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- TV Series: Heroes
- Episode: 1961
- Starring: Jack Coleman, Greg Grunberg, Ali Larter, Hayden Panettiere, Adrian Pasdar, Milo Ventimiglia, Zachary Quinto, Masi Oka, James Kyson Lee, Sendhil Ramamurthy, and Ashley Crow
- Written By: Aron Eli Coleite
- Directed By: Adam Kane
- Network: NBC
- Series: Heroes
Heroes: 1961
Back When Everything Was Black and White By
Rob Vaux
April 14, 2009
Milo Ventimiglia as Peter in HEROES: 1961(2009).
© Mania.com/Robert Trate
The Petrellis continue to unearth graves in Coyote Sands as Angela (Cristine Rose) flashes back to 1961, when she and her sister Alice (Laura Marano) arrived under the care of Mohinder's father. It served as a government compound to analyze and control people with special abilities. A number of other children are there as well, including a young Charles Deveaux, who introduces himself to the girls.
In the present, Angela reveals that her parents and sister died here, and that she needs to find Alice's body and give it a proper burial. The Company was founded, she claims, to ensure that nothing like Coyote Sands ever took place again. She believes those same methods are necessary now in order to stop the current witch hunt and allow those with paranormal abilities to live in peace.
Alice, however, may not be dead. She had the power to control the weather and as Angela and Claire (Hayden Panettiere) discuss the past, an eerie wind kicks up. HRG (Jack Coleman), who has been digging up graves with the Petrellis, gets lost in the dust. He's set upon by Mohinder (Sendhil Ramamurthy), who has come to see what his father was up to out here. As HRG explains his presence there, Angela heads out into the storm, determined to confront her sister. The minute she leaves, the storm abates. The others split up to go looking for her.
Back in 1961, Angela undergoes tests on telepathy from Mohinder's father. He asks her about her dreams and she claims that he's going to kill everyone in Coyote Sands. He assures her that that's not the case, but she's unconvinced and hatches a plot to escape with Deveaux. She's reluctant to leave Alice, but Deveaux tells her that the younger girl would only slow them down. He tells her to lie to Alice in order to protect her, which she does: assuring Alice that she'll be safe as long as she stays put.
As they search for Angela, Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) and Mohinder discuss the possibility of reforming the Company. Peter believes such an endeavor to be evil by its very nature, but Mohinder tells him that it can work if it is founded by moral men like him.
Angela wakes up in a nearby bunker occupied by her sister (now an old woman). Alice tells her that she stayed put to be safe, just like Angela told her. She recounts the night Angela left: Mohinder's father attempted to perform another round of tests on her, which triggered a violent storm. When Dr. Suresh struck her, her father intervened, knocking the man across the courtyard. The compound's guards opened fire on him, inciting a massacre.
Angela confesses that she lied to Alice when she left that night, which triggers another storm. Peter and Mohinder arrive, and Mohinder is struck by lightning. Angela gets Alice to calm down, but when she admonishes the woman to rejoin her family, Alice runs off into the desert. That night, Peter finds a film canister which may hold the answers to what Dr. Suresh hoped to accomplish at Coyote Sands. He gives it to Mohinder, who stays behind in the compound while the Petrellis depart. Over dinner at the café, Peter agrees with Angela's plans to form a new Company. They're interrupted by a news broadcast from the TV… showing Sylar (Zachary Quinto) holding a press conference disguised as Nathan.
The Good
Angela's one of the better characters in Heroes and the episode benefits from a focus on her. The flashbacks shed more light on why she does what she does: the true motives behind the Byzantine political threads she's surrounded herself with. The show does itself a further favor by staying in the same basic locale the whole time, allowing for a thematic and visual unity rarely permitted its normal rotating-plot-thread format. The notion of a new Company reformed under the Petrellis holds plenty of interest to boot.
The Bad
There's still far too much convenient plotting here, as when Peter and Mohinder stumble upon Alice's bunker. The details of the massacre in 1961 are annoyingly vague as well, and it's difficult to believe no one tasked with guarding a compound full of paranormals would have overlooked Alice in the bloodbath. Were the soldiers all killed? Did Alice have time to flee? Why didn't Angela and her friends return for them? Were they really just hanging out in a café after fleeing a federal military compound where they knew everyone was going to be killed?! Heroes blithely ignores such questions on a weekly basis, compounding the arbitrary and slapdash manner in which its story arcs are assembled. Elegance is meaningless without plausible internal logic behind it, a fact which the writers clearly still haven't figured out.
The Prognosis
Oh noes! Sylar's imitating Nathan! Whatever will we do!? Oh yeah, put up with the sneering little Mary Sue for another episode before the writers find some magical hand-waving way to defeat him or else arrange for an end-of-season twist to keep us all "on the edge of our seat" until September. Yippee.
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Man, I haven't seen season one of Heroes in some time. It wasn't until this morning that I remembered who the heck Deveaux is.
If you'd paid attention to the episode, Alice appeared to split away during the bloodbath and escape. No one thought about looking for her because she was presumed dead and Deveaux made everyone forget that anything had ever happened at Coyote Sands.
Also, the four teens did just go the to diner and hang out because they just wanted to pretend to be normal kids even if only for a short time. They did return to the camp, but it was too late. Everyone was already dead or at least most everyone was dead. I'm sure Angela didn't dig through all the piles of bodies and just assumed that her sister was among the dead. As her attentions were already set on making sure they covered the whole situation up, so she probably overlooked some things. Plus, I assume by the time they got back to the camp the storm was over. Upon seeing all the carnage back at the camp, Angela probably just assumed if the storm was over then her sister was dead too.
The question that came into my head as I watched the flashbacks was why is no one in the diner staring or saying anything about the 3 white kid hanging out with the black kid? This was supposed to be 1961 after all. Of course, they finally addressed this when Deveaux and Angela were dancing, but with all the racial tensions during that time, I'm surprised it took so long for anyone to notice.
Anyone else notice that this show seems to be much better when they leave out the stupid comic relief aka Hiro and Ando? It's also better when they concentrate on only one or two threads of a storyline in any given episode.
And, you knew it was only a matter of time before Sylar started impersonating Nathan. I know he was using a different power then, but Sylar was doing that in one of the futures we saw in season one.
Remember when we were all so pysched to see President Worf? What the hell ever happened to that? He got all of 2 seconds of screen time and I didn't even realize it was Worf until the next day.