NBC Heroes: "Shades of Gray"

I’m not usually a fair-weather friend to the shows that I watch. Although I get frustrated with them sometimes, occasionally they start doing things that originally hooked me into watching them, and it renews my interest in them. That’s what happened with last night’s episode of Heroes on NBC. Even though it wasn’t perfect, “Shades of Gray” contained many things that are beginning to pique my interest in the storyline again—something that lately was beginning to wane.

In this episode, Sylar (Zachary Quinto) finally found his father and what I was dreading actually happened—they talked. But the way it happened wasn’t all that bad because Samson Gray (played by John Glover) is dying of cancer, which seemed to take all the fun out of killing him for Sylar. I really like the actor, John Glover, so as the scenes between him and Sylar played out I was hoping that his desire to steal Sylar’s healing ability was actually going to happen and that we’d see either a new, more powerful villain, or we’d see a father/son duo that’s virtually unstoppable. Ultimately, Sylar snapped out of the paralysis his father had put on him and got away as he left his father to wither away and die slowly. I DO hope we see more of Samson Gray in the future, though.


It appears that what Sylar got out of that little exchange is that he needed to be bigger and bolder in his efforts as a villain and in the end of the episode we saw him hiding in the apartment of Building 26 agent, Danko (Zeljko Ivanek). Are we going to see a confrontation between the two of them next week? We’ll see. I suppose with Sylar we’re going to see again how “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and I think we’ll see him teaming up with the fugitive heroes in avoiding capture by Danko.

On other fronts in the Heroes-verse, we saw Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere) taking a more active role in protecting fugitive Eric Doyle (David H. Lawrence XVII) who at the end hinted that he had just pulled the wool over her eyes in getting her sympathetic assistance in the first place.


We also saw Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar) help save Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg) from blowing up in DC and in the process dropped enough obvious clues to Danko that he had abilities, that his plot to remove Danko from Building 26 backfired on him, when Danko forced Nathan to reveal his flying abilities.


An interesting twist is Angela Petrelli’s (Cristine Rose) mention of an incident in Angola in 1997 where she was surprised that Danko survived. That seemed to shut him up in his complaints rather quickly, which makes me wonder if he has secret ability that only Angela knows about.

In an interesting tease for future episodes, Ando (James Kyson Lee) and Hiro (Masi Oka) followed Rebels’ instructions and arrived at Los Angeles where they thought they were going to rescue Matt Parkman, but were confused that all they found was a baby named Matt Parkman. The previews for next week informed us that the baby is Matt’s child with his ex-wife who is about to re-enter the picture.


I think I’m building up a tolerance for the “Heroes Two-step” as I like to call it—where they take a couple steps forward and a few steps back in the progression of these characters. Although I was entertained by tonight’s episode more than some of the other recent airings, I hope they’ll soon commit to what they want many of these characters to be. Also, I really want to see Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) emerge as a strong leader for all of the heroes who are on the run.