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Heroes: acknowledging the past to move into the future
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NBC Heroes
Spoilers!
“Sometimes you have to remember who you were to figure out who you want to be.”
Heroes' Claire Bennet summed up the entire episode in saying this to her father. “Acceptance” was about examining the past, realizing that it can’t really be changed and the need to let the past direct the course of the future. Whether you discover a forgotten truth, take a good hard look at who you were, or realize that some things just cannot be changed, the end result is the same. If you don’t like the past, you can only change the present.
Hiro’s recent manipulation of the past to unite Ando and Kimiko in the present left him feeling like he could change the world. When a call comes in from a former coworker about to jump off the building, the time-traveler thinks that he can go back and prevent a moment of folly in order to fix a confused young man’s life. In the end, no matter how many times Hiro goes back and prevents this stranger from making an inappropriate photocopy, it never really works. All Hiro manages to do is change the circumstances surrounding the awkward copy. In the end the only way to prevent the jumper from leaping is to talk to him, and express sympathy and friendship. A moment in the present was far more effective than hours of tinkering with the past.
Noah Bennet finds himself truly lost for the first time in his life. His family is absent, and his job, his calling, is no longer present. As HRG looks back, all he can see are his mistakes. It takes Claire to remind him, that for everything he’s done wrong, he has done good as well, especially when it comes to her. As the young woman is struggling with her own identity and future, she is immediately able to see the same struggle within her father. In her attempts to help him move forward, she is able to illustrate that the past, however painful or dark, is a valuable tool when you start moving into the future. In the end Noah learns a valuable lesson from his daughter which he passes on to Tracy so that she too can leave her past behind and move on as the woman that she has become rather than retreating into the woman that she was.
For Nathan Petrelli the struggle is more obvious, even expected. Since Sylar was forced by Parkman to become the elder Petrelli brother, it’s been obvious that there were problems, blanks that needed to be filled in. When Angela seeks to resolve this issue by bringing by some of Nathan’s old possessions, she sets in motion a chain of events that eventually causes things to completely crumble. As he’s holding an old hat, Nathan sees a moment from his past when a teenage sweetheart falls into a pool, hits her head and drowns. After searching for the truth, Nathan confronts his mother who admits to having covered up the incident. In the end, the lie haunts Nathan until he seeks to make amends, which would have brought about his death if it weren’t for Sylar’s particular collection of powers.
In the end, Nathan, Noah, Hiro, and even Tracy seek to rectify the wrongs of the past. Inevitably they all find that they can only act in the present. This seems to be a fitting metaphor for a show that has struggled for the last two seasons. While it is too late to change things that have been, perhaps there is hope for the future yet to come, if Heroes is able to learn from the lessons of its characters.
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