Other rumors include ABC canceling Flash Forward after its first season but renewing V for a second year. Also, NBC has officially renewed Chuck for a fourth season. The CW previously announced that it was renewing Supernatural and The Vampire Dairies as well as Smallville. FOX announced earlier that Fringe would be returning for a third season.

CBS has yet to decide whether to renew Medium or Ghost Whisperer.

Last week ‘Smallville’ aired the two hour episode “Absolute Justice,” which featured Clark Kent and his budding superhero friends meeting the previous generation Justice Society of America, a team that had systematically been hounded, imprisoned, and institutionalized into retirement, so that no one even knew who or what they were. The comic book and film ‘Watchmen’ likewise featured heroes who’d been forced out of the spotlight for no other reason than the world deciding they didn’t need them anymore. For four years, ‘Heroes’ has featured a set a characters who have been denied a semblance of this existence, partly because that’s the way creator Tim Kring wanted it, and partly because, the way he designed it, those characters could never imagine it being any different. Time after time, it seemed that hiding was the best and only way to maintain an idea of a normal life.

When the show debuted in 2006, like ‘Smallville’ before it, ‘Heroes’ was seen as a breath of fresh air in superhero television, an innovative way in the vein of ‘The Incredible Hulk’ and the early seasons of ‘Lois & Clark’ to bring a fantastic reality to TV in a believable, relatable way. There’s no question that it was made possible by the phenomenal success of ‘Lost,’ and its promise of delivering a more compact story was what made it all the more intriguing during that first season. Then a funny thing happened. Bolstered by that success, it made a second season, which is strange, right? The same viewers who warmly embraced it the first season suddenly didn’t know what to make of it with a sophomore year. Somewhat thankfully (who knows, though, how things could’ve been different?), that season was cut short by the writers strike. A show that began relying heavily on the weight of the past then moved on to deepening its own mythology in the third season, through two arcs that seemed to confirm every fear of its characters that their special natures could never lead to normal, happy lives, unless they were systematically repressed.

This led, of course, to a lot of viewers who grew increasingly bored with a show that had once been a beacon of quick answers and fast storytelling. Who would’ve guessed that the first season wouldn’t lead directly into a more challenging, public reveal of these characters, that it would take three seasons to reach “Brave New World,” a season finale and the title of a (potentially) sixth arc? I mention “Absolute Justice” and ‘Watchmen’ because they’re excellent examples of the kind of work other creators have already done to demonstrate exactly the territory ‘Heroes’ has been more or less avoiding for four seasons, the messy questions and uncertain future even the bright and sunny world of superheroes can lead to.

That Kring and his cohorts have done everything they have in order to explore their version of a world where people with special abilities even exist has gone, at least in this critic’s opinion, increasingly unappreciated. From the start, the creators have made it clear, from the initial perspective of Mohinder Suresh (absent in this episode, naturally) and his father’s work to scientifically explain the existence of such people (which itself was always a unique angle to follow) to the knowledge of the previous generation and their continuing impact on the present, that their idea of a series arc would always be more complicated than a bunch of characters emerging to “save the world.” The way Sylar and HRG were introduced and their stories unfolded were a constant parallel and compelling addition to the main story, which in their own ways continually seemed to twist away and remain elusive, whether Sylar seemed to grow only worse as a villain despite the tragic nature of his origin, or HRG held onto his idea of a Company to police this hidden community, even with the knowledge that his own adopted daughter was one of them.

From the Petrellis to the Parkmans, from Hiro Nakamura and the strange saga of Tracy Strauss, it’s been a long and winding road, which has finally come to a head. Since Samuel Sullivan was introduced, the ‘Redemption’ arc has been leading to a more direct confrontation with destiny than has ever been possible before. The late Nathan Petrelli was always the clearest link and detriment to progress, so it was only natural that he be the most prominent casualty of the series, and that this death lingered well into this season was another reminder of the final steps that would need to be taken, how difficult it would really (and in fact continue to) be to deliver on the process that began at the start of the first season, when everything was new for the cast of characters that would, in one form or another, continue to carry the series through each of its seasons. I guess that’s why my appreciation of ‘Heroes’ would grow rather than diminish through the years, because I was always looking for exactly the opposite of what all the fans who massed during the first season came for, not a simple arc but a complex one, which might carry a series rather than any single season. The more complex it got, the harder it seemed to enjoy, the more it seemed for me that this show might be worth following after all. I watched the first handful of episodes, then didn’t watch the show again until the third season, after catching up with the DVDs, because of the backlash that struck ‘Heroes’ during its second year. I was fascinated by the Hiro arc, as I heard of it, in feudal Japan. The lack of depth which I had initially perceived seemed to finally be there. I had no idea that the series had already tapped it the first season, and that’s why it became so easy to become a fan with the DVDs, why I was mesmerized during the third season, to see how the Petrelli legacy continued to haunt everyone and how Nathan made the biggest (and final) mistake of his life when he turned his friends into fugitives, convinced that he was doing the right thing.

That’s what made Samuel Sullivan so compelling, that quite nakedly, he was the opposite of Nathan, transparent in his greed to exploit others like him while operating under the guise of lifting them up. Throughout the season, we’ve witnessed as he’s tried to recruit our familiar characters, all while the continuing ramifications of the past have continued to haunt them. Parkman was the character affected the most by that past, and so he was the one forced to carry the burden of Sylar, which “Brave New World” finally vocalizes as the fight between a continually pure character and one who has come to personify, however rightly, evil. Then there’s the flipside in Claire Bennet and her father Noah, the infamous HRG, who have both from the start personified the horrible potential of the most normal of people to be caught up in all of this, Claire because she’s one of them, Noah because he wants them to be controlled. Naturally, it’s Claire who finally pushes everyone to the next step, HRG every step of the way to that point continuing to caution her otherwise, because it’s all he’s ever known, all he’s been comfortable with, which is only increasingly natural now that we know how Noah Bennet became HRG. His whole relationship with Claire has become that much more intense, that much more deep, and has finally moved beyond the parameters originally set in “Company Man,” where he was only doing what he did to protect her. One of the stagnant elements of the series has been its refusal to look at this relationship in any other way, but this season has consistently challenged that, refining it to the point where they have no other choice, almost every other level of comfort removed, but to confront each other on their most basic levels. The ending of this episode wouldn’t have been possible without this kind of development.

