"Oh, my God, we took Sylar, an invincible sociopath with incredible super powers, put him in a suit and asked him to help us catch bad guys. And then he turned on us! Who could have seen this coming?!"

Sorry about not covering the season premiere of Heroes, but I am prepared to share with you now some thoughts on last week's episode:

-- Mohinder's storyline is possibly the laziest thing I've ever seen in my life. The whole point of his character is to try to root the heroes in the rest of the world, with people who don't have powers. No, this isn't a realistic show, but if you purposely create a character who is different from all the other characters for a specific reason, you are not allowed to suddenly give him super powers. "But he didn't have anything to do on the show! We had to give him powers to make him matter!" First of all, maybe you should have thought of that before. Second, you didn't have to do anything. It's just proof that you were too lazy to really come up with anything good and thought that killing off the character was too simple. Which it is, but it's still lazy to have him, in about ten seconds, realize, "Oh, hey, THAT'S how people get super powers! So without any further study or tests, I'm just going to inject this into my body because, really, what's the worst that can happen?" Ugh. I am very, very angry with this part of the show, and it certainly didn't help that they still haven't killed off Maja. Don't even get me started on the Fly ripoff, here, although I'm sure Tim Kring would whine and complain that everyone thought his "homage" was pure plagiarism.

-- Really, Sylar? "Like a long night after a bad taco"? Why are you supposed to be scary, again?

-- Again with one of the characters travelling to the future to witness an apocalypse that they now have to go back in time to prevent? 

-- And why even hire William Katt, the Greatest American Hero, onto the show if he 1) doesn't have any super powers and 2) is killed off immediately

-- I don't know why I'm always surprised when something is overly melodramatic on this show, but the part where Noah says to Claire, "I've brought someone to protect you while I'm gone," and then Claire's biological mom shows up and wordlessly holds out her hand and conjures up fire. Yes, that helps the viewers, including people who have never seen the show before, understand her purpose, but what the hell kind of thing is that to do in that situation? Claire would be like, "Uh, yeah, mom, I've seen your trick before, very impressive."

-- Blah blah blah, Sylar is Mama Petrelli's son who she gave up for adoption. Wait, so is he older than Nathan? Because... no. No he's not. Which means, what, Mama Petrelli gave up her middle son for adoption? I'm very confused on the time line here, and this isn't even one of the stupid time travel plots.

I'm beginning to agree with everyone who says that even Season 1 of Heroes wasn't that good, it was just that we all believed it was building to something good when, in fact, it was just building to whatever the writers could pull out of their asses. And, unsurprisingly, they came up with crap.

Last night's episode was a little bit better than the premiere, but that's probably only because it was only an hour and there were no appearances by Mohinder or Maja. Hurray!

But, because this is Heroes, they had to go and be stupid and have Mama Petrelli insist that Sylar partner with Noah Bennet, and together they will go deal with a bank robbery involving three of the escaped heroes (including the not-evil Peter trapped inside the totally-evil body of Jesse). Oh, yeah, this will turn out well. Because we've all seen how well Sylar acts when he's let loose in public. And then he's surprisingly obedient for most of the job, which: bullshit. I know Zachary Quinto and the writers are trying to give the guy some more humanity, so it's not that he's evil, it's that he's trying to find his place in the world, but... There is nothing they can say that will convince me Sylar wouldn't have just killed Noah as soon as they were clear of the compound. And there is no way Sylar would have voluntarily returned to the compound once he ended up killing someone.

Speaking of which, I love how Noah was all surprised by this. The whole day, he's like, "I'm keeping my eye on you," which, first of all, what could he even do if Sylar did something bad? Nothing. But then when Sylar does help him for a minute, Noah's like, "Oh, man, thanks, I'm just going to leave you alone with this guy you want to murder... OH MAN, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU JUST MURDERED HIM, YOU DICK." Again, it's not like Noah could have done anything even if he had stayed in the room, but it's hard to believe that he'd drop his guard so easily.

Another moment that was weird was when Sylar began attacking the guys with his mind - one hand mimed picking up one guy, so the guy lifted up in the air, and then Sylar's other hand choked Jesse so he couldn't use his super sonic yelling thingy. Fine. But the third guy comes to attack him and it's obviously so suspenseful because - !!! - Sylar has his hands full! How will he protect himself against the third guy? Except... he's doing this with his mind. He doesn't actually need to use his body for any of this. He could blink at the guy and it would be overkill. Ugh. Stupid Heroes writing.

I also liked how Future Peter froze time, forced Present Peter out of Jesse's body and then both Peters teleported away, leaving Noah to fend for himself. Thanks for the help, butthead!

I am quite liking Ali Larter's new storyline, though -- her Nikki/Jessica/Whatever split personality thing was getting really old, so it's good to see that the writers killed off that character but still found a good way to bring Larter back, by making her a genetic creation of a doctor back in the '70s. It's not an original idea, no, but it's interesting and means we don't have to deal with Nikki anymore. I wonder if all the copies can communicate with each other, like all the Eves on that episode of The X-Files.

This is getting pretty long, so I'll just wind up with saying that I really don't like the Daphne character. And, actually, it's not so much the character as the actress (who also played Landry's erstwhile girlfriend on Friday Night Lights), who is playing her just a little too cartoony, making her even more two-dimensional than the rest of the two-dimensional characters on this show. Too many "I'm mischievous and I've got moxie" facial tics for me. And while the character's not a terrible idea, so far it's pretty much the exact copy of every "bad girl with a heart" character from every comic book - but then, this is Heroes, so I'm not sure why I'm so surprised that they blatantly ripped off an idea from comics and didn't execute it very well.