Monday Night TV

A random new Criminal Intent and The Riches will wait until later, I only had time for Heroes and Everybody Hates Chris tonight, which are both after the jump.

Heroes: Hiro and Ando find a Deus Ex Machina ad in the yellow pages for a swordsmith, where Hiro's father is waiting for him. Mr. Nakamura is among the older generation of heroes who do not agree with Linderman, and he trains Hiro to be able to fight Sylar. We get no insight into his powers specifically, but the impression we get is that in a day, Hiro has learned to be a total badass with a samurai sword, so maybe Mr. Nakamura's power is to teach people things with a single training montage.

Peter learns to handle Ted's powers in time (though Claire was ready to pop him in the head if she had to), and they decide to split the group up, with Peter, Claire, and Ted headed to the country to keep everyone with explosive powers out of the city until the threat is past. That didn't work out too well, though, since Sylar was hot on their tail the whole time. He sicks the feds on them, and waits until Ted is in custody to break in, crack open his skull and steal his powers. Bennett and Parkman, meanwhile, are off to kill the tracking device. Bennett knew it was a person, but didn't know it was cute little Molly. Mohinder busts in with a gun just in time, and he and Bennett engage in the world's longest Mexican standoff (they literally appear to be standing with guns pointed at each other and Molly for about 45 minutes).

Thanks to Linderman, Nathan's election is fixed (as expected), and so is his wife (as expected). Micah rigs the vote count (apparently all the city's voting machines are networked across precincts, which is a terrible idea) to be a landslide in Nathan's favor, which seems pretty dumb. 52-48 gets Nathan in Congress just the same, and given that the exit polls put Nathan 5 points behind, it wouldn't seem as fishy. But whatever. Nathan's wife gets a lengthy handshake from Linderman that heals her paralysis, but she has to stay in the wheelchair in public, I think because if she stood up now, people would think it was all a fraud to get sympathy from the voters.

Jessica and D.L. raid Linderman's office to get Micah back. Linderman tells them where Micah is, but says D.L. will never see him again, then empties a bag full of cash as payment to Jessica for D.L.'s murder. He gives a long dramatic speech about how Jessica just wants stability, which the money would provide. I figured Jessica would say yes, take the money, and kill Linderman. But instead she hands control of the body over to Nikki, who refuses the money and Linderman pulls out a gun and shoots her -- except D.L. jumps in the way. He then hops up, sticks his hand inside Linderman's head and rematerializes it, apparently yanking out some of Linderman's brain in the process. Linderman looks pretty dead, though we're not entirely clear how his power to heal people applies, if at all, to himself. And D.L. looks well on his way to death, but I guess you never know for sure.

The episode leaves off with Sylar testing out his fancy new nuclear powers while looking at the skyline and saying "boom." Basically a second consecutive episode of exposition, which I hope is all leading to a kickass season finale.

Everybody Hates Chris: Drew is graduating from elementary school. Did they do that in 1985? I had never heard of such a thing until the mid 90's, and it still seems really silly to me. Finishing high school and finishing college are major milestones in life, finishing elementary school means you'll go to a different school with mostly the same people.

Chris is determined to finally have his revenge on Caruso, which gets an impressive buildup but the cats and summer detention payoff was a letdown, as was the obvious twist that Chris would have to go to summer school as well. There's a third plot with Julius trying to fix Mr. Omar's sink with some really awful joke product names (Drainado, Custodian in a Conga). How it didn't get cut completely, I have no idea.

Considering how disappointed I've been with the entire second season, it was a fitting season finale. The only laughs were provided by Greg in his Magnum and Banacek costumes. They tried really hard to be funny and/or touching, but pretty much missed the mark entirely.