- I know I’ve beaten this drum ad nausem and I know that many shows, not just Heroes, have a tendency to narrow their focus and bring everything together as a season comes to an end. Having said that, Heroes has a huge, huge problem with excluding key characters for long stretches of seasons and tonight’s episode was as bad in that category as any episode of the show’s four seasons. The entire episode was wrapped up in two very compact locations and featured a bare minimum of characters. There was no Mohinder Suresh, no Hiro, no Ando, no Matt Parkman and no Angela Petrelli. The first setting was the inside of Sylar’s mind, where Parkman trapped him alone at the end of last week’s episode to punish the über-villain and also to protect the world from him. Sylar had asked Parkman to take away his abilities and instead, Parkman trapped him alone inside his own mind, forcing him to live out his worst fear – being alone for all of eternity. That plan went by the wayside when Peter Petrelli showed up at Parkman’s door, found the walled-in chamber in the basement Parkman had entombed Sylar in, absorbed Parkman’s power and went to work releasing his own worst enemy from his mental prison so Sylar could help Peter’s friend Emma from impending disaster Peter saw in a prophetic dream. Inside Sylar’s mind, he resides I Am Legend-style, in a huge city (downtown L.A.) all by himself. He takes up his old habit of fixing watches to occupy the time, but the sound of Peter running around the city, making noise and trying to make contact, draws Sylar out onto the street. The two men finally meet but Sylar initially refuses to believe that Peter is really there. His sense of time is also distorted, as he believes he’s been here for three years when it’s actually three hours. As time passes, the two men form an uneasy bond and Sylar repeatedly apologizes for murdering Peter’s brother Nathan and insists that he’s a changed man who will never hurt anyone again. Peter isn’t sold, holding onto his anger but also continually working in a way to extricate the two of them from their urban prison and back to the real world. That challenge becomes tougher when a ginormous brick wall, 20 feet high or more, goes up all around the city, a wall Peter immediately recognizes as the one that Parkman erected in his basement to keep Sylar entombed. Peter and Sylar spend day after day (in the time scale of their bizarro world, anyhow) swinging sledgehammers at the wall, trying to break it down. But the blows from their hammers don’t even dent the wall and they begin to worry that they are trapped permanently. The defining moment comes one night as Peter wails away at the wall and Sylar stops by. Another apology for his brother’s murder pushes Peter over the edge and he admits that he’s held onto his anger about the murder because he feels like if he lets it go, he’ll lose touch with his brother. However, he also admits that he knows Sylar does regret the murder and has changed. After this revelation, he swings the sledgehammer again and this time, the wall cracks. Sylar picks up the other sledgehammer and together, they punch a hole in the wall and light comes shining through – they’re free. Freedom is not the order of the day for Claire and Noah Bennet. They are now prisoners at Sullivan Bros. carnival after Samuel Sullivan framed H.R.G. for the shooting at the carnival that killed Lydia and wounded many of the other “specials” at the carnival – a shooting actually arranged by Samuel and carried out by his right-hand man Eli. Claire is held captive inside Samuel’s trailer but when she refuses to calm down and stop causing a commotion, Samuel takes her to the carnival’s hall of mirrors where super-powered carney Damien has the power to go inside people’s heads and broadcast their memories on the hall’s mirrored surfaces. Samuel forces Claire to watch memories from H.R.G.’s past that show him from 25 years ago, when he had a wife who was killed by a “special” with telepathic powers. That murder of his pregnant wife Kate led H.R.G. to begin hunting specials. He killed one after approaching the man for information and getting attacked, which led to a visit from Thompson, the mysterious man we saw often in the first two seasons of the show as H.R.G.’s boss at the original incarnation of the Company. Thompson recruited H.R.G. into the company, but when his anger issues led to too many deaths in attempting to “bag and tag” specials, Thompson laid down the law: H.R.G. had to get married and start a family to settle him down and reduce fatalities. Thompson even picked out H.R.G.’s wife – Sandra, who we know well from previous seasons. She was the waitress at the diner where H.R.G. and Thompson were eating, so it felt very much like an arranged marriage and not one of love, which is exactly how Claire saw it. She races from the hall in anger, but when Samuel approaches her on the carnival’s midway, believing that his display has won her over to his side and turned her against her adopted father, he has an unwelcome surprise waiting. Claire is angry at H.R.G., but informs Samuel that she will never turn against her dad to join Samuel’s merry band of miscreants. He urges her to change her mind and says that he and his family are on their way to