Heroes continues, introducing police officer Matt Parkman, played by Greg Grunberg, and featuring Ali Larter, Masi Oka and Hayden Panettiere amongst others.
The second episode of Heroes continues its slow unfolding.
Peter Petrelli is a nurse with a brother who is running for Congress and a belief that he can fly. To convince his sceptical brother he jumps from the roof of a skyscraper. When he awakes, brother Nathan admits that he was right, but that they both flew.
Texan cheerleader Claire Bennett saved a man's life in the first episode, but allows another girl to take the credit in order to retain a low profile. Her father returns home from a 'business' trip which involved burgling the flat of Indian scientist Mahinder Suresh, and agrees that she should be allowed to search for her birth parents. While his back is turned, she shoves her fingers down the waste-disposal unit and slashes them to ribbons; in the single best scene of the episode the viewer watches her fingers heal in front of the camera.
Mahinder has gone to New York and taken over his father's cab route. Returning home one day, he finds a contractor who panics and pulls a gun on him.
When porn actress Niki Sanders (Ali Larter) awakes in her garage after blacking out, she finds the mutilated corpses of the Mob enforcers sent to beat payment out of her. The camera with which the goons was filming her has gone off-line, and when she looks in the mirror, her reflection puts a finger to her lips. Later she drives the bodies out into the desert, where she finds a body buried.
Meanwhile, Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka) has teleported to New York. In triumph he makes off with a comic, in which he sees his story drawn. He tracks the artist down, and is horrified to find a corpse which appears to have had the brain scooped out -- and is arrested by the police on suspicion of murder. He learns that it is five weeks after he mysteriously vanished.
The viewer is taken to Los Angeles and a new thread. A woman has been murdered and impaled in her own home, and her daughter is missing. Police officer Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg) hears the child calling and finds her. However, no one else has heard the child, for Matt is a telepath. Passed over for promotion twice, the investigating officers believe that he killed the woman and hid the child himself in order to make himself look like a hero.
This is still scene-setting writ large, and the viewer must be patient; only time will tell whether that faith will be repaid.
