Watching the Eclipse
by Russell Burlingame
The episode opens on some good, old-fashioned mourning and self-flagellation on the part of Peter Petrelli, who joins Noah to plant evidence that his brother has died in the crash of a small, private plane (as was reported in "Upon This Rock"), as opposed to being murdered. He's wearing all black, moping around and speaking in his low, serious voice as Noah opens the trunk to show him his brother's corpse. When editing moves us forward to the present day, Peter's at his brother's calling hours, bitterly reporting to inquiring guests that the official findings labeled the crash an accident.
Back at the Carnival, Samuel is working with his magic ink, apparently trying to make it do on paper what it does on Lydia's back (in order to make her expendable, maybe?), when he's nearly struck by a flying object-which turns out to be Doyle, the puppet master. When the source of the tossed fat man turns out to be Sylar, Samuel orders Doyle to "get everyone too safety," but cautions him not to go too far, presumably in the hope that if he keeps his "family" around him, he may have a chance of surviving an encounter with Sylar due to the proximal nature of his powers. It works, as Sylar pins Samuel to the wall of his trailer but can't do his brain-slice trick before Samuel creates a tiny sandstorm that suffocates Sylar, who passes out.
Is it only me who feels like this is a glaring example of Sylar being nerfed to make Samuel seem like more of a badass?
Before the services for Senator Petrelli, Noah offers to drive Claire to the calling hours, which she rejects on the grounds that he lied to her about the death. She's personally stung that, after everything Sylar has done to her, and to her family, and then to her birth father (Nathan), she inadvertently showed him affection when she was unaware that he was secretly being passed off as the Senator. After emotional conversations, both Claire and Peter tell off their respective parents for having kept the truth from them at the end of season three; Claire asks for some space, while Peter avoids commenting on his mother's request that he not go after Sylar and taint his brother's last wishes for him with revenge. The pair then join up for a private conversation. Cutting lemons and limes for the drinks outside, they share a moment when she slices her finger and feels the pain, because Peter still has the Haitian's powers and hasn't made the conscious effort to turn them off. They talk about missing Nathan, and use the opportunity to touch on the disappearance of Wes, Claire's flying boyfriend of whom her father apparently disapproved. She tries to get Peter to tell a Nathan story, but he just leaves the room.
Back at his apartment, Noah seems to be moping around and unintentionally letting Edgar, Ray Park's knife-wielding speedster, into the room. However, in the moment before he's sliced to bits, he spins and uses a stun gun to subdue the attacker. Next thing you know, he and Lauren are bribing the proprietor of a Japanese restaurant to close the joint down so that they can use it as their personal superhuman-waterboarding HQ. With Edgar duct-taped and roped to a chair inside of a freezer (the cold tightening his muscles, slowing his heart rate and "leveling the playing field" for non-speedsters), they start drawing truth serum into a needle...
At the Carnival, Samuel has placed Sylar in Lydia's trailer, where he tells her that she'll have to use her charms to learn why Sylar was incapable of finishing him in their battle. He says that there's something different about him-that he doesn't seem truly to be Sylar or the blank slate they'd met before. After a brief bit of hesitation by each of the two principals, Lydia and Sylar begin to make out, with her getting psychic impressions from him as they do. She diagnoses that he's scared of Hiro's analysis from earlier in the season that he's going to die alone, and that he wants love but doesn't think he deserves it. He reverses the role on her, taking her powers without killing her and telling her that he knows she doesn't really want to help him, only to use him in her agenda to kill Samuel. Dispensing with all pretense of foreplay, she tells him that he won't kill her anyway, because he's "impotent," which causes him to shy away from her, take his clothes and run out.
Back at the wake, Claire is looking at a vaguely homoerotic photo of the Petrelli brothers when Angela approaches her to talk about Peter's need to grieve and the fact that she can't provide him closure because he, like Claire, is angry and disappointed with her and Noah. She urges Claire to go up to the roof, where Peter is listening to the police scanner. He has followed the scanner's reports, though, to a building where there's a man barricaded inside with hostages and a gun. He has snuck in to start treating an injured co-workers of the gunman. He leaves Claire to apply pressure to the woman's wound while taking off to confront the man, with Claire and the entire audience calling after him that her power set, not his, would help her in the situation he's charging into.
