Save The Cheerleader, Save The World?

If you haven't been watching Heroes, I suggest that you stop reading now. While I'm not going to be summarizing any episodes, sooner or later (right after this sentence!) I'm going to refer to something that just happened and I don't want to ruin your Heroes fix.

Here's some Heroes food for thought:

Now that we're in Season 3, what exactly was so important about Season 1? Almost right off the bat, Sylar gets into Claire's brain box and uses his power of "intuitive comprehension" to study her brain and learn how to regenerate like Claire. Once he figures it out, it seems like he's about to leave and let her die (she doesn't appear to be regenerating while he's there), but he turns around and puts her skull cap back onto her head so she'll heal. I have 2 problems with this scene:


1) In Season 1, Claire gets exposed to a crazy level of radiation that chars her to a burnt husk. In Season 2, Claire cuts off her toe and it grows back completely. If she can regenerate all that, what was stopping her body from regrowing the top of her skull?

2) Does the phrase "Save the cheerleader, save the world" ring a bell? Sylar is a little nutty in the head, but when push came to shove, he let Claire live because in his brain excavation, he discovered that there was something Special about her that made her different from all of the other Heroes. If Sylar lets her live after performing some minor brain surgery...what's the point of the catch-phrase from Season 1?



Niki Sanders (Ali Larter). What's up with her? Didn't she die in an exploding house at the end of Season 2? I'll hazard 2 possible theories:

1) Through the end of last season, the only Power she's displayed is that her other persona, Jessica, has superhuman strength. I'll take this a step further and hazard the theory that her Power is her split personalities - and each personality has it's own Power. Enter, Tracy Strauss, the Ice Queen. With a Power like that, it'd be no problem to survive an explosion in a burning building. A little bit of memory loss immediately afterwards makes things convenient.

2) Niki Sanders really did die in the explosion. But did Niki Sanders' twin really die as explained in "Six Months Ago" (Season 1)? Perhaps, perhaps not. Niki only thought she died and her inability to "let go" of her twin was a psychological trauma that resulted in the formation of a split personality, Jessica, her "twin." Enter, Tracy Strauss, the Ice Queens, Niki's real long-lost and thought-to-be-dead twin sister.

See you next week!