I can maybe see him being limited to powers currently active at the moment of mimicry.

I'd agree, except I don't think he ever saw Claire's healing power in action before he picked that up. Nor Ted's, for that matter, unless you count the prophetic dream, which I do.

I don't think Peter's been around anyone else whose power would explain using telekinesis against Sylar and stopping Claude's lead pipe free-for-all. I can maybe see him being limited to powers currently active at the moment of mimicry.

Funny thing, that. Telekinesis is the only one of Sylar's powers we've seen Peter use, and, while we know it doesn't come naturally to him, it was the only power the OWI said they could find a genetic trace of when they were experimenting on him.

So, I wonder if it's perhaps the only thing Peter's gotten from Sylar.

To me, it's obvious that one of the things that will never be clear from canon is how, exactly, Peter's powers work. Some powers he doesn't see, and still uses without conscious thought, like Claude's or Claire's. Others he sees in action and makes an effort to utilize them, like Nathan's or Niki's. (Hello, alliteration, old friend.) Some he may never be aware of, others he might spend a lifetime trying to perfect, like Hiro's. It's obviously pretty complex, and I think part of the reason it drives me crazy is that I inevitably compare it to Sylar's mastery of powers, which arises in an entirely different way. But they can't really be compared, and I think the truth about Peter's power is that it is ambiguous that the writers can manipulate it in all sorts of ways to suit the situation they want.

In terms of limitation on Peter's power: the whole "exploding man" thing could be that limitation if the writers want. If Peter overuses his powers, Peter goes boom.

Indeed. Which makes me ask--do we all, generally, believe Peter's still alive? I ask, because they essentially wrote it into the story without ever expressing it in words. If Sylar, in the first reality, was responsible for the explosion and survived it, because he had acquired both Ted and Claire's powers, and if Peter has acquired both Ted and Claire's powers, and Sylar and Peter are set up as counterweights to each other, then surely Peter will survive. Of course, I'll believe it when I see the IMDB sheet on the shooting of the first episode for next season; but for speculation, it seems like they wrote themselves into a logic hole, until what Gar says above holds true.

I believe Peter is alive. The only question for me is: will he have a scar or not?

I am not sure if Sylar is alive. I really hope he is dead, but I'm thinking he may not be.

It might be interesting if the writers had set it up that he went boom because he was confronted with too many powers in his midst at once. Not unlike when he acquired Matt's and Ted's powers.

But I don't think that's the direction that the writers wanted to go in.

I kinda take it for granted that Peter is alive. This series often won't spell out thing if they made it clear enough. In "5 years after" it was clear that Peter could survive being ground zero for a nuclear explosion. Surviving the splat from a 50,000 foot fall seems trivial compared to that-especially given TK and flying abilities both to break the fall.

In terms of the explosion having come from overuse of powers, in the dream sequences about Peter exploding when it was first revealed that Peter was the exploding man, I think they hinted that was true. From the writers point of view, th e nice thing about "overuse" causing explosions it is a nice vague limitiation. They can let him use as much power as the plot requires, but no more. The vagueness can even be canonical. No one can figure out exactly how much power use it takes to trigger an explosion, but heavy use of multiple powers always carries that risk. Can the writers really resist the convenience of that?

The genetic trace thing for Sylar makes me think he actually did eat and assimilate that first guy's brain, before figuring out that consumption was unnecessary.

Since that explosion was so way beyond anything Ted himself ever did even when shot, I think an overload chain reaction among Peter's various powers with each augmenting the next might be at least partly at fault. I wonder if his being in physical proximity to so many powered people at once (and both Sylar and Hiro have TONS of power) means his own native power is scanning/absorbing from everyone at once, starts building up to a ka-boom, and it just looks like Ted's power going haywire because that one is radiant energy-based?

The reason I think Ted's power is key here. Peter ALWAYS has all those powers. (Though in all fairness he did get a bunch of new exposure all at once: Nikki, DL, Molly, Nikki+DL's kid...) Ted's power always did seem more unstable and less under control than most of the power the Heroes have. I think it interacts with Peter's other powers in a particularly nasty way.

In terms of the explosion having come from overuse of powers, in the dream sequences about Peter exploding when it was first revealed that Peter was the exploding man, I think they hinted that was true.

I disagree that an "overload of powers" has anything to do with Peter's explosion. I think Ted would have had just as big of an explosion at Claire's house if she hadn't managed to sedate him.

The only "hint" that your theory is correct came from the characters themselves -- I think Peter believed that his explosion would come from an overload. But the characters have been wrong before. Remember that Matt & Ted both thought that their powers were given to them by HRG as part of an experiment.

But the hint was from Peter's dreams. And in turns out that the power Peter got from his last patient was *prophetic* dreams. Now it is also true that those *prophetic* dreams need to be parsed very carefully-lots of stuff that is not literally true. So it is not a slam dunk. But it is a reasonable interpretation of a semi-reliable source of information. I wonder if the writers have made up their minds on this ye.

What in his dreams specifically hinted that it was his powers overloading (as opposed to being unable to control his pick-up from Ted)?