I'm not saying I don't understand the desire to do just what Claire did. I think it was totally in character for her to be swayed by West to do what they did. Whenever it goes to the level of physical violence (even if it's simulated) in a school setting, that's over the line and shouldn't be tolerated if there's any hope of making that school culture a place where student achievement and learning can happen. So for me, while the action was understandable from the POV of the characters involved, that doesn't make it right.

I am a high school teacher and now I work with new teachers who've just entered the classroom. We just did a session with the folks from the Office of School Safety this evening with about classroom managment, school based behavior managment, school safety procedures, etc. Everything from going over the citywide discipline code to what do you do as the teacher when a fight breaks out in your room and back again. We spend a great deal of time on bullying and how to deal with it. And that way is not to turn around and traumatize the bully (not for other students and not for the teacher). In the best of cases, it may get one student off the hook, but it doesn't really change the behavior of the bully. In the most extreme cases, it might backfire horribly and make the person wind up really dead and crumpled on the stairs in a heap rather than "fake" dead. In most of the schools where our teachers are placed bullying is very real and it is very serious. One of the real cases we dealt with tonight involved a teacher who'd seen the paraprofessional in the room with him get poked in the eye with a No. 2 pencil by one of his students in the midst of trying to break up a verbal altercation between two students over doing group work and another involved two students (one of whom was a favored target and the other who was the bully of the piece) beating each other up in the classroom so badly that one of them wound up with a broken nose and the other one wound up going to the hospital. But I am going to step away from this conversation because I know I'm getting heated and everyone is going to have different opinions depending on his/her point of entry into this conversation. For me, Claire and West's actions were over the line and out of proportion to the situation.

Um, I was going to post something in response to an earlier comment, but I can see things got pretty heated. As long as things are moving on, I won't reopen the question of the ethics of Claire's actions especially since I already kinda put my position out there. I just want to reply to victor's point

Claire is definitely a daddy's girl. And her daddy just tortured an old friend and then shot him in the head. IJS.

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. Somehow just feeding into my reading of her as deeply fucked up, not an innocent anymore.

Somebody needs to take Claire and West aside and explain that with great power comes great responsibility. Seriously.

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. Somehow just feeding into my reading of her as deeply fucked up, not an innocent anymore.

You know, when we first meet Claire, she's jumping off buildings repeatedly to see what she can break. I think one of the neat things about Claire is that the viewer (and many characters) want to view her as an innocent, but I don't think she has been for the entire time we've known her.

I say send them back into the past with Hiro, where they'd have a good moral example and no working blackberries or iphones to distract them.

Somebody needs to take Claire and West aside and explain that with great power comes great responsibility.

Hee. Yes indeed.

I'm kind of with Typo Boy. I understand about the fucked up prank, but witchy cheerleader was hazing the whole fucking squad. I hate bullies and she needed to be dealt with.

West definitely has a dark side, so I wonder how much he'll lose his shit when he sees Claire's daddy.

West and HRG smackdown? that should be interesting.

I hate bullying. I was bullied horribly in junior high--humiliated publicly many times. But I agree with Kat P; to me, the prank was out of proportion and misguided. I think I would have been almost as traumtized by pulling a prank like that as I was by being bullied, and I think Claire was, too. That said, I think it was a very well-written scene and perfect to show the influence West is having on Claire. Who, for the record, is craxy and Sylar-esque and ick.

I am bored to tears by the Hiro story (which sucks since I like Hiro so much), and black-tears girl is making me want to retch. Mohinder gets a spine for two seconds and gets ikkiN as a partner--hm. Not sure how I feel about that. I hope her storyline goes somewhere.

The episode frustrated me, as is probably obvious.

I did like HRG killing his old friend, though. Horribly appropriate.

I am bored to tears by the Hiro story

I'm actually enjoying it, if only to watch Oka and Anders go at it, because the two of them can pretty much take turns reading the phone book and it'll be mildly interesting, but I agree that this storyline will only be worthwhile if it ties in to the rest of the stories. And if it ties in to the rest of the stories, that has some serious implications.

black-tears girl is making me want to retch

Well, she wouldn't be the first desperate young woman to fall in with a charming sociopath, but yeah, this one's holding my interest the least. (Is it wrong that I kind of dig Alejandro, though? I like the actor. He always seems to have more broiling under his skin than he's saying.)

What we have now, it seems, is a scenario that's reminiscent (maybe a little too reminiscent) to last season, with an apocalypse scenario and multiple paths to getting to it:

1.) Somehow Maya's responsible. 2.) The Company (or villains working counter to the Company) is responsible. 3.) Sylar with Maya's powers is responsible. Which? Retread. 4.) Peter with Maya's powers is responsible. Which? Mega Retread, to the Nth degree. Dear God do not go there again!

But that aside, I do like the fact that we have multiple antagonists running around -- Bob, Elle, Sylar, Maury the Nightmare Man, Kensai (sort of) and even even potentially West and Maya. It's the Heroes equivalent of the Legion of Doom, except that they're as tangential to each other as the protaganists are. Seriously, if either side ever gets organized, they'd be formidable. And that, I think, is the object lesson of the "Golden Age Heroes" -- that that sort of organization eventually corrupted them.

That being said, it's interesting how quickly I assume HRG and Nikki will end up on the side of the angels in the end. Certainly, they're painted in that light, but their actions are often questionable enough that I really should hold out the possibility of their going irredeemably bad.