Hiro, meanwhile, is finally reunited with Charlie, and for the very first time is confronted with a situation he can’t simply time-manipulate to his favor. Who would ever have imagined this character facing such a scenario, especially one that brought him back to some of his earliest and most innocent circumstances? If the series does somehow end with this season finale, the work done with Claire, HRG, and Hiro, at the very least, would have been justified. You might still argue about Sylar if you like, might wince at another season exploring his redemption, or wonder if Parkman and Peter didn’t get quite the same amount of resolution. Peter, I’d argue, did, even if it wasn’t quite wrapped in the same neat bow as some of the other characters, but Parkman, like Mohinder, like Tracy, is left in something of a bubble.

Well, anyway, for what it’s worth, this reviewer thought “Brave New World” did its job.

For the record, this was the 77th episode of the series.

Okay, so NBC made a few things clear last night: this season is going to be eighteen episodes long (one less than originally suggested), and that, for all intents and purposes, ‘Heroes’ isn’t quite done yet. The fans, meanwhile, have still been having their say as well: whatever this season has done, it hasn’t exactly accomplished its goal of redeeming the series. If anything, it seems to have only cemented the fact that ‘Heroes’ has quite thoroughly lost the zeitgeist. At this point, a lot of the original fans have decided more of what they want than what they’re willing to accept from the creators, which is something that has killed genre shows in the past (ironically, for instance, ‘Star Trek: Enterprise,’ which attempted a similar fan-appeasing fourth season, also managed to fail quite spectacularly, though NBC is still apparently willing to suggest ‘Heroes’ isn’t quite done yet). “The Wall,” for better or worse, demonstrates an unerring confidence on the part of the creators in their own storytelling instincts.

Since “Confidence Man” in the first season, HRG has been the source of some of the show’s best stories, and “The Wall” again turns to him with flashbacks to help, in the eleventh hour, provide some powerhouse developments. Held captive by Samuel at the carnival, HRG and Claire have another opportunity (yay!) to bond over revelations of his past. We learn some major new things about it, which I think work a lot better than some of the stuff that’s been done with Samuel in recent episodes, possibly even better than the Lauren angle the season has been working. It seems we have an entirely new origin story for HRG now, one that involves an entirely heretofore unknown family. If that bums you out already, I’d say get used to it. “Company Man” was the first and perhaps still only classic episode of the series, and perhaps for some, like the entire first season, hallowed ground for some (okay, majority of the) fans, but this is a late extension of that groundbreaking origin story. More than all the work done with the previous generation of “specials” (a term used this episode, which only emphasizes the fact that the series has never really settled on a single, unique term for what it has really been dealing with, since “hero” and “villain,” like “Superman” in ‘Smallville,’ has never been entirely appropriate) such as the Petrellis or the rest of the class of Coyote Sands, it’s Noah Bennet’s history with the Company that’s really provided the meat of the backstory, ever since the Sureshes fell out of favor with the fans (right about, oh, after the first few episodes of the series, unfortunately). Sometimes, just trying to keep him in a Company context has proven a chore.

But that history is always rich territory, as “The Wall” demonstrates. So, as I said, new revelations. Bennet had a family before Sandra and Claire and whatshisface. Turns out this family, or at least the promise of one, served as the impetus of HRG’s origin, since his wife, not long after she announces that she’s pregnant, is killed by someone with powers similar to Doyle (the Puppetmaster), which leads Bennet on a quest to track down his kind. This leads to the kind of wall map with string that’s become another of the unofficial signatures of the series (like, oh, the recently abandoned Tim Sale art that accompanied precognitive visions from characters Isaac Mendez to Matt Parkman), which HRG himself revisited earlier this season, at least with newspaper clips. Anyway, we get a real sense of what Bennet was like before he became HRG, and we see his introduction to Eric Roberts’ Thompson, who’s become a favorite to revisit most seasons, even another mention of Claude, the Invisible Man, one of the few characters never actually seen again since the first season (ah! appropriate). It’s an episode that fills in gaps in a necessary manner, a suggestion (yet another one) that even at this late game and with most of fan trust eroded to nil, the creators still know what they’re doing.

Which is nice, because “The Wall” also revisit’s the periodic attempt to show a reformed Sylar, thanks to Peter, who travels into a mind that’s been closed off almost exactly to the request of Parkman last episode. Sylar had reached the point where he willingly sought, if not a shot at redemption, then at least a chance to free himself from the impulses his powers made easy to fall prey to that ruined his life, which Parkman wickedly granted him, just at the point that Peter needed Sylar to free Emma from her own unfortunate future in the Samuel plot to assert his evil influence on the world. Most of the episode sees Peter inside Sylar’s mind as he tries to convince him to leave this bizarre exile, which we already know seems to have its own sense of time from last week. After three hours in the real world, Sylar thought he had spent five years. He’s used that time not in anger and bitter resentment, but to actually reflect and affirm his own sense of reform, and by the time Peter gets there, he’s still working on his mental atonement and isn’t ready to accept that he’s needed in the real world.

Now, there are probably fans (“probably” in this sense meaning “definitely”) fans who won’t accept Sylar in any sense as a good guy at this point, since they grew tired of him a long time ago, “grew tired” in this sense meaning “irrevocably,” the same reaction that has made it impossible this entire season to win back those jaded since the second season. Yet in its own logic, the episode works in this sense, too, the redemption of Sylar. He’s finally broken free of the influence of his powers, for the first time since Elle made him kill and effectively transformed Gabriel Gray into Sylar. He can no longer claim innocence, but if you believe in the ability of a criminal to reform (which is the idea behind prisons and correctional facilities, which, er, civilization is all about), then you have to give Sylar at least the benefit of the doubt. He and Peter spend a lot of time talking about the elephant in the room, that Sylar’s single biggest crime was the murder of Nathan Petrelli, which is still the last one he ever committed, even if you count all the torment Sylar put Parkman through this season (which can be argued, he had coming).

