WRITER: Joe Pokaski DIRECTOR: Paul Edwards
CAST: Hayden Panettiere (Claire), Jack Coleman (Mr Bennet), Masi Oka (Hiro/Future Hiro), Milo Ventimiglia (Peter), Sendhil Ramamurthy (Mohinder), Adrian Pasdar (Nathan), Ali Larter (Niki), Greg Grunberg (Matt), James Kyson Lee (Ando), Zachary Quinto (Sylar), Jimmy Jean-Louis (The Haitian) & Kellan Lutz (Andy)
Hiro and Ando find themselves stranded in New York, five years after an explosion decimated the city. Nathan has become President and is developing a means to wipe out people with special powers...Five Years Gone gives us a glimpse of the future, revealing what's in store for the heroes if they fail to stop the New York explosion from happening. Personally, I'm not very keen on speculative episodes like this, despite their popularity in comics, primarily because they tend to cheapen the present day storyline. I don't want to know what the show would look like in season 5 if the writers allow NYC to be half-destroyed. I'd rather see things develop far naturally.
Clearly, the episode exists to show audiences how high the stakes are, as if a post-9/11 viewership didn't already comprehend. Of course, this episode is just a "potential future" and many elements will hopefully never come to fruition. The day cherubic Hiro becomes a stoic leather-clad grouch is the day the ratings begin to nosedive, surely...
It's amusing to see characters given a new spin here: Matt's a sinister thug, Hiro's a wanted "terrorist", Peter's a godlike fugitive (with the same tailor as The Matrix's Neo!), Nikki's a grieving pole dancer and Mohinder's a complicit scientist to Nathan's devious President. Other characters are relatively unchanged but have interesting new circumstances: Claire is engaged and living under an alias as a waitress, while Mr Bennett covertly helps "special people" hide from prejudice.
Beyond the enjoyment in seeing familiar faces given unfamiliar traits, the thrust of the episode concerns Hiro and his future self trying to alter the past. Future Hiro has already travelled back in time to tell Peter to "save the cheerleader, save the world" (in Chapter 4, remember?) but it seems that didn't work...
The time-travel aspect to Heroes is quite a bane for the series, as the writers are forever having to concoct reasons why Hiro can't just travel back and redo mistakes. He'd essentially be unstoppable if he learned to control his ability better, so it's confusing as to why Future Hiro (with his prowess at time-bending) can't change things with greater success... particularly as he seems to be unaffected by changes to the timeline!
The fact the present and future co-exist with one another is also illogical, as it throws up all sorts of problems if you think deeply. I recommend you just let such temporal problems and other errors wash over you -- why, for example, would Future Peter have a facial scar if he saved Claire and therefore must have leeched her power of indestructability?
As a frolic into "what if?" territory, Five Years Gone is a lot of fun, but don't take it too seriously. Its existance has somewhat dulled my anticipation of the real-time conclusion to the season, although I was glad things began to improve as it went along -- particularly once a clever twist was revealed involving Sylar...
Overall, after taking awhile to find its feet, this episode builds a head of steam and leaves you anxious for the next episode. But I'm still not a fan of these speculative leaps. I hope this episode exists just because the writers have different plans for the series, but couldn't resists flexing their imaginations.
It's also increasingly apparent that Heroes, with its Rising Stars premise, Watchmen influenced finale and (as seen in this future atleast) an X-Men-esque divided society... may not be original, but it's a blissfully entertaining melting pot of stolen ideas.
