HEROES REBORN Reveals This Season’s BIG BAD

Episode 5 “The Lion’s Den”

Things of note in this episode: Melina and Farah make their way down to Canada, Tommy finds out that he’s adopted, Carlos kidnaps the cop who took away his nephew, Luke burns his house down, and Miko finally gets her sword back. A lot of that is still tangential to the main story, however, which we finally have defined for us.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we officially know what the bad thing is for this season. I’m going to focus on that a plot thread for the duration of this article, and I’m going to save the reveal for the end, in case any of your have not seen the episode yet.

Erica is overseeing he storage of thousands of containers of plant seeds. The containers are being zapped by a device Renautus is using to harness the yet-to-be-defined powers of an EVO, in the same manner they harnessed Molly’s (all hail the memory of her past loveliness) power to power EPIC. She gets a call from Taylor looking to reconcile from their fight (in the previous episode), but it is all a ruse, as when Erica arrives at her house Noah and Quentin are waiting for her. Noah tries to get information out of her, but she’s just as cryptic as she is with Taylor, and we ultimately learn nothing apart from the fact that Noah once worked with Erica (not so much a revelation as much as it is another piece in the puzzle of Noah’s forgotten past).

Harris arrives and gets her out and she goes to see one of the scientists at Renautus where they discuss — wait for it — the bad thing that’s coming. And what is it? What is the reason for Renautus’ activities, abducting EVOs, instigating and propagating the prejudices against EVOs, and killing innocent people?

A solar flare. Tada! Apparently the planet’s poles are reversing and that will leave the Earth vulnerable to a massive solar flare that will wipe out all life on Earth. The seeds are for the repopulation of the planet of Earth after the disaster.

This is confusing to say the least. It sort of makes sense, what with the constant appearance of the northern lights, but it always seemed like Melina was causing it; now I suppose it was just her somehow fixing the atmosphere/poles/whatever. Melina’s powers are becoming more and more confusing as this series goes on and I’m beginning to doubt it will ever make any sense; so far she can cause an aurora borealis, revive butterflies, make trees grow rapidly, and shove people back like she’s using the force. If she’s somehow able to stop this disaster from happening, I don’t understand why Erica and Renautus would want to kill her, and they’ve been sending people to shoot her so it’s not just for the sake of digitizing her powers like all the other EVOs they’ve been kidnapping.

Oddly, they’ve also been referring to her as “the baby”. It still remains to be seen how it all ties together.

Now, this is where the plot holes start to show. If it is possible to prevent this oncoming apocalypse by the abilities of a single EVO, or even a group of them, wouldn’t Renautus have the infrastructure to harness that power? Why put all this effort into the rebuilding when you have their level of capability? Why do it all so covertly? Why not come out and show everyone on Earth that this is coming and that EVOs can prevent it?

I mean, I get the whole not wanting to cause a panic thing, but this has been going on for at least a year now; if they knew this was coming and knew they could harness the power to prevent it then why cause social unrest amongst the populace, turning people against EVOs in an effort to root them out? Remember, thousands of EVOs were willingly coming out by following Claire’s example. Why not ask EVOs to come forward and volunteer their abilities? Primatech/Renautus has experience dealing with powers, and has access to people who can help train newly discovered EVOs in how to mature in their abilities so they’ll be ready (which is what I’m assuming is what someone has been doing with Melina). Why does this have to be a conspiracy like this?

I can’t say, and sadly this revelation has not made any of the characters any more likable. Erica is still horribly uninteresting and her dialogue is awful. Taylor is basically useless to the story, and her part could have been written out entirely without much difficulty. Quentin has had nothing to do since episode 1 and he’s starting to become dead weight (a real shame, because his story was pretty compelling in the Dark Matters miniseries).

And none of the other tangential plotlines seem at all strengthened, even knowing that, in typical Heroes fashion, they’ll probably all come together somehow. It’s just a waiting game to see how it happens.