“The Wall” takes its name from this sequence. It also features somewhat prominently the book ‘Pillars of the Earth,’ for what it’s worth, quite a recent novel at that. If you want to look into the significance of that, it probably wouldn’t be a bad thing. Anyway, beyond HRG and Sylar, the episode also features Samuel, of course, and Eli, the multiplying man I thought might provide a goose for viewers when he was first introduced, who like Lauren is a new kind of personality template, but who hasn’t really had a chance to have a proper spotlight. Ironically, with one episode remaining, he has his biggest moment ahead, confronting Sylar and Peter before they can foil Samuel. It’s worth noting that the season finale technically still has Hiro, Mohinder, and Parkman to revisit, even though they weren’t featured in the preview.

That’s the thing about a shortened season. Things may end up sacrificed, but I’d say the show has done a lot of good with what it’s had, far more than it’s been given credit for. But being a minority voice, do I really count as far as opinions go?

‘Defying Gravity’ (now on DVD, by the way) creator James Parriott, in a recent interview, recently divulged an anecdote when explaining what the series arc for his show would have been had ABC not cancelled his show. He related how, during the first season of ‘Lost,’ when he was working press for ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ that its creators admitted they didn’t know where their show was headed. He said he couldn’t imagine how ‘Lost’ could operate that way. As much as I admire and miss ‘Defying Gravity’ and what Parriott had intended to do, I can’t say that I agree that the best and only way to tell a rich and engrossing story is to know exactly how it’s going to end from the moment you begin it. Maybe that makes me a bad storyteller in my own regard, I don’t know. A lot of folks have been wondering the same sort of thing about ‘Heroes’ for a long time now, whether or not its creators know what they’re doing. I can’t say what Tim Kring and company’s approach has been, either from the start of the series or even during this fourth season, but what I can say is that “The Art of Deception” does go a long way in justifying a particular course of action that wasn’t followed earlier in the season, when it was decided Matt Parkman wasn’t going to be responsible, at least then, for the destruction of Sylar.

It’s a tremendously easy thing, especially when most of the popular support of a once red-hot show has dissipated, to question the creative decisions being made. It started with ‘Heroes’ during its second season, ‘Lost’ (at least heavily) during its third (and those creators are still admitting that maybe their fans were right, which is fine for a show that actually won back its support). My experience with this sort of thing used to be that the original creator had moved on, and so it was certainly easy to say, once Robert Hewitt Wolfe had left ‘Andromeda’ that all the best energy was gone (which I still don’t agree with, but that’s beside the point), but with ‘Lost,’ with ‘Heroes,’ that wasn’t the case. It was a matter of fans losing faith in creators very early on, either because they had others like Joss Whedon and J. Michael Straczynski who had formed cults around a central figure that could never be questioned and so any time there was more than one individual it was easier to begin suspecting a dampening of influence from a single vision, or because they really didn’t like what they saw, for whatever reason. Either way, it’s become difficult, even for a show like ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ for fan support to stick around for very long.

So for ‘Heroes,’ it was always only a matter of time, an inevitability, that it was going to transform into a punch line, it was only a matter of how soon. Now, three seasons in with this status, it’s difficult to imagine that Kring and company know what they’re doing, but maybe they still do. “The Art of Deception” chronicles Sylar return to the Parkman household, now that he’s formulated a new plan, a desire to rid himself of his powers so that he can finally, at least in his own mind, redeem himself. The funny thing is, what anyone else could have predicted, what the fans who stopped being entertained by Sylar and all the characters who’ve watched him be a monster for four seasons could have seen coming, Parkman doesn’t quite see it the same way. After just what’s happened this season, he’s more ready to trick Sylar than help him. This whole episode is a culmination, a terrific little turn of events, a sudden act that wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t followed Sylar over the course of events that began in “An Invisible Thread” (to say the least, but really, from at least “Six Months Ago” in the first season). Just as it seems Parkman has finally gotten his revenge, for everyone’s sake, for all the misery Sylar’s caused, Peter Petrelli pops up and immediately tears the whole thing apart!

Peter, of all people? And saying only Sylar can save the day? You can say that’s the thought of desperate creators trying to keep Sylar relevant because they really want to retain the services of Zachary Quinto, or you can see it as the very kind of delicious irony this show has been dealing with from the very start, when Hiro first showed up from the future, in the first and only real instance where he was an integral part of the greater plot (“Save the cheerleader, save the world”).

The great thing about “The Art of Deception” is that you wouldn’t even have to watch it for this half of the episode to walk away feeling it was a banner hour for the series, because there’s also Samuel’s own machinations. He manages to dupe his carnival friends into forgiving him for destroying a town by setting up a decoy in the form of an attempted assassination, that conveniently takes care of the dubious Lydia and delivers scapegoats Claire and Noah Bennet, brings Edgar back into the fold, and even finally draws Emma into the family. (Then again, Lauren places the call that finally reactivates Tracy Strauss, who hasn’t been seen in ages, so it’s not all roses for Mr. Sullivan.) The episode completely redeems Samuel as an active player for me, after stretching a little to try and give the viewer a concrete explanation for what pushes him over the edge with the whole failed romance angle.

The season’s going to be over in a matter of weeks, a little strange for a (more or less) full season, and with it, speculation that the series itself may be over, unless Kring can convince NBC that he can come up with something more satisfying for wide audiences, if that’s still possible. The network could decide to replace him, or finally cut losses and let its reputation stay on retail shelves, where the DVDs still hold a respectable status. Who knows? This late in the game, with an episode like “The Art of Deception,” I certainly no longer need any kind of convincing. As for as ‘Redemption’ goes, I’m pretty sure at least one satisfying conclusion is in the works.

