A Review of the Heroes Season Three Double-Premiere

After the Season Three ("Villains") double-episode premiere of NBC's Heroes, it seems America should be saying a simple prayer: Dear God, save us from the Petrelli family. Hopefully this recap of the season premiere will help you see why.

Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) has always been one of my favorite characters on Heroes. But after the first episode of this season (titled "The Second Coming" . . . a fact we'll look at later), I'm just not so sure. Peter has already made some pretty silly mistakes. He got Simone Deveaux (Tawny Cypress) shot in season one, paired up with Adam Monroe (David Anders), one of season two's major villains, and very near killed Nathan (Adrian Pasdar), not to mention a huge chunk of the U.S. population. Just when you think Peter Petrelli couldn't get any dumber . . . he does.

Right at the offset of Season Three, Peter goes and causes a butterfly effect through time. And instead of grasping the fact that changing other stuff only makes it worse, we get to endure future Petrelli causing some seriously bad ripples in the Heroes-universe's timeline. He starts off by sticking present-Peter into the body of a seriously bad dude now known only as Jesse, a guy so evil that the best way Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman) could describe him was, "You don't want to know." He keeps Claire from going to Odessa, Texas (the place where all her fun little misadventures began), which leads to her having, as Angela Petrelli (Cristine Rose) put it, a "really bad day" (which we'll get to later). He sends Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg) on a magical trip to the middle of a simmering African plain. Oh, and did I mention he's the one who shot Nathan? Someone needs to teach this guy the "best laid plains of mice and men" philosophy.