Zach's Heroes Watch - "Once Upon a Time in Texas"

Previously on Heroes: Samuel has some past-fixin’ to do, and so does Hiro. Enter destiny and special guest star Charlie.

Hiro successfully travels back in time, and he’s ready to save Charlie from a fate worse than Sylar. Cue the boy-meets-girl flashback, and since good guys wear white hats Hiro gets mixed up in a whole slew of appropriate imagery (see, Grey’s? That’s how it’s done.). We also get a nice little reminder that Charlie had a power – super-memory, which sounds really nice right in time for finals week.

Retcon alert! Noah used to have a partner besides the Haitian, and we revisit some of that good old “lying to our families sucks” dialogue we’ve come to know and love. Except Lady Partner (Lauren) thinks Noah is flirting with her – is he? We also get some fantastic reminders of how close the Sylar chase was back in Season One and how close the show is coming to eclipsing its original greatness.

Remember Eden and Isaac? They’re all back, too! ...in alternate history form. It’s too bad that I don’t remember Season One all that well, because Noah asks Isaac to do something that we probably already saw, but I can’t honestly remember. What’s definitely new is that Noah’s partner has the hots for our bespectacled buddy, feelings that don’t seem to be reciprocal unless the writers want to hook them up in subsequent episodes.

Noah’s much more interested in reconnecting with his daughter, and we learn that Noah’s a Shakespeare buff (I like him more already, even though he quoted my least favorite of Will’s plays). After Claire tells him to do what makes him happy, it looks like Noah’s about to get busy with his partner, but we know he’s not all morally grey. He keeps it in his pants and puts his family first. No lovin’ for Lauren, who has her memory wiped Haitian-style to make things easier.

Back in the present day at the Creepy Carnival, Old Man Arnold is ready to shuffle off the mortal coil, which has Samuel irked because he didn’t buy a big enough cemetery plot. Samuel, whose superpower seems to be “convinc[ing] an apple it’s an orange,” knows he needs Hiro because Lydia’s tattoo told him so, so he’s off into the past to try to convince Hiro to join up with him.

So Samuel wants to tell Hiro that “Suzie Flapjacks” isn’t worth making history go “kablooey,” even though Hiro doesn’t believe him. Hiro stops time right before Sylar can kill Charlie – just before the commercial break. When we return, Hiro wheels Frozen Sylar out of the restaurant and into a Greyhound bus’s luggage compartment. But he puzzles over this whole “kablooey” thing that time travel fiction has always grappled with, as Samuel broods in a shadowy corner.

The solution? Be menacing and pretend to be Future Hiro to tell Past Hiro to... oh, my brain’s exploding. What is this, Lost? Suffice it to say, it works. But Samuel finds a flaw in the situation, speaks some Japanese, and sends Hiro to fix potentially-broken things with Ando before Hiro and Charlie go off on a world tour. But the super-memory kicks in and something is definitely wrong with Charlie (hint: it’s not the fact that she’s got a show on a rival network).

Unfrozen Trunk Sylar wakes up and menaces Hiro, but it turns out that Sylar is no match for Hiro’s chronal on/off switch. It’s absolutely hysterical watching these two face off in a superpowered version of Old West gunslinging. They reach a truce in which Sylar agrees to cure Charlie for a peek at the future. And hey, it worked! Hiro makes good on his deal and goes all fortune-cookie on Sylar, warning him about a bleak future that awaits him.

The plan, of course, backfires. Charlie is upset that Sylar is going to keep on killing, and she feels like her new life with Hiro is “cheating... and selfish.” Poor Hiro has his heart broken – if only he’d been watching Glee. He’d know this wasn’t meant to be after all; she’s in love with Will the glee coach, after all. Hiro turns to root beer and has an existential conversation with Noah at the diner. But at the last second, Charlie comes back to the diner looking for “our happy ending” – hooray!

But it’s not all kisses and origami cranes. Samuel abducts Charlie to get to Hiro but then admits that he sort of lied about the whole thing. Trapped in the carnival, Hiro flips out and learns that Arnold trapped Charlie in time just before he died. Samuel reveals that he’s going to blackmail Hiro into helping him erase his “Evil Butterfly Man” past. With that, Hiro goes over to the dark side to help Samuel erase his worst transgression – killing Mohinder (now we know why he wasn’t returning Matt’s calls).

Verdict? This episode was compared to “Company Man” before its airing, and I’m thinking this episode would have looked really awesome in black and white. Maybe that’s just the visual culture guy in me, but it would have been pretty striking. This was another good episode from the Heroes crew; the Noah plotline felt a little like a waste (although my bet is that we’ll see Lauren again), but the Hiro/Samuel interaction is gold. I cannot wait to see where this plotline goes, especially because we’re STILL not sure what side of the fence Samuel is on. And the hope for a happy ending, even if this is the last season, gets me all giggly inside.