The whole season has been called ‘Redemption,’ of course, but this would sort of be the money episode if you were looking for a single one to define it by. The fans who’ve stuck around, curious to see if there really was some redemption to be found, despite all their doubts, which’ve only continued throughout the season, might at the very least sit up and pay attention to this one.

The main players in “Pass/Fail” would be Hiro, Sylar, Claire, and Samuel. If you wanted to boil it down to a single pass/fail, you might choose Hiro, but the episode is equally important for Sylar and Samuel, the two villains of the season. Hiro’s portion is certainly dramatic, working an arc that’s been building since the end of last season, when it was first learned that he was dying from cancer caused by his frequent time-traveling. Flatlining, he finds himself in a courtroom that holds both his deceased father (George Takei) as judge and Adam Monroe (David Anders) as prosecutor. Throughout the season he’s been trying his best to deal with what seems like a fatal diagnosis, by trying to correct some of the historical mistakes of his life, including finding love for Ando with his sister and rescuing Charlie from Sylar. The court doesn’t look favorably on the explanations or ramifications of these actions, until Ando gets to cross-examine his own defendant, Hiro himself. Hiro eventually decides that he is guilty, except this leads to one last chance, a sword dual with Adam, which Hiro wins, leading him to his mother and the great beyond. But one last twist occurs when his mother decides that some things are more powerful than death, such as, well, destiny.

There will certainly be those who will say, enough already. This was another fine opportunity to kill off an original cast member, and there are moments where it seems as if it would have been perfect. But Hiro lives to fight another day. What’s left for him to do? To finally evolve past his limited sphere, perhaps, to truly “save the world” (which he’s done already, “twice”). If there’s a character who serves as the heart of this show, it isn’t Claire or Peter Petrelli, but the man who has been a hero from the start.

Perhaps more controversially, Sylar seeks his own redemption from Claire, which might be the most ludicrous suggestion yet in this series, since Claire is the last person who should offer this guy sympathy. But the episode makes a good case that Sylar and Claire are mirror figures, if not exactly bringing sympathy for Sylar, then giving him an idea of what might finally conclude his active participation in this series arc. Will the willing loss of his powers really do that? He’s lost them before, sure, but he’s never really dealt with his relationship to them, only what they’ve made him become. Is it possible to redeem the monster by taking away what made him one? That’s the big question. I would like to remind viewers/readers that we’ve seen a multitude of excuses, at the very least, that might in some way absolve Sylar from his crimes, but the shear accumulation of them, right up to Nathan’s murder and his methods in this latest effort to redeem himself, might make it a little more complicated than simply relinquishing his powers. Are we watching the run-up to Sylar’s sacrifice for the sake of Samuel’s defeat?

Speaking of Samuel, that dream girl of his rejects him for the last time, which proves to be the last straw, so that he decides the world has rejected him for the last time and so he will make the world do things his way. It provides a few perfunctory moments, and it’s a predictable arc, but Robert Knepper pulls his weight when he really needs to. This whole late-development piece of Samuel’s story seemed like it was sort of tacked on just to make sure viewers saw Samuel as a fully developed character. I saw him as pretty nuanced from the start, and the arc with his brother, had it been explored a little more, might have done the trick itself. I don’t really think it was a waste to add this extra shade to Samuel, but it’s a little like Gretchen and Claire. I don’t really care for Gretchen (though I do like Madeleine Zima), and I don’t see, if the show has such a future, much long-term potential there.

Anyway, the preview for next week, as always, looks thrilling, but I won’t get into that, lest I do spoilers…The final grade for “Pass/Fail”? Pass.

NBC was up to some schedule maneuvering this week, and the topic of ‘Heroes’ came up. Everyone’s sort of been expecting that the series is going to be cancelled pretty soon, but at least for the moment, the network is still standing by it. Maybe, like someone suggested, it’s only to maintain the small audience that’s still hanging in there, or maybe NBC still sees real worth and/or potent ional in it. It was only last season the “Villains” arc prompted a significant promotion from the network, and “Redemption” may still prove, in some way, to serve as the storyline that gets everything back to where the fans are happy. There’s a chance the fans might come around again. This was a night that saw the arc progress back in a forward direction, after the mini-climax several episodes ago when the Sylar/Nathan situation was finally resolved.

Several times since, the writers have had characters state how big a mistake that was, and it might be that they are also acknowledging that they’ve been doing some unpopular things (you’d be hard-pressed to hear me say that they’ve made mistakes, because I still believe that ‘Heroes’ is one of the great TV shows, which I might reiterate is not the way I first thought when I first started watching at the start of the first season). This time, it comes from an exchange between HRG and the returning Matt Parkman, whom we haven’t seen since “Brother’s Keeper.” Some of those still watching wondered why he didn’t die an episode earlier, “Shadowboxing,” when he seemingly sacrificed himself in a hail of bullets that might have taken care of Sylar as well. I tried arguing that it would have been unsatisfactory for both the characters and the theme of the season, leaving too many unresolved (if, admittedly, “realistically abrupt”) issues , but you can always count on the same reaction from a dubious audience. This week, however, Parkman finds himself once again being drawn into a story bigger than himself, perhaps for the first time truly relishing the unexpected possibilities of his powers, being just a little curious about where they might take him.

It’s interesting to be back to that point, which really hasn’t been an aspect of the show since the first season. The alienating second season featured some new characters who were either afraid or not all that interested in the possibilities of their powers, and the third season was all about being on the run because of them. There just hasn’t been a lot of breathing room, or much in the way of a positive view of what the series is all about. What’s funny about “Close to You” is that it studies through a variety of the characters the potential of the powers to be useful again. Ando, for instance, helps break Hiro and Mohinder out of an institute and away from pursuing hunters by employing his seldom-explored super-charger ability (the red sparks, in other words). Hiro gets his mind and his time-traveling ability back, but apparently he’s still dying. So that kind of sucks.

