Well that answered a few questions…and raised about a gillion more.

I’ll start with a tally. I count at least three new Heroes: Mr. Midas Touch, who turns tarnished flatware into gold; Maya (Dania Ramirez), who gets uncontrollable urges to do something we can’t see but which kills people AND makes them bleed from their eyes (blecch); The Boy Who Could Fly, aka Nicholas Dagosto (formerly Hunter, Jan’s administrative assistant from The Office), who apparently derives his power from melodramatic adolescent novels; and…am I missing anyone?

Oh yeah, there’s a new Hero-killer on the loose, and he’s out for old blood. Mr. Sulu—sorry. Kaito Nakamura (George Takei) appeared to be down on his luck, having missed his flight to Japan in favor of a flight off a rooftop. Ando was about three seconds late with that sword.

I have to say, that Midas touch is a pretty cool power and not one you’d think of right away. That could come in pretty handy. I wondered why Mohinder (Sendhil Ramamurthy) would even sit down with the someone from The Company, and it wasn’t until the end of the episode that his and Mr. Bennet’s (Jack Coleman) plan to infiltrate and bring down the bad guys was revealed. We’re going to find out pretty soon that Heroes have been around for a long time, and so has The Company. So I think those bad guys will go down about as easily as The Mob.

Claire (Hayden Panettiere) , meanwhile, is a fish out of water…or a cheerleader out of Texas. She’d fit in fine if she could show off her moves, but HRG won’t let her try out for the cheerleading squad. Tempted to show off, she only chokes, realizing she can’t stand out if she wants to live. Of course this draws baleful disdain from Hunter—err, Flying Boy. I know there are a lot of demographics to appeal to here, but that story line is a little too Dawson’s Creek for my taste. So Claire reaches out to her real dad, whose life is in shambles.

Soaring over Manhattan and watching your little bro disintegrate in a nuclear holocaust is bound to wreak havoc on your political ambitions and pretty much your entire existence. But the fact that Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar) exists answers one summer cliffhanger question. Peter’s (Milo Ventimiglia) fate remains in doubt until the Irish gangsters find him in an empty cargo container. I’m sorry guys, but those were the worst Irish accents I’ve ever heard. If they were authentic, then Central Casting needs to recruit its Irish gangsters from a different part of the Emerald Isle.

So Peter is half-naked and handcuffed to the cargo container, but he can still throw fireballs with the best of them. But he doesn’t know who he is. Back in New York, his mom (Christine Rose) figures he’s dead and blames his brother for saving him? Wait, didn’t she want Peter to blow up and take Manhattan with him? She’s just mad he didn’t detonate a few miles closer to sea level. Nathan, even in a boozy haze, sees his Mother Petrelli for the evil momma she is.

Somewhere a few thousand miles to the south, Alejandro (Shalim Ortiz) and Maya are on the run from the law, buscado el homicidio. Given the prominence of the illegal immigration debate these days, producers are clearly looking to get people talking by adding to this pair’s plight a daunting journey into the U.S., putting their fate in the hands of crooked coyotes. And when things turn inevitably bad for them, a bunch of people, good and bad, die. Some superpower.

Hiro (Masi Oka), as usual, provides the laughs. Naturally his childhood hero, Takezo Kensei (David Anders) is a British guy who’s only out for himself. Hiro’s appeal to his better nature only gets our time-traveling pal a jaw full of knuckles and the affections of a goat. Time travel science fiction, what with its unavoidable fretting over alterations in the course of history, strikes me as tiresome. What more can we say on the subject that Back to the Future didn’t already say? More on topic, though, I’m wondering now how Hiro ever becomes that bad-ass warrior he showed himself to be on that subway with Peter early in Season 1 and later in Isaac’s loft.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Hiro’s hijinks are Molly’s (Adair Tishler) nightmares. Is that Sylar she’s sketching everywhere before she zonks out in class every day? She’s got to find a better hero to hide with than Officer Parkman (Greg Grunberg). I’m sorry, but he’s the lamest hero of the bunch. Mind-reading is a parlor trick compared with fireballs and gold spoon-making.

So there you have it. Was the Heroes premiere worth the wait?

Heroes notes…

For another take on the premiere, check out this guy’s summary. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s a good read regardless.

Photos: Masi Oka at a news conference in Hong Kong Aug. 29. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)