I’ll be doing a super-big wrap up of all the American TV for this ‘season’ soon, so I’m going to keep this short.

1: The comic homages continue. This was a Homeland Security-esque take on classic X-Men tale ‘Days of Future Past’. Some may scream rip-off, but for me, it’s just damn good fun, and shows the writers know their influences very well.

2: Heroes needs a decent action director. Episodes like ‘Company Man’ have featured some good stuff, but the actual full-on action often lets the show down- Claire’s first encounter with Sylar in Ep 09 was a little muddled, and in Ep 20, the Matrix-style build up to FuturePeter and FutureHiro taking on the government troops resulted in some rather limp action and not a single shot being fired. Definite room for improvement.

3: Parkman is Evil! Greg Grunberg doesn’t always hit the heights, but manages to be genuinely nasty here.

4: Sylar is President! Not only that, he seems to have killed D.L., Nathan, Candace, and Ted and be sporting their powers.

5: Mohinder has a beard! And a none-too-convincing one at that…

6: Claire has dark hair! And is one of the many alterna-deaths this episode.

7: A couple of clunky moments, but mostly an episode that knocks it out of the park. Heroes has its ups and downs, but it’s a damn sight more interesting as a superhero story than the lumpen, dated Spider-Man 3, and is also carrying off the kind of experimental episodes that Buffy didn’t start tackling until Season 3.

8: Plus, by all accounts, they are going to give this season a proper ending. The mode they’re going for is ’24’, with a large shake-up (and reportedly a more global scale) in Season 2. Can’t help thinking this is a good thing.

9: Three more episodes to go until this year’s climactic episode: “How To Stop An Exploding Man”