But Peter gets to help the viewer understand how Emma is important, right before he smashes the cello Samuel gave her for his own ends (originally intended for the lost love, Vanessa, who becomes an integral part of the season after this episode), that would have turned her into an unsuspecting siren (even though she quite intentionally draws Peter in for a visit with it). He steals his own mother’s precognitive ability during “Close to You” to help see the future (a possible one, anyway), for all the good it’ll do him. It’s always the unexpected that gets in the way on this show, unexpected but always woven firmly into the story. Sylar’s about to become Nathan? He spent the previous episodes getting lost in his new shape-shifting powers. There’s always something going on; it’s only a matter of paying attention and figuring out what it is. A lot of what ‘Heroes’ does is obvious, but it’s the way that the show consistently works the unexpected that keeps it interesting. My favorite moment of the first season was how Nathan apparently sacrificed himself to save the day in “How To Stop an Exploding Man.”

There’s always more, always something else to learn, and that’s why it’s been worth it to keep the same core characters around, because there’s plenty to do with them, and all the greater worth to finish their stories rather than keeping the series around with new characters who will simply repeat what we’ve already seen. Wasn’t that the big complaint about some of the later Star Treks? It’s so hard to keep up with the cynicism of some fans…

Somewhere in the two hours broadcast last night was uttered the sentiment that burnt bridges can be rebuilt. No doubt, that’s the sentiment the creators are hoping for, because at this point, ‘Heroes’ has lost virtually all its good will. Certainly all its buzz, anyway. Retail stores are still convinced that it’s a hot seller, and no doubt it is, and maybe that’s the best the series can hope for at this point, that it’ll be rediscovered after its original broadcasts. It’s not like now isn’t a good time for something like that to happen, whether you consider the Internet age (which might be considered the method by which it became popular in the first place) or ordinary word of mouth (by which the show can sustain the storm of withered expectations from those same fans), which have mingled so thoroughly in this case that it’s just as possible to find someone still trying to find out what all the fuss was about without having to worry too much about the disappointment that set in when things stopped going the way those original fans expected. I’m a DVD fan who was lucky enough to convert to TV fan in what may be the show’s final days. At this point, I don’t really care. Next week will mark the longest continuous arc since the first season, and the slow build has been paying off exceptionally for the past few episodes.

Ever since Nathan was murdered in “An Invisible Thread” in the third season finale and Samuel Sullivan was introduced in “Orientation,” the fourth season premiere, a pair of inevitabilities were certain: Sylar would get his body back and Samuel would be the crux of the new arc, ‘Redemption.’ It was only a question of how all of it was going to play out. For a while, Sylar existed mostly as a disembodied mind inside Matt Parkman’s head, and Nathan continued on in Sylar’s own body. Samuel interacted mostly with his own carnival band, with the occasional visits with the main characters. Parkman struggled constantly with Sylar, and the balance between Nathan and Sylar was always precariously, almost exactly from the moment it was attempted. The rest of the cast moved on in various ways, and more characters were introduced, most interestingly Emma, the hearing-impaired acquaintance of Peter Petrelli. For much of the season, the creators kept Emma’s ultimate role close to their vest, preferring to pursue the obvious veins of the arc, which ultimately led to Sylar escaping Parkman’s mind and reclaiming his own body, not to mention the final death of Nathan Petrelli. For the first hour of the evening, “Upon This Rock,” most of that isn’t really explored. We follow Hiro as he reunites with Ando and their usual antics ensue, only there’s a real purpose evident this time. Hiro is acting all strange – because of his recovery and experiences at the carnival – but is still as motivated as ever, thanks to his need to rescue Charlie from whatever fate Samuel delivered her. The sequences are perhaps even more offbeat than usual, and employ the character to break the fourth wall more than ever before (which is strange, because the series once had a character who literally made the show into a comic book), referencing pop and literary culture to help contextualize and shorthand the pair’s escapades, the very things they’ve been doing all along, perhaps to justify to an increasingly skeptical audience that they aren’t so odd after all.

Samuel is given a new motivation for the first time, flashbacks to his quarrels with his brother, and the idea that he might also be pining for a lost love, not just driven by a need to exploit his powers, but like every other character in the series wishing he could fill a void in his life. When you hear him reiterate that he just wants to do it to give his kind a sense of family, you know that he means it, and that, yeah, he’s got ulterior motives, too. Everyone does. His happen to be somewhat selfish, or at least, don’t easily fold into the ones the main characters follow, much like Sylar.

Which makes “Let It Bleed” that much more interesting, when Sylar reappears, and returns to the carnival to confront Samuel. It’s the first time Sylar has truly met his match, someone who will be able to go toe to toe with him, completely unrestricted, nothing to lose if it comes right down to it. Samuel has his desires, sure, and so does Sylar, but they’re both so abstract that it’s a delight to watch their duel. In a way, Claire is more like them than she is the rest of the cast, which is why it’s so interesting to keep getting her involved so ambiguously in these situations. By the end of the two hours, it’s clear that once again she’s going to be pivotal, it’s just a matter of how and why. Sylar has nothing to gain from her as far as abilities – yeah, he did that already – a fact Claire still holds strongly against him. What else is there?

Emma, too, in quite the opposite way, comes into her own as a dynamic presence in the arc. She’s this season’s Exploding Man, the red herring who will serve as the excuse for the bad guy to say it’s not really his fault, but hey! Look how dangerous she is! What’s the point of her powers? Well, Samuel seems to think she’s a siren, and for a man like Samuel, that’s pretty dangerous indeed. We’re no longer talking the Company here, it’s no longer about Nathan and his ability to expose all of them. It’s the sheer danger of it again, as it was when Sylar was first introduced, the foreboding of Samuel, who might as well be this show’s Magneto. Who exactly is Professor X? HRG? Peter Petrelli? Claire? Who knows? That’s the big question. Whose philosophy will win out? Claire saves Peter’s life after a fairly extraneous hostage situation, and tells him they need his purity, the very opposite of what viewers might have been expecting after the gut punch of “The Fifth Stage.” When everyone keeps asking why Sylar gets to survive, why things have to stay in an apparent rut, it’s because at its heart, ‘Heroes’ is a show that needs to follow its best characters to the logical ends of their arcs. Nathan Petrelli could not survive the tangle he’d made of his life. What of the others?

