This is a great idea for a post.

One of my search strings is “Mouth Shitting”.

I want to play TF2. Why the hell don’t I then? Right, bye then.

wank job

I’m pretty sure Mr. Bennett is sans superpower. Dramatic licence has him turning up on time, nothing more.

More interestingly.. I’m convinced that Mr. Bennet (I loved that “Why do you guys always call him Mr. Bennet?” line in the last episode) has powers of his own. At first I thought it was X-ray vision, with the way he fiddles with his glasses. But then he would have dealt with Claire a lot easier.

Now I’m more sure he can clone himself or appear in more than one place, since he was clearly locked in a sealed room and then miraculously arrived in time to save the day.

So why didn’t Sylar steal his power. He has the ability to see how people work internally, so he would know about it. Which must mean that Bennet doesn’t have a power, or the writers are a little confused on the issue..

However, Eden shot herself to stop Sylar from getting her power. He didn’t use any control over her to turn the gun towards her.

As for the bullets, I was kind of working under the assumption that Sylar could pass through things, at least in some limited capacity. We’ve seem him disappear from places almost in an instant, with no apparent exit, and the houses that Psychic Cop visited all had people fused into the walls, if I recall. The problem is, it doesn’t explain why he didn’t just walk out of his holding cell at first, before they started drugging him. Which means that my idea is totally meritless and stupid.

Good times.

I do love how he uses the telekinesis, and in general the way in which he wanders around as if quite unconcerned about what anyone (save HRG and the Haitian, it seems) might do to him. The way he put up a scarily convincing pretense of being a paper factory worker, but dropped it just as fast once he grew bored of it, totally screamed “I’m a mad serial killer”. It was great.

His only other truly confirmed power, as I see it, is freezing people (cryokinesis, I guess), which we saw done to the corpse of one of the people at the scene where Matt “Psychic Cop” Parkman was introduced and found that girl Molly.

Not quite so sold on the telekinetic protection idea – it’d be odd that he always catches them just as they hit him, irrespective of range and impact type. I’ve been assuming he has a sort of stone-skin power, a bit different from Claire’s rapid-heal. Perhaps, as you say, the two would combine favourably. He tells Eden that they both know the gun she has pointed at his head wouldn’t hurt him.

I liked it when Sylar had a lot of powers no other hero we’d seen had possessed – even now we know that he started with no direct powers of his own, I like never quite knowing what he’s capable of. He’s still so much fun to watch even now the rest of the mystique is gone entirely. I keep changing my opinion on this, but after the last episode my new favourite power is firmly Telekinesis. The way he needs – or just likes – to perform a small physical gesture to create the force ironically makes it look even more effortless than if he didn’t move at all.

What we saw was that Sylar forced the FBI lady to put the gun to her head. How he did that – whether by simple telkenetic forcing of the gun to her head, much as one might grab someones arm to push something they were holding somewhere, or by mind control, is up for grabs. However, the implication from his interaction with Eden is that he merely telekinetically pressed the gun against her head, and he lacks any mind control ability.

“…his lust for it in that scene is hard to understand. Ditto for his obsession with obtaining Claire’s power, when he’s already demonstrated many times that he’s impervious to physical harm just like her.”

He’s demonstrated he’s impervious to bullets, or at least only temporarily stalled by them. He’s also demonstrated that a fall off a roof does injure him somewhat – he was limping when Eden and the Haitian first brought him in after his tussle (and fall off the roof) with Peter.

Hence, he clearly isn’t utterly impervious to harm. My bet is he mostly just uses telekinesis to deflect harm from him, although he isn’t so finessed at it that bullets miss him completely, or that a large fall won’t involve some degree of pain.

It’s also possible his resitance to harm is the result of some other power entirely which he has, in which case his interest in Claire is to extend, supplement or improve that.

Another possibility is it’s just one of those writer errors/continuity inconsistencies/canonicity problems which inevitably plague any endeavour of this variety which goes on for any length of time. I get the feeling that episodes are not written very far in advance of their air dates, so stuff like ths may be prone to changes and rethinks mid-season. An unfortunate artefact of the way television is produced in America.

I remain hopeful that all continuity issues regarding Sylar’s powers will somehow be resolved, though, perhaps in the manner I outline above. I’m pretty damn certain he’s no powers of mind control whatever, though, and that we’ve never been led to draw that inference.

This seems an appropriate place to alert you that james1.htm is for some reason no longer crawled by Google. I’m sorry to say that this may cast doubt on the validity of your results.