‘The Wall’ picks up where the last episode left off – with Sylar and Peter unconscious in Parkman’s basement, trapped inside Sylar’s mind, and with Samuel framing Noah for the shooting at the Carnival. Having provided his ‘family’ with an enemy to focus on, Samuel’s own transgressions have been forgotten and he is succeeding in whipping up fear of the ‘regulars’.
Before leading them all to New York on what seems set to be a suicide mission though, he strangely decides that he needs to try once more to win Claire over. Is this because he needs her to add to his power? No – it’s because her ability will enable her to survive the destruction he has planned and he wants her to document his greatness to future generations. O-kay…
His plan is to use the man whose ability is to recover memories to dig deep into Noah’s past and show Claire what a bad man he really is. Essentially he wants to create a division between father and daughter and use that to change her mind about him.
We’ve seen Claire’s affection for her father tested in this way before and this plays out in a pretty familiar way. She learns some things that are initially difficult for her to take such as an ex-wife she’d never heard of and that was murdered, that Noah killed in his search for vengeance and his threatening Gretchen.
The flashback sequences in themselves are fine enough and do provide some more backstory for Noah. There are a few moments in these flashbacks that long-term followers of the series will appreciate. We learn the circumstances of how Noah came to marry the woman Claire thinks of as her mother and we also get to see Thompson (Eric Roberts, Runaway Train) recruiting Noah to join the Company.
This story thread does have something of a problem though in how inconsequential it ends up feeling. Claire’s reaction to everything she learns is never really in doubt and so there is very little tension . Instead events play out in exactly the way we expect with Claire siding with her father in spite of his considerable faults because he is family.
What made the first season episode ‘Company Man’ so memorable was that we learned some things that fundamentally shifted our understanding of Noah’s character. The information we gain here is nowhere near as shocking as the revelations of that episode and as the story thread fails to build up much tension, it ends up unfolding at what feels like a very slow pace.
While Claire is forced to confront her father’s past, his love interest Lauren (Elizabeth Rohm, Angel) tries to sneak into the medical tent in search of supplies to take care of her injured shoulder. She is discovered quite quickly by hospital file clerk Emma, who has taken up residence at the Carnival after an argument with Peter. Initially Emma helps Lauren to dress the wounds while Lauren tries to persuade her that Samuel is really a very bad man.
She makes relatively little progress in this as she hears Samuel’s approach and is forced to hide nearby. Samuel however quickly realizes that something is going on and, after persuading Emma to give Lauren up, confronts her and reveals that he’s angry at humanity and wants everyone to fear him. Then he decides to send the Replicating Man after her to dispose of her – more on this later.
Meanwhile Peter searches for Sylar within the latter’s mind. This is visualized as an enormous cityscape where they are the only people, tying into early episodes’ suggestions that what Sylar fears most is being alone and unloved.
Peter tries to convince Sylar to leave the mental prison with him but finds that Sylar has come to believe that he deserves to be there and that escape is impossible. Together they discover that there is an enormous wall preventing them from leaving that they must smash through. To do this they will first have to work through their own emotional barriers and Peter must come to terms with who Sylar is.
I like the idea that Sylar believes he had spent years trapped alone within the city and that this gives him time to rehabilitate himself. If Sylar is to make that transition from villain to hero then we needed to see him really address who he is and repent for what he has done; this sequence does give us that.
While I was pleased with the idea behind the sequence, the way it was executed left me cold. The conversation between the two never really pushes any extreme of emotion or challenges our understanding of either character so the resolution in which the mental boundary is destroyed does not seem earned.
Nor do we really get a sense of the isolation that these two characters must feel because these scenes are intercut with those from the other storyline. Had the entire episode been devoted to their storyline and treated as a two-hander it may have helped to build a sense that they feel huge amounts of time have passed and that they’ve had to spend some real time together. Instead it feels as though they’ve had a couple of lines of meaningful conversation and have spent what feels like nine years to them, simply bashing away at a pile of bricks with sledgehammers.
So with the pair having escaped their mental prison, we should return to the story point I mentioned earlier in which Lauren was hunted by the Replicating Man. Apparently she manages to escape his clutches somehow, though we never see this on screen. Instead she just disappears from the story and later we see the Replicating Man tell Samuel that he has failed in his task. It feels like a big gap in the story and left me wondering why they didn’t just show her slipping away earlier in the story.
Having failed in the relatively simple task of capturing an unarmed human, Samuel decides instead to dispatch his right hand man to deal with Sylar and Peter. Clearly he thinks that the man whose skills proved inadequate to capture a human will have no trouble taking out the two most powerful heroes. After a season in which Samuel’s planning has generally seemed pretty strong, this seems like something of a misjudgment.
In any case, how does Samuel know where to send his crony to find Sylar and Peter? Didn’t Samuel use to rely on Lydia’s ability to tell him where to go and find people or objects? Without those powers Samuel’s knowledge that Sylar and Peter will try to stop him and where they are to be found seems to come from nowhere. Clearly this is supposed to set up the events of next week’s finale episode rather than actually make sense.
‘The Wall’ is not a terrible episode but it does slow down the momentum that recent episodes had worked hard to build up while never providing any great revelations of its own. Had it been in the middle of the season rather than the second to last episode I may well have thought better of it. As the penultimate episode of this season, and possibly the series as a whole, it is a disappointment.
– Aidan Brack
