Of Rats and Jen

Yeah, I’m on that bandwagon. I’ve watched a lot of the new dramas that have come on television this year, but hands down, Heroes has won my heart. It’s my current must-see, the one show I’ll be really ticked off if Tivo somehow doesn’t get it recorded.

The new mantra on the show, the statement that at the moment seems to sum up the goal the reluctant heroes need to achieve to keep New York City from going up in a nuclear holocaust, is “Save the cheerleader, save the world.” The cheerleader is Claire, an adopted teenager who has discovered that she’s indestructible. Except…

I’m not going to try to run down all the characters and their backgrounds so far. But I do want to point out a few things we who have been watching the show know for sure. Things that I think may be connected to each other, and to the title of this post.

We know, for instance, that Claire, at the end of one episode, woke up on an autopsy table in a morgue. She had been “killed” by accident while the quarterback at her high school tried to rape her. She fell on a dead branch on the ground, which impaled her at the base of the skull into the brain.

While the branch was embedded in her brain, Claire was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Her eyes had clouded over. She was immobile and not conscious. This was contrary to other instances where she’d been injured, when she stayed conscious and clearheaded and watched in amazement as her wounds simply mended themselves.

At the instant that the mortician removed the branch, however, Claire’s eyes went clear. And a moment later, she was gasping for air, closing up the autopsy incisions, and climbing off the table.

This suggests that Claire’s healing ability is based in her brain. Affect her brain, and you can, in fact, kill the unkillable Claire.

Now, we also have a storyline going where a serial killer has been going around slicing off the tops of people’s heads and removing their brains. And when Hiro, the time- and space-bending Japanese office worker, accidently traveled to the future in New York, he found one of the other Heroes had been killed in this manner. The killer could be trying to find mutants specifically, though that hasn’t been stated absolutely.

So imagine that the serial killer targets Claire. Removes her brain and destroys it. Poof goes Claire.

Which suggests that the key to saving NY City from the nuclear bomb will be Claire, and that the other Heroes must stop the serial killer to keep her alive to do it.

But then, that’s just my two cents worth of speculation. And we all know how good fan theories are when a tv show likes to throw in new plot twists at least once an episode.

We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?