Quick n’ Dirty Synopsis (Sans Spoilers)

After the Screamin’ Scavenger Hunt reaches its climax, Clare is left to pick up the pieces of her normalcy, and makes every attempt to do so. Sylar/ Nathan wakes up to find he’s still not feeling quite like himself. Sylar/ Matt continue their love/ hate relationship, whilst trying to traverse the country in search of Sylar’s body and at his bidding. Emma continues to grapple with her confusion, about both her power and her life. Peter has a handle on his new power, but its continued use seems to be getting the better of him. Personal casualties seem to be piling up all around.

Full Out Synopsis:

Alexandria, VA: It’s post-scavenger, where we left the ladies last time, and Clare somehow manages to convince them that no, they in fact did not see Rebecca become invisible, nor did they see Clare hung up like a hooked fish on the wall. She “figures out” that there must have been some sort of hallucinogenic in the water the sorority planted for them, making up her own hallucination while Gretchen relates hers of seeing the other two make out. She perhaps wishes it were so.

NYC. NY – Peter is putting his newly acquired power to good use (hey, way to master in days what it took that poor kid years to come to terms with). However, it drains him every time he uses it, and he begins to look a bit like one of the victims that are being pulled out of a horrific two-train car crash in the city. Somewhere in the chaos, Emma has found the strength to leave her cave and finds her idle hands being given the task of applying pressure to a wound. However, when the medic tells her what the woman has been prepped for, Emma goes into action, threading up the correct gauge and going to work on the wound herself. Peter sees her in action; where did she learn to do that? He turns to take care of a man in critical condition, and is visibly weakened by the effort.

Los Angeles, CA (to start): Sylar and Matt are in the airport, preparing to fly (first-class, of course) to New York; Sylar figures since the last thing he can recall is Peter jabbing him with a syringe, he should start there. Sylar is enjoying his new mobility, and continues his harassment of Matt. As they head through a security checkpoint, however, we get to see that Matt still has a modicum of control: Sylar inadvertently packed a gun instead of his socks, and this lands him immediately on the no-fly list. Road trip!

Carnival: Sylar/Nathan is dreaming, flashes of his most recent former existence. As he sleeps (in what appears to be Lydia’s paisley-printed sheets), is face wavers first, and then settles into Nathan’s visage. He awakes, and seems to be not so much disoriented but wary. He leaves the trailer, and manages to evade Samuel and Lydia’s notice before shooting into the sky. Looks like “his” memory has come back.

VA: Gretchen is understandably shaken by her numerous brushes with death at the hands of Rebecca. Clare decides to head over to the sorority house to investigate, but not before showing Gretchen how to neutralize Rebecca with…. Baby powder? Well, she may still be lethal, but she may also be somewhat visible. Gretchen arrives at the house to see the grueseom twosome from the scavenger hunt, whose increased vapidity indicates they’ve been Haitaned. Enter Noah and Renee; Clare put in a call to dad as soon as the situation escalated. Renee leaves with Clare to (actually) neutralize Rebecca, should she return to finish Gretchen, leaving Noah to ransack Rebecca’s room for clues.

Somewhere between LA and NY: While en route in a rental, Sylar somehow misses a large metal chunk in the road that leaves him with a flat. His first retaliation is to mock Matt’s upper body strength, or lack thereof, while he tries to fix it. A tow truck comes along, and a helpful gents named Hank comes to his aid. Hank asks Sylar to retrieve a tire iron, and as he walks towards it Matt trips him up. Sylar gets to his feat, and instead of handing Hank the tire iron, he proceeds to beat him to a bloody mess with it. As Matt cries out in disbelief that Sylar killed him, he answers, “No. You did.” Sylar loads the body into the trunk, with the offending tire iron, and explains to Matt that he had to show him the line. The line, that is, that he is willing to cross to get the truth. After all, “The world is my hostage. Anybody, anytime.” Matt says he understands, and seems to be complicit, as they continue their journey.

NY: Emma finds Peter in his state of exhaustion. He tries to deflect the conversation from himself by asking Emma where she learned her fancy finger-work? We learnt that Emma in fact attended medical school. This, we already knew. Just as we knew someone’s death affected her finishing her residency. But that’s all we get for now. Peter, having recharged, moves off to save more lives .

VA: Clare arrives to find Gretchen packing to go home, “maybe forever.” She leaves, and Clare asks Renee to tail her until she gets on the plane and she knows she’s safe. Clare is starting to tear up when a knock at her door forces her to toughen up. She turns to see Samuel, who looks so dashing and trustworthy in his suit jacket and visitor’s badge, who says he needs Clare’s help to find his niece Rebecca. When he reveals she isn’t really his “niece,” and begins to speak of the family, and Clare asks how he deals with his ability. He says he deals with it by not dealing with it, surrounding himself with like-minded souls. We see Clare begin to be drawn into his web of delicious lies, even as he begins to ask her about her father’s reputation for “scorching the earth” and pursuing their kind. In fact, he asks her, were her father there with them, “What would Bennett do?”

Meanwhile, Noah has located Rebecca when she returns to her room. Under threat of a tazing, she materializes and proceeds to relay the story of how she’s been drawing Noah to her, using Clare as bait, in order to eke out a revenge for his killing her father more than a decade before. When he tells her (either as a threat or as a statement of fact0 that she will not hurt Clare, she replies, in a voice dripping with venom, that she will hurt them both. Noah is “saved” when the two silly sisters enter with a costume for her. Seeing only Noah, he takes his leave. Saved. And on his way to the dorm, it seems, since we next see him coming through Clare’s bedroom door with his gun at the ready, asking Samuel, Yes, indeed, what WOULD Bennett do? He wants answers, and brandishes the compass found with Danko and that almost cost him his life, demanding to know their meaning.