With the addition of Elizabeth Rohm, a veteran of the Law & Order franchise, HRG finally has a partner who will make his work seem that much more relatable to casual audiences. ‘Heroes’ was never meant to feel like a typical genre show, but if there’s one criticism to be leveled over the past three seasons, it’s that viewers have been asked, increasingly, to exist only in the one reality where people have special abilities. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s also not what the show originally was. Parkman couldn’t be a regular cop after the first few episodes. Imagine if he’d been able to maintain that life a little longer. But that’s what the show’s been saying all along, too, right up to the failure of Nathan/Sylar, that pretenses are a lot harder to maintain than you think. That’s why the Haitian, as handy as he is, has never quite been able to erase every memory forever, or serve as the reason every bad guy is defeated. Life is messy. That’s what ‘Heroes’ is about, how messy lives are reconciled. That’s what this season has been attempting to explore, and why when it’s concluded, it wouldn’t be such a bad note to end on.

The episodes themselves probably weren’t going to win back a lot of viewers. “The Fifth Stage” was definitely a good episode to make them wait a month for new episodes, but even combined, “Upon This Rock” and “Let It Bleed” at best only continue an existing arc. They do, however, sustain a narrative momentum, one that the preview for next week helps justify by pumping more energy into the arc, just when it’s needed. Call this week Nathan’s wake, a moment for reflection. That’s been something I’ve admired about the show from the start, that it doesn’t worry too much about spending too much time in these characters’ heads. But it knows when business needs to pick up, too.

It may be time for fans of ‘Heroes’ to reach the fifth stage of grief themselves, because it’s not very likely that the show will be returning for a fifth season. Then again, at this point, you either really want to be watching the show, or you just plain aren’t, and it’s funny, because even with so few viewers, it still outclasses the number of fans some of the cult classics of recent years have managed to lure throughout their runs. With a show like ‘Heroes,’ they’re vocal when they’re at their biggest, when they’re building the hype, not necessarily when they’re trying to be constant cheerleaders. You might say the best fans aren’t the ones who’ve stopped watching, but rather the ones who still are, who don’t need constant reassurance that they’ve caught on to something. In that way, even as a declining failure, ‘Heroes’ is still a greater success than you might have been led to believe, fully three seasons past its apparent peak. “The Fifth Stage,” meanwhile, continues to prove that it has far from given up the fight.

Part of what led so many people to stop watching is that they got tired of seeing so many of the same elements, from characters they didn’t like to the Tim Sale art to the apparent unwillingness to embrace change. Even creator Tim Kring suggested that it was never his intention to stick with the same things for so long, that he’d always meant to cycle a bit more rapidly. I never quite understood much of that. Far from losing its value, I found that the more ‘Heroes’ explored the same characters, the richer they got, certainly from a viewpoint of not just their future but their past as well. The second season, much as it began the trend of growing bored with the show, was a treasure trove for those interested in elements like Takezo Kensei and the history of the Company, what amounted to the backstory of the series, which the third season further developed while also deepening the present. Then an episode like “The Fifth Stage” comes along, and gives us the final farewell of a beloved character, a moment that would never have been possible, such rich emotional resonance, if only the pleading of the fans had been listened to, even from earlier in the fourth season.

When you think about it, one of the characters whom the show has stuck by, seemingly (by the cynical view) because the actor portraying him suddenly won a role in a much larger project, has never been until now quite what he appeared to be. Sylar was never even the first season’s main antagonist, but rather someone who had, like every other character, been entangled in a twisting web of conjecture and discovery, something the show took great pains to establish. In the second season, again he was tangential, until again he stumbled into the main story, and again in the third season, until he had so irrevocably entwined himself it was impossible to continue ignoring him. The act of killing Nathan Petrelli in “An Invisible Thread” led him into the crosshairs of two main characters, Matt Parkman and Peter Petrelli, and the fourth season has been exploring that consequences ever since.

So when “The Fifth Stage” finally marks a final stage, it no longer matters, because of what’s transpired throughout the season, that Parkman had the chance to end Sylar’s threat in however dramatic fashion a few episodes earlier, but that Sylar had become Nathan, and vice versa, and what that means for the Petrelli brothers, who have basically been the focal points of the series since the very beginning, memories that are touched on during the hour. Nathan actually comes to much the same conclusions that Parkman did, and I expect the same fans who would’ve loved to see Sylar gone years ago would have loved to see it reported that this is his final appearance, but for the storyteller’s version, for the ‘Heroes’ version, that just isn’t the case. Instead, eleven episodes after his death, Nathan Petrelli has his big goodbye, and it cannot be said to be anything but a classic ‘Heroes’ moment, which isn’t bad for a show that was proclaimed dead longer before he was. Like “Cold Snap” last season, when Parkman had to say farewell to Daphne, this is an episode that could be remembered for a single scene.

But this is ‘Heroes,’ so there’s always more going on. This is a mid-season finale (a month hiatus may recharge fans, or at the very least give NBC and the show a final dignified run come January), which means ‘Redemption’ will last the whole season. This is fine, because Peter now gets to concentrate on revenge, and the saga of Samuel Sullivan marches on. “The Fifth Stage” is another meditation on acceptance, because it marks the point Claire finally joins the carnival, by far its biggest acquisition this season (Tracy and Hiro, certainly no slouch himself, have previously signed up). Claire is the hero who has since the start been trying to find acceptance. She wasn’t Peter, thinking he could fly or Hiro, celebrating his mastery of time, or Mohinder, taking on his father research. She was just a cheerleader who couldn’t die, and recorded many an attempt proving it, with resignation. She found out her dad was HRG, the hunter of people like her (oh, and that her other dad, the biological one, was Nathan, who was arguably worse than HRG). In the episode, she’s given the chance to tell a story to a bunch of children, and ends up choosing the chestnut of the first season, and ends it by declaring everyone happily ever after. It’s what the disgruntled fans wanted all along, really, and it’s what Claire has desperately desired, too, but never managed to find. Her family’s broken up and her experiment in normal college life has been one disaster after another.

