop him, but we see that Tracy has a power to freeze people in times of aggressive contact.

• Since getting her powers taken (well, borrowed) by Sylar, Claire is a little bit pissed and wants some payback. However
she now discovers that, while she can regenerate and still not die, she can’t feel pain now, which depresses her, because she thought pain was the only thing that kept her human. After her offers to help Peter and Noah are turned down, she’s left to wonder what to do next, but surprise! Her birth Mom visits the Bennets. What she says or does remains to be seen, until next week anyway.

• Mohinder (Sendhil Ramamurthy) really digs his new powers, so much so that he’s got a love for chocolate milk and getting some with Maya (Dania Ramirez), in no particular order. However after injecting himself with the powers, his body starts to react negatively as much as it did positively earlier in the episode.

• Matt (Greg Grunberg) was banished to the African desert, remember? I know, neither do I, but he encounters a tribesman named Usutu (Ntare Mwine), who manages to know his name and has some idea of why he’s there, but the answers certainly weren’t given this week, as the two walk the earth, Kung Fu style.

• Hiro continues to try and find the speedy bandit responsible for stealing the chemical formular that was in his father’s vault. They locate the thief and he offers a trade, which she rejects and threatens Ando’s life, but everything manages to work out, and Hiro manages to put a tracing signal on one of the thief’s possessions to get a better hold on her. Hiro and Ando talk about what Hiro saw in the future as well, and how that effects their friendship.

• Remember how Sylar was kept under containment in level 5? Well a powerful ally comes to call, and it’s…Sylar’s mother?

Now for the steam-of-consciousness post-game analysis:

I was watching a local news piece where Coleman was interviewed, and to paraphrase, he said something about partnering up with a polar opposite of him, but they both had the same goals. I think I won the bet with my wife on this, because she thought Noah was partnering up with Elle, but if we’re talking about opposites to the extreme, then Noah and Sylar have to be partnering up, right? If so, the reasons for it, and the partnership itself will be interesting to watch, and I think that Angela has something to do with these motivations. So unless there’s a swerve I’m missing, feel free to volunteer it. But I’m calling it now. Mark it zero smokey.

I’ve been one who’s been pushing for Larter to basically go the f away for quite some time now, as the Niki/Gina arc was interesting for a minute, but got weaker as it went along, and she was pretty much a non-factor on Season Two, but I’ve gotta admit the whole Tracy thing has got me curious. She plays it down to the fake teeth, but it’s hard to think that Tracy and Niki aren’t the same at this point; how they reconcile that (or do they?) will be interesting, and at least it makes Larter an interesting figure again. And judging from the way they show Tracy and the reporter in the garage, count on them introducing a peripheral character in the mix.

Obviously, the Hiro storyline has less to do with this new villain, and more to do with his friendship with Ando. Assuming this is the center focus of the Hiro storyline, this could wind up being some excellent storytelling. The two have been friends for awhile, so there’s plenty of territory that could be mined from this, and can easily vault Hiro back up the level of prestige that the first Season brought.

Claire’s character turn, assuming that’s where they’re going with it, should be interesting. If I was going to throw a theory out there, Claire’s birth mother plants the seeds of this in her brain for future events, which we see not only in “The Second Coming” but in the end teaser for upcoming shows.

The new villains are clearly evil dudes with clearly defined roles, and present-day Peter’s place in that group remains to be seen.
Mohinder’s whole “1986 Jeff Goldblum” routine seemed a little bit stupid to me, all the more so when you consider how physically similar they look, and assuming that Mohinder doesn’t start hoarding old fingernails anytime soon, I hope that this storyline doesn’t sag, because it potentially could be one of the interesting ones down the road.

At this point, the weakest storyline has to be wherever they’re going with Matt. He and Mohinder have seen the same drawing in two different areas but don’t know it yet, and one of the things about isolation in this show is that it tends to hamper your character all the more so. Matt better find the door to come back quick, or people will be fast forwarding their Tivos at record speed.

All in all, “The Second Coming” and “The Butterfly Effect” provide a good mix of “Holy Crap!” moments, combined with setting up the framework of what is already providing to be a great season for both Heroes and Villains alike.