NY: Emma goes into a storeroom at the hospital and discovers a little girl, decked out in what is obviously her favorite princess costume, laying on the ground, her breathing stopped. She cries out for help, and Peter (somehow?) is the only one to hear it. He rushes in, and wants to carry her to the ER but Emma knows there isn’t time. She asks him to grab a kit from the stock and proceeds to pull fluid out of her lung. As the little girl takes her first shuddery breath, Emma breathes a sigh of relief herself. You still got it, girl!

Midlands, TX: Sylar has stopped at what can only be the Burnt Toast Diner, and orders the Tahitian pancakes, which he recalls as being delicious. The waitress, Lynette, talks him into a real, full sugar soda, and we can’t help but like her. Sylar laughingly tells Matt he once almost killed a waitress in that same diner (hey, thanks, Hiro!), and the playful way he handles his switchblade tells us he’s willing to give it a second try. He makes that clear to Matt, too: tell him where his body is, what happened, or the waitress, for starters, dies. Matt refuses, and Sylar gets as far as the bake case by the store room, which we know is a great place to commit a crime, before Matt rises and entreats him to stay his hand. Lynette is safe for now.

VA: Noah handcuffs Samuel (who warns him of allowing Clare to see the way Noah treats “their kind”) and is hauling him into his car for questioning, when Clare is suddenly knocked to the ground. She calls out, but not before Rebecca manages to slam the car door on Noah. He tries to get up, points the tazer, and she knocks him to the ground again. Samuel demands that she stop, and as she goes after Clare again, Samuel himself takes p the tazer and shoots. He grabs her to him, as Clare runs to her father, whose gun is out again. He throws her to the ground himself, ostensibly to protect her, and she begs him not to shoot. He pauses, reconsiders, and Samuel and Rebecca scurry away. Clare, however, looks at Noah in a whole new light, and as he drops her at the dorm, their strained conversation makes it clear that the seeds of Samuel’s poison, being watered by that evening’s events, are beginning to take root.

NY: Emma is in the common room playing piano, similar to her and Peter’s first meeting. She is playing and gazxing at a picture of a beautiful little boy when Peter again joins her. It turns out, this is the Christopher her mother/ doctor referred to in her first episode, and he was her nephew. Christopher drowned on Emma’s watch, being unable to hear his cries when she became distracted and found his way into their pool. It happened just before she started her second year of residency, and thus, she dropped out of school. Peter, in reply, takes out of his bag the plastic crown the little girl was wearing earlier when Emma saved her life. She can’t bring Christpher back, but she gave that little girl a chance to grow up. As they begin to play the piano together, Peter places the crown on her head.

TX: Matt gives Sylar the truth about where his body has been “hidden.” Sylar can sniff out “Mama Petrelli’s” involvement, and Matt admits that Noah is in on it, too. Sylar, who has been doodling aimlessly, now throws down his napkin as Lynette takes his plate away, and we see the purpose in his steely gaze as he tells Matt his next step is to find the other Petrelli brother, and then kill everyone who had any involvement in this plot. He throws down his money and heads out, Matt taking a look back before following him out. However, what we saw as doodles was in fact a message, and Lynette call the cops after showing the owner the napkin: “I have a gun and I am going to kill everyone in here.” He isn’t even at the car before he is surrounded by cops, all with weapons drawn. Matt reveals what he’s done, and Sylar scoffs, saying he won’t force their hand because he’ll die, too. Matt proceeds to force him to reach into his jacket, and a barrage of gunfire responds. As Sylar lays bleeding, Matt fades into the night. Sylar, how could you sell him short and think he wouldn’t cross the line once you showed it to him?

Flashes of the action as we fade out:

Parkman in an ambulance, bleeding out, the sound of a flat-line whining in the air as the medics try to shock him back.

Clare, alone in her empty dorm room, a casualty in her own right.

Emma in her closet with her resident’s coat, with its cursive monogram: “Dr. Emma Coolidge.” Oh, the possibility.

Samuel with Rebecca at the carnival. He promises her the revenge she seeks, just as Lydia arrives with the news that Sylar is gone.

Noah in his bachelor pad, putting up news clippings with Samuel’s name now written on them, the blame in place.

Peter, in his place, takes down his own news clippings. There is a knock on the door: Nathan! He hugs Peter to him as he whispers, “I think I’m in trouble, Pete.”

What We Learned:

1. Rebecca is supposedly yet another victim of Noah’s youthful indiscretions. Do we think she is really only interested in revenge? We saw both Clare and Noah appear on Lydia’s back; they must both have a role to play.
2. Gretchen may love Clare, but not enough to risk her neck. Have we really seen the last of her?
3. “Nathan” is back. So to speak. But if the body believes, and the consciousness of Sylar has been killed off with Matt, will Nathan finally be at peace within himself?
4. And, according to next week’s preview, and in keeping with the cannon, Matt/ Sylar’s not dead yet. After all, Peter conveniently holds the keys to life and death. And when Matt comes to, it looks like he’s back in control, based on Sylar’s speaking to him in the bed: “Good things come to those who wait.”