Heroes Season 3 Reality Trip

(He's alive! Dallas Petrelli assembles an army from his hospital bed!)

Heroes Season 3 Villains is starting to seem more appropriately titled as "Heroes Season 3: Mindfreak", with the way that Tim Kring and the writers are twisting and turning our realities and those of the various characters. With the introduction of Dallas Petrelli, the considered-dead dad of Peter & Nathan, and the various manipulations, who knows what to believe?

First off, we have time travel galore going on this season. We're thrust 4 Years into the future, then 4 tears back to the present. It's enough to make Marty and Doc's time-traveling car overheat. Hiro, Peter and Matt Parkman all have either been in the future or seen it and have ideas about what will happen. We've seen alternate (present day and future day) versions of several characters, Peter's learning how to change the future, as well as Sylar going nuclear and blowing up Costa Verde (in the future). Sylar's mushroom-cloud explosion just might be symbolic, like the combustion of Heroes' fans brains as they try to digest all the concepts going on this season.

As for Peter, not sure if this bothers other fans, but it seems he never quite gets to fully use and develop his powers. We saw him training with Claude the invisible man during Season 1, but he's been in and out of comas, had amnesia, joined a group of thugs, been stuck into the body of a villian and now put back into a coma-induced state by his mother. Some of the coolest and best-delivered moments of the show have been Peter using those powers to rescue someone or fight Sylar. Kring and the writers have to know that fans would like another Sylar-Peter showdown, so what gives there?

We also have Mr. Linderman, who is really just some sort of figment of the imagination that Dallas Petrelli has Matt Parkman's dad playing in Nathan and Daphne's minds. With the introduction of that concept, who knows what's really real now. Everyone's reality we are seeing just might be altered, including ours as we watch the show.

There's also the concept of Good & Bad, which the show warned us about for this season. Anyone can turn evil as we've been seeing, and anyone can become a good guy. Also, this season more than ever, the writers seem to be introducing the concepts of religion and evolution. Linderman and Nathan have discussed doing God's work and the concept that they could be angels, with Nathan becoming ultra-religious after his "rebirth". Of course then he found out he wasn't exactly born to fly.

Tracy Strauss, the triplet sibling of Niki and Barbara Sanders, learned about the genetic creation of various heroes in a lab, including Nathan. So we also get to toy with the concepts of creation vs. evolution. How many heroes were born with abilities and how many were manufactured? As for Tracy, is Niki still alive or did she perish in that explosive fire, rescuing Monica? Where's Barbara, the other triplet? And wasn't there a Jessica in the mix? Is Tracy just another manipulation of the mind?

The writers have definitely set this up good so we can't second guess a thing, even if they hand it to us. While the storyline has been pretty straightforward with no real holdouts in terms of surprises, it's still left open a world of possibilities. In Season 3, it looks like our brainwaves will truly be put to the test. With the changing of alliances, the deceptions, the secrets uncovered, the manipulations of space, time and mind and Suresh' transform into a Spiderman/Fly type monster, we have a season full of the good, the bad and the ugly!