S01E22: 'Landslide'

This penultimate episode of the outstandingly good first season of Heroes delivers one of the darkest and finest hours of the series.

Amidst the fight to stop the bomb, there are some brutal and jaw-dropping moments mainly involving some of the peripheral but pivotal cast members kicking the bucket. The deaths of Thompson, Linderman, Sprague and possibly Hawkins are all sudden, not signposted, and therefore very effective in terms of their impact.

The episode also throws up an interesting moral argument that focuses on the state of the world today. For Linderman claims he wants to ’heal the world’, make it a better place, because the world is ’sick’. Of course, wiping out hordes of innocent humans isn’t the way to go about things, but as Candice says, the world is ridden with prejudice and racism. Linderman’s means may be wrong, but exactly how malevolent was his ’end game’? We saw him heal Nathan’s wife so perhaps he was a character akin to Mr Bennet by having good, humanistic intentions at the core?

Furthermore, Bennet is thrown into an absorbing predicament in his bid to eradicate the Walker system of tracking. Can he kill one innocent little girl to save his own daughter? Away from the cerebral dilemmas thrown up, there’s also the massive pleasure of simply seeing Mr Sulu - well, Hiro’s father - wielding his weapon for a spot of sword fighting.

Overall, this episode does more than merely the sustain the narrative tension, cranking it up before the season finale.