The show Heroes has an astonishing imagination (omitting 10,000 lines of praise code here)… After watching the first three seasons, I’ve found plenty of mysterious events that the show’s own rules can’t explain. After three seasons I feel trapped in the mystery, and I hope that one day some expert will tell me the truth!
Mystery 1: About the 2 annular solar eclipses.
According to the plot, one annular solar eclipse appears in the first season and one in the third, one year apart. In the third season, the heroes start to realize that most of their powers manifested after that annular eclipse a year earlier. The annular eclipse in the third season caused everyone’s superpowers to vanish, including people like Arthur who had powers long before. And since Arthur, after the annular eclipse struck and he lost his powers, was baffled and ordered Dr. Surush to hurry up and develop a way to restore them, we can see that he was utterly unprepared for and utterly ignorant of the effects the annular eclipse brings. That being so, did the annular eclipse a year earlier not affect him at all? Why does he have zero experience with it?
Now let’s look at Adam. He’s lived for countless years—has he never once been through an annular eclipse messing with superpowers? We see that when Adam’s powers were absorbed by Arthur, he instantly turned to dust, and because all the injuries Claire had ever sustained flared up once she lost her powers, so Adam’s immortality, once it stops working, should likewise turn him to ash.
What’s more, at the very start of the first season, Peter’s powers were just beginning to manifest, and his abilities were granted at birth by his parents using the company’s research. From Angela Petrelli’s dramatic account of how back then they were fully confident that Peter and Nathan could master their powers, it’s clear the Petrelli family understood the effects of granting superpowers, and Peter’s powers only surfacing at the eclipse ought to have been something they expected. Yet Arthur’s expression makes it look like he has no clue whatsoever about the relationship between the eclipse and superpowers!
Mystery 2: Relativity—time flowing backward
The last episode’s opening and closing are way too sloppy—they actually drag relativity into it. Ando’s power-amplification + Daphne’s super speed = running speed exceeding the speed of light = time flowing backward, going back 16 years to save Hiro… Never mind why they didn’t go back even earlier to help Hiro stop Arthur—the mystery here is: time being able to flow backward doesn’t mean you can go back and forth. If you can explain going back to the past, how do you explain running back to the present again?
Mystery*: I won’t even mention the N other small bugs. Small bugs I don’t much care about—you can still paper them over. Big bugs I’m powerless against; my brain is turning to mush, mush… I’ve gone off the deep end.