Heroes, "Dual": Lock 'em up and throw away the key

Spoilers for the finale of the third "volume" of "Heroes" coming up just as soon as I rip up some paper...

Gosh, where to begin? How about the way that, after last week's episode ended by trying to present Ultra-Marine as the scariest man in town, Knox snaps his neck about five seconds into U-M's appearance in this one? Or what about Sylar having apparently stolen the abilities of the world's greatest travel agent when we weren't looking, given his ability to get from Costa Verde, CA to Ft. Lee, NJ to Odessa, TX so quickly? Or that they brought back George Takei just to show him use his katana as the world's greatest baguette slicer? (Could that be his power? Bread-Slicer Man?) Or that it only just occurred to Knox that Arthur Petrelli's plan would give abilities to other people? Or that Sylar uttered a line like "That's the thing about the truth, Claire: it stings like a bitch!" and it was supposed to sound menacing?

But here's really all that I want to say: when Nathan was done telling the president (played by Michael Dorn, which gave us Sulu and Worf in the same episode), all I could think was, while Nathan's motives may be suspect, he's absolutely right that every single one of these characters, whether they're "heroes" or "villains," needs to be put away forever. Despite the show's title, nobody ever does anything good for the world at large, other than solve problems that wouldn't exist without their particular subculture. Yeah, the X-Men spend a lot of time battling evil mutants, but they do occasionally help people. What we have here is a bunch of incredibly powerful, and incredibly stupid and easily persuadable, people who spend all their time fighting other parts of their insular world, not really worrying about collateral damage.

The last scene, and the previews for "Fugitives," suggests that Nathan's supposed to be the villain of the piece. When I'm rooting for the bad guy to win, something's gone horribly awry.

And yet the knowledge that Bryan Fuller is coming (albeit not until episode 19 or 20) is going to keep me around, which makes me just as big a sucker as Peter Petrelli.

What did everybody else think?