Previously on Heroes: When I visited the set, I found the Haitian and had him erase my mind so I could forget about season 2. Sadly, I still have vague recollections about Hiro in Japan, some people named Maya and West, Niki getting blown up, Nathan getting shot and Sylar regaining his powers.

Watch "The Second Coming"

Now it’s time for Heroes to return to form (hopefully). We begin with Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) running through Manhattan four years in the future. He finds Claire (Hayden Panettiere), who is looking sexier than ever all in leather. She points a gun on him, vowing to end it. He wants to go back to fix everything, because now humans know about their powers and hunt them down.

She pulls the trigger, but Peter freezes time, takes the gun and teleports away. Hey, that’s cheating! Future Peter is back in the present at the Odessa Police Station. If you hadn’t figured it out yet, it turns out Future Peter is the one who shot Nathan in last season’s finale. Present-Day Peter and Parkman chase after the shooter butt find nothing.

Nathan (Adrian Pasdar) is wheeled into the ER where the doctors tell Peter that his brother is dead. Peter gives his dead brother a kiss, at which point Nathan jumps back to life. After some quick recuperation, Nathan’s first mission is to go to church where he gets super religious, talking about how God gave him a second chance to do great things. Nathan has transformed into one of those crazy evangelicals, spouting off about redemption and God’s plan. Nathan also tells Peter that people with powers might be angels sent to do God’s work. This might seem more impressive if Supernatural didn’t already start going down this road last week.

Peter returns to the police station to retrieve the gun, because this isn’t Present-Day Peter, it’s Future Peter posing as the present day version. Parkman (Greg Grunberg) uses his detective skills to learn the truth, but Future Peter thwarts his mind-reading and sends him on a one-way teleportation trip to the middle of nowhere where he sees a strange symbol on a rock.

Angela Petrelli (Cristine Rose) shows up, takes one look at Future Peter and asks where her son is. We finally learn that Angela Petrelli’s power is the ability to see the future in her dreams, so she knew Future Peter would come. It also explains Peter’s very first power, when he had the dream about flying in the pilot. They argue, and Future Peter reveals that, as Angela must already know, the Formula she and her friends tried to bury comes back and destroys everything. He lets her know that Present-Day Peter is safe, and we see the mysterious Level 5 (the Company prison now home to HRG), where a guy who looks a lot like Weevil from Veronica Mars is yelling that he’s Peter Petrelli.

In the hospital, we see a face from the past as Linderman (Malcolm McDowell) comes out of the shadows, revealing that he is the one who healed Nathan. I know it’s been a while, but didn’t D.L. reach into Linderman and killed him. But as we’ve seen, death is a relative term on Heroes.

Speaking of dead people coming back to life, Niki (Ali Larter) is currently hanging out with the governor of New York and going by the name Tracy. Well, at least she looks like Niki. But since this is the governor of New York, there’s a chance it’s just Niki posing as a high-price call girl.


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Also read: Heroes Season 3 Premiere Part 2 "The Butterfly Effect" Recap