Heroes Reborn - 'Odessa'

Mr and Mrs Collins. He's an all-American dad who lost his son, and is
therefore tragic. She's British, and thus evil.

Tommy and Emily discuss his powers, but her boyfriend sees a demonstration. He blackmails Tommy to make his stepdad disappear, and when Tommy's mystery hypno stalker sends the stepdad away swears eternal brohood.

Luke and Joanne Collins find themselves in Tommy's old observation room at Primatech, where Luke soul searches until Joanne shuts him down and they break out, killing the half-dozen staff at some sort of monitoring station. On their way out they steal Noah Bennett's car, along with files detailing the addresses of all known Evos.

Noah came to Primatech's mostly abandoned facility to get those files in order to find the finder Molly Walker (who is going by the name Zoe and hustling for a living, until she is captured by a telekinetic craps hustler and his goth girlfriend, who turn out to know exactly who she is*.) He suspects that his daughter may be alive, but needs Molly to prove it. A dying staffer at the site tells him that Molly is also needed by Primatech's new parent company Renautas to 'monetise Evos' to 'save the world'.

As powers go, this one is a weird mamajama.

In LA, Carlos takes up his brother's mantle as he discovers that Oscar was running down corrupt cops - almost certainly the same people who set him up and killed him - and also working an underground railroad for Evos with their Evo parish priest.

And in Evernow, Ren uses his knowledge of the game to aid Miko/Katana Girl in infiltrating the tower where her father has been imprisoned. Surrounded by goons, she sheathes the sword to return to the real world, emerging not where she began, but in the lobby of a real-world skyscraper.

Heroes Reborn has the classic Heroes problem of being hella unwieldy. It's more of a feature than a bug, but it's hard to get involved in any one story when we spend so little time with each, nudging forward a few steps at a time, then jumping forward in the most unlikely fashion (such as the grand coincidence of Noah Bennett and Beardy Conspiracy Theorist being at Primatech at the exact time that the Collinses break out (also, the Primatech facility being a going concern, but with no internal alarms. What? Did they rule out teleportation as a threat? Because that's pretty dumb.)

* Sadly we have a change of actress here, but since the original is taking time out to go to university I can't really fault her.

Heroes Reborn - 'Brave New World'

A new generation of emo: Clockwise - Conspiracy
Nerd, Aurora Girl, That Guy, Mrs Not-in-Episode-
One, Brooding Hispanic, Mrs and Mr Vengeance,
Katana Girl, Ice Cream Girl and Vanishy Boy.

And speaking of once-great series that I never saw the end of because I lost interest and which have now been relaunched, Heroes Reborn picks up some years after the end of Heroes, and exactly a year after the June 13th terrorist attack on a human/Evo unity summit destroyed most of Odessa (the one in Texas, rather than Ukraine) and sparked a global backlash against Evos (which appears to be Heroes Reborn for metahuman.) This being Heroes, we are first introduced to all the characters.

There's our old buddy Noah Bennett, now selling cars under a new assumed name until an as-yet-unnamed conspiracy theorist tracks him down and tells him his memory has been altered. This leads him to the Haitian, who tries to kill him, apparently on Bennett's own orders, because 'it's coming'. Sadly, in the ensuing struggle the Haitian is shot, just in case he spoiled the pronoun game.

Then there's Mr and Mrs Vengeance (their name isn't really Vengeance, but as with all ensemble shows I will be using nicknames until the show itself tells me what they're really called,) whose son died at Odessa and who are now hunting down Evos, starting with the members of a support group in Chicago. A kid named Tommy escapes, but they track him via his ice cream parlour loyalty card and try to take him out, along with super-perky, nice-but-popular girl... Emmy? I think. She seems decent, but is dating an idiot, narcissistic jock because... rules? Anyway, Tommy makes them vanish and go... somewhere. Somewhere not too far away, I guess, because they're in way too many of the publicity shots to be gone for good.

Carlos is a dead-beat former war hero. He learns that his brother Oscar is the superpowered masked hero El Vengador when Oscar is caught in an ambush by another group of anti-Evo vigilantes. Oscar dies, leaving Carlos to look after his son, who may also have powers.

Miko is a Japanese girl who does a lot of origami and doesn't know where she went to school. A gamer named Ren tracks her down based on clues in a game called Evernow, revealing to her that a sword hidden under her father's study is the key to her destiny. She finds the Kensei sword and is transported into a computer game; which is a hell of a thing.

And then there's some girl who is either making eyes appear in the Aurora Borealis or preventing more of a face appearing or something.

So, all the Heroes ingredients are there - lots of characters, varied powers, big arc mystery - but I have to say that the fact that apparently there are people who know and are purposely concealing the truth for reasons makes the whole thing more annoying. Still, I'm watching for now, which is a step up from Season 4 and 5.