We know what’s really going on with Samuel and the carnival at this point, and briefly, it’s referenced by Lydia, but by the end of the episode, it feels good that Claire has found a semblance of normal. Much of the episode, in fact, is spent making the carnival sound good, despite what we know. It almost doesn’t matter that Samuel hints he’s after bigger fish than her. We meet a cool new replacement for his main henchman in the process, the kind of presence that might have jazzed the lapsing fans. We also revisit Doyle, the Puppetmaster, an absurdly reassuring presence at this point, for Claire and for the audience, a key figure from the third season, minor but a great source of continuity. The HRG/Lauren arc is touched on as well (Lauren is a CIA agent, but the season does not seem eager to exploit that angle just yet), while the episode also offers our first real glimpse of the carnival as a working carnival (weird, huh?).

There’s glimpses of the other characters and arcs waiting for us next year as well. Like I was saying last review, I don’t know if it’s the lack of a truly mounting story that fumbled viewers the past few seasons, but there’s been one throughout this season, and those who are still watching are being constantly rewarded. It’s still a great time to be a fan of ‘Heroes.’

Back during the first half of ‘Lost’s’ second season, even Terry O’Quinn was getting antsy. He didn’t understand why Locke had reverted to the angry individual flashbacks showed him as being in the past, but in the present, at least until recently, he’d long since overcome. The actor’s vocal frustrations closely mirrored the reactions of fans who had grown accustomed to thinking of the series as one of the most innovative, thrilling, and constantly rewarding experiences on television, but had found this perhaps to no longer be the case after the first year. I offer the anecdote not as proof, now that we’re approaching that show’s final year with everyone happy once again, that things were never as grim as they appeared, but that there is always time for reflection, no matter what the results are, and Thanksgiving is a perfect time. ‘Heroes’ spent this week’s episode doing exactly that, and it was certainly an appropriate gesture.

By the fourth season of ‘Lost,’ its creators had announced the end of the series, a bold and unprecedented move that helped renew faith in the show. This being the fourth season of ‘Heroes,’ in which once again a once-popular show has made very obvious overtures to its fans to come back, one might wonder if a similar experience might be possible. The thing is, ‘Heroes’ isn’t ‘Lost,’ and it never has been (which is ironic, because when it premiered, many viewers were calling it an improved version of the ‘Lost’ template, an epic serial narrative). ‘Lost’ had an obvious arc to follow (which became slightly less obvious when the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 were actually rescued and decided they had to go back), where ‘Heroes’ never did, certainly a vague one, but one that seemed to embrace a more traditional, season-to-season structure that allowed for looser ideas of how to construct stories. ‘Lost’ had a central, evolving conflict concerning a fixed set of circumstances. ‘Heroes’ quickly proved that each season could be built around a new story, a new conflict, and even if each season built on the last one, no obvious or at least direct arc ended up seeming like a mandate. Even if Tim Kring were to say today, “Our show ends after so-and-so,” it would lead to no expectations or conversations. ‘Lost’ became an interactive experience very quickly. ‘Heroes’ remained an objective one, where fans would have to be content (or not) with whatever the creators chose to do. Eventually, those fans decided it would be best to assume the creators not only didn’t have a long-term plan, but that they only did the most irritating things because they seemed like the popular thing to do (well, clearly not).

Along comes a season arc like ‘Redemption,’ and an episode like “Thanksgiving.” Fans a few episodes earlier assumed the best way to conclude the Sylar arc was when Parkman, then possessing the consciousness of the arch villain, tried to kill himself, thereby presenting a spectacular, sudden end to both himself and Sylar. The creators, if they were listening to this reaction, must have scratched their heads (like if ‘Lost’ had listened to O’Quinn and made Locke suddenly serene again, before Henry Gale ever showed up and left the hatch exactly as he found it as a result), because they knew where they were headed (this isn’t to say alternate stories would be totally unknown to ‘Heroes,’ which to my mind has always been the most transparent of any TV show in this regard). They knew that by “Thanksgiving,” Sylar was going to be Sylar again, but also Nathan, but in a far more unsettling way than before. They knew it would be far more interesting, far more creepy, to have Nathan turn on his own family, then reveal that it’s Sylar in control (the Puppetmaster identity perfected, by the way), and finish a conversation that had already been started, have the events of “An Invisible Thread” laid bare, and eventually have Nathan back in control, but in a way that has Peter finally having to take a truly active role, for the first time since “Home Coming,” in the first season.

This episode delivers, or continues to deliver, all the promise the third season finale presented, but in a way that those who perhaps only started watching this season might appreciate. HRG reunites with Lauren, introduced in “Once Upon a Time in Texas,” making an uncomfortable reunion with ex-wife Sandra (how weird is that, anyway?), who seems to have finally settled for a version of normal life that certainly seemed like she wanted when we first got to know her (perhaps something she finally got to have again, or perhaps a hint that isn’t quite appropriate for her anymore). Claire makes the big decision to at least visit the carnival, after a spat with her father that finally exposes the elephant in the room, that their relationship has never progressed from “Company Man” because, in a sense, neither one has moved past that rhetorical point. Those who think nothing ever happens on this show, that nothing ever really changes, might begin to reassess that judgment.

Then Hiro travels back in time to find out what viewers might have been suspecting all along, that Samuel Sullivan killed his own brother. Samuel’s mutinous, mistrustful associates, Lydia and Edgar (Ray Park!), now have good reason to no longer trust him, and Edgar is run off in the process, but otherwise the status quo must be upheld so Hiro still has a chance to reunite with Charlie, a curious arc that has taken off the remaining boy scout sheen on the character (in case there were viewers who still believed that myth, too). Oh, and thanks to Hiro, we know that the season has covered two months, an unusually expansive timeframe for the series, which also means the events involving Mohinder occurred just before the season began.