Back into the freezer at the Japanese restaurant, Edgar is all covered in blood and looking pretty shabby as Noah wipes his hands on a towel, barking questions at the ';luuded-up speedster. As he starts to lose his patience and threatens Edgar with his own knife, Lauren comes to him and tries to discourage torture. She points out that Edgar doesn't have a compass, and that Noah would get further with him if he weren't so cruel, and instead tried to win him over by being better than Samuel.
Back at the hostage site, Peter is trying to relate to the hostage-taker by explaining to him everything that's going through his head as a result of losing his brother and being forced to stage the death and plaster on a fake smile for the mourners. Ultimately, he guilts the man into hesitating, then leaps on the man and gets shot in the process. Lying on the gurney outside, after having subdued his shooter, he takes Claire's powers after she talks to him at great length about not wanting him to go after Sylar. The two talk about what Nathan would have wanted, and Peter comes clean that he's trying to keep busy doing other things so that he doesn't stop to mourn or think about Nathan's death and "make it real."
In the freezer, Noah is asking Edgar what it is he wants from him-postulating that Edgar wants him alive, and Edgar says he doesn't know what the real plan is-that he just does what he's told. He explains that he's not really a hitman, but misses being a juggler. He admits that he thought if he brought Noah back to Samuel, maybe he'd be allowed back into the community. Noah proposes that they work together to take down Samuel.
Back at the Carnival, Sylar is throwing boxes around, looking for ink so that he can make a tattoo and see his "map." Samuel tries to convince him to stay with the carnival, and tells him a little bit about his lost love, Vanessa. He reveals that he knows Hiro told him he was going to die alone, and that it's haunting him. He promises Sylar acceptance at the carnival, and Sylar tells him that if the tattoo tells him that, he'll stay. Samuel turns some dirt into ink.
Back in Noah's apartment, he's partially untied Edgar and is planning to raid the Carnival and take out Samuel. Edgar, though, demands that they simply remove or kill Samuel and leave the rest of his friends alone. Edgar, having shared the plans for the Carnival which allowed Noah to make a strategy, blows past the pair of agents and steals the papers on his way out.
When Samuel applies the ink to Sylar at the Carnival, it starts to dance and skip around his chest, shoulders and back in a way we've never seen it do with Lydia. Samuel tells him that he's trying to force a result, and that's what's screwing it up. When the tattoo comes to rest on the inside of Sylar's arm, Samuel remarks that it's interesting and Sylar says, "I guess you were wrong; I don't belong here," and takes off, putting his shirt on.
On the rooftop of Peter's apartment, he's sitting with Claire looking out over the city. She offers to stay with him instead of going to school, and he tells her that it's okay-that she should go to school. He promises not to lie to her, and then asks her to contact Wes (her old boyfriend) for him.
Noah and Lauren diagnose the Carnival as a cult, and Noah's worried that Claire might be brainwashed, but when Lauren tells him to go ahead and call her, he does so...hanging up almost immediately. On the rooftop of his building, Peter flies off into the night sky, while Samuel sits alone at the Carnival, filing away his umpteenth drawing of Vanessa. Claire returns home to a dark, empty dorm where Gretchen has left to study, and contemplates calling Noah, but doesn't. Outside her window, predictably, stands Sylar with a tattoo of Claire's face on his forearm. "Hello, Cheerleader," he says, and the episode ends. Calling her "Cheerleader" has come to be kind of like Dr. Cox calling J.D. "Newbie" on "Scrubs", now, hasn't it? I mean, I can't imagine anyone really just thinking of her as "the cheerleader" anymore outside of NBC's marketing team, but it's the only way Sylar ever refers to her if she's in the room.
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Russell Burlingame (russell@comicrelated.com) / Columnist, Reviewer and Contributor
Russell is a journalist and columnist living and working in New York City. In high school, Russell interviewed Elliot S. Maggin for a review of the Kingdom Come novelization, and since then has worked consistently in and around the comics industry. He interned for Wizard magazine, and has freelanced for Wizard and Newsarama, in addition to a number of non-comics publications, Russell is currently working on a graphic novel based on Cap'n Internet, the comic strip that ran in his college newspaper; and a graphic biography of folk singer Phil Ochs with artist Marion Vitus.
Currently, in addition to his freelance work and his comics projects, Russell writes a number of columns for ComicRelated, including Conscientious Sequentials, The Gold Exchange, What's Perhappenin', Closing Statements, Reflecting 'Pool and To See or Not To See.
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