I wanna see a guilt-off between Mama Petrelli and Hiro.

Hmm. Having to target each other would definitely give the advantage to Mrs. Petrelli, because I get the feeling she's got a Teflon coating around her conscience. UNLESS she was silly enough to take Hiro up on a topic on which he was very sure of what the right thing was. In which case, his cast iron with actual rightness conscience would trump the cheap non-stick, much like real life skillets.

But then again, I can definitely see Hiro's tender heart taking some deep hits of false guilt for doing the right thing even when it hurt... someone else. But it is a precious, precious quality that he is always trying to not only do the right thing, but also to do the right thing in the right way.

There was also the shoot-Peter-in-the-base-of-the-head solution, remember? And if Nathan wanted to spare his daughter from the mental torment of shooting Peter, he could have done that himself. It's not like Claire was the only one who could get near him.

Like it's not traumatic to watch your dad shoot your brother in the head? Plus, Nathan didn't know the special spot. I also think that this was something that Nathan felt like he needed to do, to make that choice to put someone else ahead of himself. I don't know that Nathan could have brought himself to shoot Peter anyway.

And really, if your super power is to fly and you've been denying this, it is MUCH more dramatically satisfying to woosh him away in your loving brotherly embrace than to cap him.

Windsparrow, for Mama Petrelli, it is a bit more problematic than even that.

She really thought it would "save the world" if all of NYC went down. So it wasn't even appropriate for her to try to save her son Peter from decades of guilt. She could have stopped all this crap from coming about in the first place if she had just put Peter under anesthesia for a week or two.

>I'm hope we find that Mama Petrelli's certainty has been shaken up a little next season.

I should hope so, given that she was certain NYC would go boom. I don't think she wanted the explosion to happen; but she thought it was inevitable and wanted to make the best of it.

I think the Salon article above makes a good argument for Nathan's actions, in Nathan's rejection of killing as a solution mirroring his rejection of letting people die for a hypothetical greater good -- it's ultimately a rejection of doing evil for allegedly good ends.

I did like the Salon article. It still posits really a narrative- or plot-driven reason for Nathan's actions, but as I said, I think his actions *were* driven by plot/narrative needs, not logical ones.

What I like about the Salon article is the contrast it draws between 24 and Heroes as responses to 9/11. I do like the way Heroes addresses the ethical problem of bad actions for good reasons as a misapplication of utilitarian ethics.

Like it's not traumatic to watch your dad shoot your brother in the head? Plus, Nathan didn't know the special spot.

Yes he did. He saw Peter dead and then alive again after the glass shard was removed, so he knew that an object, whether a bullet or some other materiel, inserted at that point would render Peter dead.

I think you're asking a bit much of Nathan. His brother is about to explode any second. He goes with what he knows, which is flying.

He saw Peter dead and then alive again after the glass shard was removed, so he knew that an object, whether a bullet or some other materiel, inserted at that point would render Peter dead.

but he didn't see Claire remove it, and he may not have made the connection between that particular spot and death. of course, Peter could have told him off screen.

Do WE even know it was the particular spot? I thought the problem was "foreign body impedes regeneration".