NOTE: This entry originally was posted Oct. 15 on our temporary site.

Now that’s more like it. We actually got a little action in tonight’s Heroes, even if we did have to endure more of the soap opera-like scenes that are becoming too frequent.

We got a new Hero who’s a hero to TV-addicted kids everywhere. The mystery of who’s killing the elder generation of Heroes unfolded a little bit more with one of them taking one for the team – even if she was lying. A pair of youngsters sowed some wild oats without parental supervision. And an old enemy took a road trip with new friends.

And after it was all said and done, the most anticipated new arrival is just one week away.

Maya and Alejandro, fresh from their jailbreak with American fellow inmate Derek, find Sylar lying half-dead in the road. If anything he says can be believed, he’d been wandering for three days.

Maya’s not the best judge of character. She thinks finding someone who knows the man they seek, the late Dr. Suresh, must be a sign from God. Now powerless, Sylar goes by his given name, Gabriel. Like the angel, Maya says. Not quite.

When Derek sees the twins’ sketches under a wanted headline, he tips off Sylar who predictably cracks the kid’s skull with a brick. Maya nearly takes his breath away with her black tears before Alejandro settles things down. The trio will be together for a while longer it looks like.

After three weeks of the same repetitive series of events with the “Wonder Twins”, it was nice to see some forward progress. It’s also good to have Sylar back, particularly with his full malevolence, if not his powers, intact.

Down in the Big Easy, Micah’s settling in with his cousins and Lt. Uhura, aka grandma Dawson. The kid impresses by stealing a pay-per-view wrestling event. His cousin Monica has bigger ambitions. A fast-food worker, she dreams of a management gig, anything to get out of New Orleans, where a notorious storm claimed her mother’s life.

She’s like an Apex Tech commercial, talking about bootstrapping her way to a new life. I don’t like the seeming exploitation of Katrina, though. As her kindergarten pal pooh-poohs her goals, Monica’s carving tomato flowers like the culinary whiz she saw on TV that morning. Seems like a throwaway scene as her boss interrupts to shatter her hopes for a promotion.

Later that night she catches a glimpse of the spandex grapplers her little brother and Micah are watching on TV. It must have made an impression because later we see her at work, closing up shop when a pushy customer muscles his way in with a handgun. She executes the wrestling move she watched earlier and foils the heist. And neither she nor her boss (Was that the boss from Chuck?) is sure how she did it.

Now that’s a pretty cool power. Sure justifies watching more TV.

As Warner Wolf might say, if you had Mama Petrelli without a conscience, you lost. Seems the old lady is feeling so bad about whatever evils her generation wrought on the world (How’s that for a paper-thin metaphor?) that she’s willing to take the rap for Kaito’s death and even the invisible attack on herself. We and Parkman know she wasn’t alone in that interrogation room, but who’s going to believe he read her mind?

Nathan shows up clean-shaven, which is a relief since that beard was pretty scraggly, having told his kids he’d be home again soon. Parkman is piecing the mystery together, but he says he needs Nathan’s help. Nathan just wants to confront his mother first, in Days of Our Lives fashion, unfortunately. He’s a drunk, she tells him. She’s confessing to a crime she didn’t commit, he says. She’s carrying her brother’s baby—no, wait, that’s an actual soap opera. My mistake.

Anyway, she won’t be talked out of her confession. “I have done so many bad things in my life it really doesn’t matter what crime I confessed,” she tells him. Seriously, what did these people do, and how did none of their kids ever know?

Nathan spies the burned face again and punches a mirror. If he had healing power it might explain why he looks fine after going nuclear with Peter, whose death he’s mourning. But those bloody knuckles suggest otherwise. At any rate, he shows Parkman a group photo that has all the old Heroes in it: Nakamura, Mama and Papa Petrelli, Linderman, Mohinder’s new boss Bob, Charles Devereaux and the Boogeyman from young Molly’s nightmares. Oh yeah, that just happens to be Parkman’s dad.

Small world.

Molly’s still really annoying, but she agrees to help pinpoint the bad man. Remember, that’s her power: she can find Heroes, kind of like Charles Xavier knows where all the mutants in the world are. Mohinder doesn’t want to put her through that stress, and he and Parkman bicker about it. These two need marriage counseling.

In a surprisingly riveting scene, Molly tracks the bad man down to a Philadelphia apartment house before she gets telepathically sucked inside. The bad man is the only Hero she can see who can see her back. She passes out, but calls out to Parkman from her subconscious. I thought that was pretty freaky, myself.

Claire tries to take her dad’s advice and cool things off with Hunter/West. (I call him that because Nick Dagosto played executive assistant Hunter on The Office for a combined screen time of probably 28 seconds. It’s tough being typecast.) He convinces her to let him take her out, and of course HRG can’t find out.

We next find them atop one of the O’s in the Hollywood sign. He can’t help her unless she trusts him, he says. And by trust he means jump from the giant letter. Of course he catches her, they kiss and I lose my dinner.

What I’m wondering at this point is how did HRG rise so high in the ranks of a covert government mutant-hunting organization and yet still be so easily snowballed by his dopey daughter who tells him she’s going to the library when she’s really out on a date with the flying kid he abducted and branded years before? In fairness, though, maybe HRG was distracted by that painting foretelling his death.

There was no Peter tonight, which is fine since I needed a break from his brooding. By the previews it seems we’ll get a pretty Peter-centric episode next week. We’ll also meet the most highly anticipated new Hero since the show began: the one played by Veronica Mars herself, Kristen Bell. The short clip suggests “Elle” works for The Company because she refers to an “assignment.” And this piece at BuddyTV suggests she has “ambulant allegiances.”

I have a feeling this episode coming up is going to get pretty good ratings.

—Brian Howard