Here is No Why

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On The List of Things I Didn't Deserve . . .

April 29, 2007 10:04 PM

hat ranked pretty damn near the top.

Update

I won't say what happened. I'll tell you face-to-face, but I can't do it here.

Hiro Nakamura is a man with a lot on his shoulders. Although he has the ability to manipulate space and time, he was powerless to intervene when Sylar killed Charlie Ismaels, the love of HIro's life. Although Hiro went back in time to before Sylar killed her, he couldn't save her--it was as though the universe intervened and prevented Hiro from changing the past in such a way that would negate his reason for traveling into the past. If Hiro went back to save Charlie, he couldn't stop her from dying--if he did, he wouldn't have gone back, so she'd die, and so forth.

As painful as that experience undoubtedly was for Hiro, what was in store for him was even worse. We know a little about what happens in the future: Peter Petrelli explodes, taking half of New York City with him. In the latest graphic novel, we see a new version of Hiro: five years in the future, the meek office worker has become a fearsome warrior, his once optimistic outlook dimmed by the world after the explosion. We also see that he has a deep obsession: for five years, Future Hiro's been working on his web of time, trying to pinpoint a moment in time. He hopes to find the one second in time where a subtle change would make all the difference.

After years of study, he went back in time to deliver the most important message of his life: "Save the cheerleader, save the world." But upon his return to the future, Hiro saw that nothing had really changed. Although it was now Peter--not Sylar, as in the previous timeline--that caused the explosion, the net effect was the same: the future still sucked.

It appears that time is immutable, even to someone with the ability to travel back and forth through it at will. In Hiro's universe, there is fate, and it sucks sometimes.

I don't know if I believe in fate in the real world. But I'm starting to see that, like Hiro's universe, mine has some immutable laws, as well. Yeah, there's gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But there's this other thing, too. I don't know what to call it, but this principle's effect on my life is undeniable and now, at the age of twenty-five, I'm starting to feel as though I'm drowning in this law and its consequences.

Tonight's episode of Heroes takes place five years in the future. Present-day Hiro will attempt to find out what went wrong so that, upon his return to now, he can stop it, thereby saving the world. The odds are stacked against him but, dear god, I hope he succeeds.