Central Park in New York to finally reveal themselves to the world. She only wants to leave and Samuel points her in the direction of the souvenir trailer, where H.R.G. is tied up. Once Claire is inside, Samuel uses his power to create a giant sinkhole that consumes the trailer and buries father and daughter some 50 feet below the ground, inside the trailer. There they remain as Samuel’s crew packs up and heads for New York. It was an equally bad day for H.R.G.’s partner/lady friend Lauren, who snuck into the carnival to get medical supplies to treat the gunshot wound she suffered last episode courtesy of Eli. When Emma finds her in the medical tent and helps tend to her wound, Lauren tries to convince her that Samuel is a bad guy who is dangerous and only out for himself. Samuel happens into the tent moments later, Emma spills the beans about her visitor and Samuel excuses her so he can talk to Lauren alone. Their talk turns to the video from the Coyote Sands facility some 40 years ago, the one in which Samuel is born and Mohinder’s father realizes that the baby is an extremely dangerous individual with potentially deadly powers. Seeing the fear in Lauren’s eyes at they talk and her response when he asks if he truly does have the power to change the world that he believes the video revealed, Samuel is energized and galvanized to carry out his plan. As the episode ends, he directs Eli to stay behind as the rest of the family heads out so that he can “tie up loose” ends, i.e. people that Lydia revealed before her death that wanted to stop Samuel’s plan. Those people turn out to be Peter and Sylar, who are confronted by Eli – all of him, as he multiplies himself – as they try to leave Parkman’s basement. He’s there to stop them, but will they be able to escape and get to New York? Tune in next week for what will hopefully be a great season finale and manage to salvage some of what has been a thoroughly disappointing season for what used to be a great show…………
- The mini-uproar over Phil Mickelson’s club selection at the Farmer’s Insurance Open in San Diego as the PGA Tour opened the 2010 can be viewed in one of two lights. Either you can see golfer Scott McCarron accusing Mickelson of cheating by using a Ping-Eye 2 wedge that was made 20 years ago and has square grooves to work around new USGA rules on club architecture as a bad thing because cheating in any sport is a negative, or you can say that at least people are talking about golf and the topic isn’t the world-class infidelities of Tiger Woods and his ongoing absence from golf. "It's cheating, and I'm appalled Phil has put it in play," McCarron said of Mickelson using the vintage clubs. Phil is actually one of four players currently using the throwback clubs to get around the new club rules, which ban square grooves on the faces of clubs because they provide more spin and control and thus allow players to hit better, more accurate shots with less skill on their part. The square-groove Ping wedges remain legal, however, because of a loophole provided by lawsuit that Ping filed against the USGA that was settled in 1990. The resulting settlement stipulates that any Ping-Eye 2 made before April 1, 1990, remains approved because it takes precedence over any rule change. So by the letter of the law, Mickelson and any other golfer using the old-school Ping wedges is not doing anything wrong. McCarron and anyone in his school of thought would counter that while that is technically true, such actions violate the spirit of the law. Accusing someone of cheating is especially bad in golf, which is considered a gentleman’s sport where players call penalties on themselves and operate on a code of honor. Mickelson refused to be drawn into a battle of words with McCarron, but did speak on the rule itself. “It's a terrible rule. To change something that has this kind of loophole is nuts," Mickelson said. "But it's not up to me or any other player to interpret what the rule is or the spirit of the rule. I understand black and white. And I think that myself or any other player is allowed to play those clubs because they're approved -- end of story.” To be fair to McCarron, he did clarify that he is not singling out Mickelson and has the same harsh feelings about anyone who uses the pre-1990 wedges. "That anybody using that wedge is cheating? I still feel strongly about it," McCarron said. "Anyone using that wedge, I feel, is behind the rules, even though we have a rule that because of a lawsuit says it's OK.” You can bet that McCarron will be using his recent appointment to the 16-member Players Advisory Council that deals with competition issues as a platform to press this issue. The issue actually should have come up two weeks ago, when both John Daly and Dean Wilson used the Ping wedge at the Sony Open. This basically boils down to the perpetual battle between advances in technology and the competitive spirit of the game and how to strike a happy balance. I suppose it is ironic that players can find a loophole in the rules by hopping into a time machine and going back 20 years to use old-school equipment, but at least people are talking about golf and it has nothing to do with Tiger Woods and his harem of hookers, cocktail waitresses and Denny’s hostesses………..
