Episode 21 is here. This one is a little bit of a quieter episode of HEROES. The key to understanding it’s place in the season is to realize that, episode 21, 22 and 23 are three parts of one story. It fact it’s less of a trilogy, and more like, Act one, Act two and Act three of a film. So, by the nature of that design, this episode is a little slower and spends it’s time getting the players into position. Next week cranks it up to a simmer and then we boil over in the finale.

John Badham came back to direct his second episode this season. Besides being a legendary director, he is a true gentleman. He is thoughtful, gracious and he grasps everything very quickly. On set he concentrates on performance direction foremost, and the actors all quite like him. Actually John wrote an interesting book about directing actors for screen. It’s called “I’ll Be In My Trailer,” published by Michael Wiese Productions.

One of the biggest ideas for this one that came from the writer’s room was to re-examine Sylar’s character. To have him have one last moment of doubt and one last shot at redemption. This would be viewed in relationship to his mother, so that we could begin to really understand how he had become the villain he was. Now, to be frank, this conceit spurred some healthy debate. I know my opinion, and some others, who hadn’t been involved in developing the story, questioned the need for it. Sylar felt like a pretty committed villain. Why would he have self-doubt? Why was it necessary to regress him to his previous incarnation? But Tim and the writers felt strongly that we needed to better understand this character, and that we had one last chance to fully round him out. They felt that Sylar had always acted methodically, killing the weak in order to become a superhuman. They added dialogue in his phone call scene with Suresh to illuminate the idea that he had no intention to kill millions of random people for no gain. This helped my issues. And any other doubts I had about the storyline vanished when we cast Ellen Green to play Sylar’s mother.