"Heroes"

[stoutfellow]

Tomorrow night is the season finale of Heroes. I have scrupulously avoided spoilers; nonetheless, I have a prediction to make, under the cut.

I expect Peter Petrelli to die, or (less dramatically) to somehow lose his powers, or his power-absorption ability. He's simply too powerful, the way Silver Age Superman was.

Now, Peter isn't Superman, by a wide margin. But he's about three-quarters of the way to being a discount version of Supes. Let's compare powers, starting with the big four.

Flight. Peter has absorbed Nathan's ability to fly. Judging from the incident in Nevada, Nathan can fly pretty fast, too.

Invulnerability. Peter's not invulnerable, but the regeneration ability he picked up from Claire is a fair substitute. All he needs is a henchman to do things like pull shards of glass out of his brain stem...

Super-speed. Peter isn't super-fast (except, perhaps, in flight). But he's got Hiro's abilities: he can stop time, teleport, and even travel in time. That's close enough for me.

Super-strength. Not yet - but just let him meet Niki...

What about the minor powers? Superman has heat vision; Peter has the nuclear abilities he got from Ted Sprague. Superman has super-hearing; I don't recall whether Peter's run-in with Sylar came before or after Sylar stole that talent, but you know they'll meet again. Peter doesn't have anything like Superman's other vision powers. On the other hand, Peter has telepathy, telekinesis, prophetic drawing, and invisibility. He's also got or will get, via Sylar, other powers: liquifying metal, whatever that freeze-power Sylar used on Molly's parents was, and who knows what else? Peter has powers he probably doesn't even know about yet - and every time he meets another special, he'll get even stronger. Candice? Micah? D.L., assuming he's still alive? (It's a shame he never met Linderman.)

It's too much. Stopping Sylar will take someone at that power level, but, unless the writers plan to up the ante every season, Peter is just too powerful. (And if they do? Eh, that trick never works - cf. Willow Rosenberg, or Anita Blake, or Jean Grey, or...) (Why is it that the examples that come to my mind are all female? Well, there's Doctor Manhattan, I guess.)

Comments

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

I think I'm going to reply to this with a regular post.