Samuel as a story point, specifically the connection to Coyote Sands (“1961”), continues a ‘Heroes’ tradition of forming new season arcs from plot points already established, which might be enough for the more generous fans to assume, once and for all, that Kring and the other creators aren’t just improvising, but have had an idea of what they’ve been doing after all. If that’s the case, then maybe fans might began to trust the creators again. Or maybe they’ll just sit back and watch as a thrilling season once again unfolds on the show.

Whether you love it or haven’t been convinced, the ‘Redemption’ arc reached a high point this week. At this point, the season is no longer accepting new viewers, or even those curious if it’s gotten back to first year goodness, but rather is now firmly back in the cumulative effect a serialized show ought to work best in, counting on awareness of developments from last season and hoping you care enough about Samuel Sullivan as a foil to register that “Brother’s Keeper” just spelled out his threat once and for all.

Personally, I couldn’t think more highly of the work the creators have done this season, from the carnival plot to the arcs done with new and old characters. There’s still plenty to do before this story’s through (how does Emma fit into everything?), but this was the pivotal episode after a string of strong entries, the “Villains” of the season (the flashback episode that revealed Arthur Petrelli’s past during last season’s opening arc, also called ‘Villains’) that finally brought back Mohinder (believe it or not, but he does still have fans), got Nathan to the point where he realized he was Sylar, studied how some of the familiar characters were doing in relation to the carnival, and yes, explained Samuel. It’s was a classic, “cluttered” episode, one that is probably impenetrable to the uninitiated, but all the more dazzling, exactly the kind of work that drew so many fans early on in the show’s run (“Home Coming” from the first season is another crossroads entry “Brother’s Keeper” may be compared to, and if you know that one, you can get an idea of this week’s impact even if you’re reading this review without having seen the episode).

First, let’s talk about Matt Parkman. Last week it seemed like he bravely sacrificed himself in a hail of police bullets to stop Sylar, but the teaser for “Brother’s Keeper” quickly dispelled the certainty of his death, a somewhat controversial move (in this show, as in the comics it’s more or less derived from, no one ever seems to stay dead). This in itself, an unwillingness to part with original cast members, has been a show tradition. Nathan and HRG have both tasted death, Tracy did, and Claire has made a career of it. The biggest instance would have been the end of the first season, when viewers might have assumed that’s exactly what Peter was doing, even when Nathan swooped in, bringing down both Petrelli brothers in one fell, er, swoop. Maybe that’s why so many original fans stopped watching, because they began to question the integrity of a show that kept teasing something it rarely equated with finality. Regardless, Parkman is revived by Peter’s healing touch (acquired a few episodes earlier and lost by episode’s end), which sets up a nasty situation when the monkey in the room, Sylar, has the chance, at last, to reunite body and mind. Some of the best moments are the tension caused by Nathan wandering a bit too close to Parkman. By the end, Parkman’s free of Sylar at last, but there’s doubt (which the teaser doesn’t entirely dispel) about whether or not Sylar got what he wanted.

This will lead, for some, into yet another interesting set of circumstances. For some, it’s another chance to see if Sylar can redeem himself. Inside Parkman’s mind, he doesn’t seem to have been very much interested, but inside Nathan/Sylar? The episode is the first time in weeks that we’ve gotten an extended experience of Nathan, and as I said, he finally learns the truth. As Nathan and with Sylar’s mind displaced, all he has to struggle with, supported by his brother, is what this makes him: more Nathan than Sylar? more Sylar than Nathan? It’s a struggle either way, at least during “Brother’s Keeper,” and exactly the kind of compelling drama “An Invisible Thread” set up, and a long-running series is capable of. Being such a fan of Nathan, I see this as a chance for the character to continue grappling with the part he’s played in the series, which is exactly the flipside of Sylar’s arc (see why this has also been such an appropriate pair, as Parkman and Sylar were?), where he has been at the periphery pretty much the whole time. Both have made a lot of bad decisions, and have struggled with the ramifications (at least from time to time). Forcing the two to literally travel the same road is the best thing that could have happened to them, and the show.

Mohinder, that annoying Indian guy constantly researching the same stuff his father did, who used to do the narration to every episode (and see how it was appropriate, too, that Samuel replaced him in “Orientation”?), could never decide if he worked with the good guys or bad, and hadn’t been seen all season, finally got back into the game. We’d already seen what happened to him, but we spend about half the episode in flashbacks as he discovers, once again, that he can’t leave the research alone. Viewers from last season will again be rewarded (“1961”) when the topic of Coyote Sands is revisited, almost as a ’Heroes’ answer to the Dharma Initiative from ‘Lost.’ Mohinder watches a film that holds crucial information times hasn’t been kind in preserving, which causes him to do some research (invent a certain compass), and eventually visit the Sullivan circus, where he meets Samuel’s brother, who tells him things Samuel wasn’t supposed to know, and so of course Samuel overheard and killed Mohinder for. But Samuel has already gotten Hiro in his camp in the present, and the task he wanted was to retrieve the film before Mohinder burns it, so he can find out his powers increase when he surrounds himself with others who possess special abilities. Hiro saves the film, but he also saves Mohinder, but ends up doing pretty much the same thing to him that Samuel did with Charlie. End result: Mohinder’s back in play.

Also in play this episode are Tracy and Claire, who’ve paired up and eventually realize both have been courted by Samuel. Tracy has begun losing control of her powers (which have finally switched back from water to freezing), and needs a little help coping. HRG eventually shows up to notice some of this, but not before Tracy has decided maybe she ought to run away to the circus after all.

The preview for next week feels like something straight out of the first season, believe it or not, like things are really heating up, building in a way, and not to take away anything from them because I’ve grown fond of the whole series, the previous two seasons really haven’t. I can’t speak highly enough about ‘Heroes’ in its fourth season.