Last night's "Heroes" was the big five-year-jump episode, where our time-traveling friend Hiro accidentally brought Ando to the future so we can all see what terrible fates await all our favorite characters. It was kind of tough to watch since just yesterday I watched "Children of Men," and I've had my fill of incredibly depressing the-future-is-a-shitbox tales for the time being, thank you very much.

A LOT happened in this episode, and I kind of need a flow chart to figure it all out. The broad strokes that you need to know: The Heroes failed to stop the bomb from going off, so New York is a wasteland and millions of people died. Not long thereafter Nathan apparently became President (Linderman is never seen, nor mentioned, but we can assume he's involved somehow). The world believes that Sylar was the bomb and so President Nathan has started a war on Heroes that includes them being imprisoned or worse. Working for him is Mohinder, who is trying to find a "cure" for their genetic mutations, and Matt Parkman, who is a straight-up dick. Seriously, if I hated Parkman before I downright loathed the character after this episode. The man is a sheep. Future Hiro has been working in Issac's old loft to create a timeline map so that he can pinpoint the critical moments in the past that he could go to to change the future. One of them was his subway meeting with Peter that we saw in episode 2 or 3; the other is stopping Claire's death at the hands of Sylar, which made him unstoppable. Our Hiro and Ando inform him that Peter did save Claire, so Future Hiro seems to think that they've started to change the past; all they have to do now is go back and kill Sylar so that he doesn't blow up New York.

Couple problems with this theory: 1) Claire is still alive in this timeline, although pretty much everyone thinks that she's dead. It's all a ruse perpetrated by Bennett to keep her safe. (Oh, I just love him....) She's working as a waitress in Texas and is now a brunette. Surprisingly, she kind of rocks the darker locks. 2) Sylar didn't blow up, Peter did. Nathan covered up his brother's big oops moment and blamed it on Sylar. So what none of the characters, save for maybe future Peter, realize is that all this talk about killing Sylar to save the world? Is meaningless. Sylar had nothing to do with Pete blowing up, at least not that we know of. It's possible that the two of them were fighting in downtown NY and that's what caused Pete to lose control. But...that somehow seems unlikely to me, since Sylar was nowhere around Pete when he had his blow-up visions earlier this season. The other problem is that we've seen Sylar apparently come back from the dead/heal quickly before, from his first appearance when Matt shot him to Mohinder's drug gambit. So I'm not convinced that Hiro could kill him anyway.

Like I said, it's complicated. And that's good. I love not knowing what the hell's going on some times.

A couple other interesting points:

-President Nathan in the future isn't Nathan, it's Sylar, who apparently killed Nate, illusion-casting girl (I don't know why I can't remember her name) to fool everybody, and several other known Heroes. He also kills Claire after his lackey Parkman brings her back to meet Daddy. It's a pretty great scene.

-Parkman is apparently the father of his cheating wife's as-yet-unborn child, as in the future it's revealed that the kid has powers. I don't really care. I hate Matt and I want him off the show immediately.

-Nikki and Jessica do integrate into one consistent personality eventually, and she ends up dating a scar-faced Peter. In the future she goes back to stripping as a way of avoiding Micah and DL's apparent deaths in NY (however, Hiro refers to DL being alive later in the episode, and Sylar seemingly uses his powers too, so...that doesn't make sense).

-Ando dies in New York, and his death breaks Hiro's spirit and is what pushes him to become darker and hopeless.

One really interesting thing to note is that when future Peter and Sylar faced off at the very end, they both manifested different radioactive energy signatures - Sylar's was yellow, Pete's was blue. That suggests to me that they're not both using Radioactive Ted's powers; that perhaps Sylar took somebody else's abilities. I'm not entirely clear on it, but that could be a big clue. Or maybe not.

Lastly, a new character named Molly is teased, and she appears next episode as a very young girl with the power to stop Sylar. I have no idea what that could be, but I'm intrigued.

Only three more episodes until the end of the season!