It was a bad night for dads on Heroes last night. It was also a bad night for those of you trying to keep score of who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy these days. And any friend of Mohinder’s had a rough go of things too. You know who had a pretty good night, though? Matt Parkman.

It’s one thing to read minds. Knowing someone else’s thoughts will make you a pretty good poker player, but it hardly sets you apart from those who can shoot lightning from their hands or move things without touching them. But if you could not only read someone’s thoughts but plant new thoughts in their head, well that’d come in handy.

Matt started small, ordering Molly The Annoying Kid back to the breakfast table and getting his boss off his back. But he soon branched out and used his Jedi trick on Mama Petrelli in the interrogation room. She’s one tough mama, though, resisting his mental probing to conceal her darkest secret about Ms. Victoria Pratt to the point it gave her a nosebleed. (The deja vu nagged at me until I realized Jamie Sommers got a nosebleed overriding her cerebral surveillance chip last month on Bionic Woman. But that’s another, lamer show, so the deja vu was more of a deja annoyance.)

“Cautionary Tales” might more aptly have been titled “Bonfire of the Bennetts” because the family was put through the wringer. It began with Claire’s rebellion and requisite “I hate you” moment every TV teenager goes through with their parents. Her relationship with West, besides being poorly written and gratingly performed, has blown the family’s cover. Now she doesn’t trust daddy, West doesn’t trust her and even Mrs. Bennett is looking askance at her bespectacled hubby. The mentally challenged little brother is the only who thinks things are peachy keen.

Bob is tightening the noose on Claire and HRG, pairing Mohinder with Elle—who Bob calls his daugther—to snatch the cheerleader away and kill her old man. But Bob trips up and alerts Claire to the plan even as Mohinder slips and blows his cover with HRG. Determined not to let the Isaac Mendez paintings come true, particularly the one with the bullet through his eye, HRG convinces West they need to work together to protect Claire.

So West body slams Elle to the ground, then uses his super-powered puppy dog eyes to guilt HRG into not blowing Mohinder’s head off. HRG and Elle go way back, so he knew the way to short-circuit her power is to tie her up with her feet in a tub of water. I enjoyed seeing her shock herself, because she’s not a very nice person. Even better, HRG is able to cast a little doubt on her faith in Bob, pointing out it was Bob who led the charge when it came to experimenting on the sweet little girl she used to be.

Proposing a daughter-for-daughter trade, HRG walks into a trap the viewing audience could see a mile away. Of course, he gets that bullet through the eye. It’s only at the episode’s very end that we see the IV bag of Claire’s blood dripping into his veins, healing his eye and ultimately reawakening him. I knew they couldn’t just kill him off like that.

If there is any justice in the television storytelling universe, he’ll put a bullet through Mohinder’s eye some day soon.

The highlight of the episode for me was Hiro’s efforts to undo his father’s murder, even if I still don’t get why he didn’t end up doing just that. We find him at Kaito’s funeral, telling Ando he must make things right. Ando fails to dissuade him and fwoop, he’s gone back a week to the scene with Kaito and Angela on the rooftop.

Only, Kaito doesn’t want to be saved. He says they have the power of gods but should not play God. I beg to differ. Dying is to be avoided, my geriatric superhero friend. Thinking he’s got a brilliant idea, Hiro zaps them back to his mother’s funeral, convinced Kaito will recall his grief and see why Hiro must save him. Except grown-up Hiro meets little-boy Hiro, who makes him think it’s childish to want to keep someone from body slamming your dad off a rooftop. For the record, it’s not.

So Hiro lets the old man take the sack of a lifetime but freeze-frames things so he can get a glimpse of the killer: Adam Monroe. Ha! We knew that a week ago. Hiro should watch more TV. Anyway, from the look on his face it’s clear he’s never considered that healing ability would make a guy virtually ageless and immortal. In his defense, Hiro’s only had a few days to ponder things, where as Adam has been stewing for 336 years.

So who’s the bad guy here? Adam is killing elder Heroes, but even his prospective victims have conceded they did some bad stuff to have that coming, and it’s not like Hiro didn’t steal his girl and all. Sylar’s the old bad guy, and he’s on his way back. But he’s powerless. And even at his worst, he was no match for Peter Petrelli and his Posse. Bob and Elle seem pretty bad, but a few weeks ago I was like Mohinder, convinced that they’d changed The Company’s ways. Also, I’m not so sure which way HRG is going on  the good guy-bad guy scale.

I do know next week’s previews looked awesome.