'Dancing With The Stars' Season 14 Dream Casting
What To Watch On TV This Week
Heroes: 1961
by Jason Hughes, posted Apr 14th 2009 1:03AM
(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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