- In case you missed it (and hopefully you did), the Grammys were last night. I didn’t witness them myself, but enough credible media outlets are reporting that they occurred for me to believe it’s so. How could a guy who loves music so much skip an event that many would argue is the highlight of the year for the recording industry? Because that sh*t ain’t music, to be blunt. The Grammys are the ultimate symbol of what a farce popular, mainstream music is and they are the height of the incestuous, self-congratulatory, out-of-touch world that music has become. The same damn artists who are already in the club are merely recycled through the circuit based on who has released an album recently and the bands that truly put out great albums never get a sniff of these awards shows because they are not mainstream enough. Sure, Kings of Leon won Album of the Year and they are actually a solid band, but sort of occurrence is so rare as to be irrelevant in this discussion. The insidious nature of the Grammys is perhaps best illustrated as they relate to Silversun Pickups, an amazing indie rock back that was nominated in the Best New Artist category, which is fine because their album Swoon was amazing and unquestionably one of the best albums of the year……or it would be fine if Silversun Pickups was actually a new artist. The problem is that Silversun Pickups released an equally amazing album, Carnavas, in 2006. That album was well-received as well by those who actually bothered to venture out of the crap-tacular world of mainstream pop and if the Recording Industry Association of America bothered to remove its collective head from its ass, it may have known as much. Instead, they nominate a great band for an award it should not even be considered for and nothing else. The bottom line is that of the 20 best albums released last year, I would say 19 of them weren’t nominated for a single Grammy and the show’s producers never considered any of them for a live performance at the event either. Anyone who watched the Grammys with anything other than complete and total irony and believes that what they witnessed was anything close to the best of what music has to offer is a delusional fool, nothing less……………
- How freaking magnanimous of you, U.S. Attorney's office in Vermont. After crashing the party of several members of the Burlington chapter of the Lambda Iota fraternity’s party by raiding their coke den and shutting it down, you oh, so generously allowed the non-arrested Lambda Iota’s to keep their house. Word is that authorities wanted to seize home base because members of the fraternity were convicted of drug charges. The brothers who managed to escape criminal charges went to work on a way to save their home and a deal was announced Thursday that will allow them to do just that. The feds filed a complaint in October 2007 in which they sought to seize the 440 Pearl St. frat house because undergraduate fraternity members and others allegedly used the house as a home base to sell coke and the fraternity’s leaders knew of the illegal activities and did nothing to stop it. To that, I would ask simply: Where is your proof? Unless you have something concrete and more substantial than speculation and conjecture, that’s not going to fly. Stick with persecuting the two fraternity members and a third individual who have now been convicted on federal drug charges and leave everyone else alone. It’s bad enough that you had to ruin the coke party and disrupt the flow of the Colombian nose candy to campus, don’t make it worse. The government should be ashamed to itself, forcing the Burlington chapter of Lambda Iota to pay $50,000 to the government itself, as well as $5,000 in donations to seven charitable organizations in Chittenden County. Quit extorting money from these dudes just so they can keep their house. On top of that, the fraternity must allow those groups, along with other community and law enforcement organizations, to use their house for as a meeting site and install a plaque inside the house documenting the fact that the property was used by drug dealers. Oh, and fraternity brothers could also be forced to pay up to $175,000 if further drug activity occurs. "Today's closure of this matter represents just the latest opportunity to reinforce a message that has been looking for a solid foothold in our country for many years, that drugs destroy lives," said Burlington Police Chief Michael Schirling. Whatever you say, jerk. Just know that you and your government cronies went waaaaaay overboard on this one and somewhere down the line, karma is going to catch up to you…………
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