The third season and fourth episode cycle of Heroes concludes Monday, and it's a sign of the show's diminished prestige that the event is going almost without notice. But operating for the past three months in the shadow cast by Dancing With the Stars and 24, the cycle titled "Fugitives" has represented, if not a complete return to form, at least a significant improvement over the nearly unwatchable mess Heroes had been since fall 2007.

The big problems with Heroes had been a profusion of new characters who were introduced with fanfare and then dropped within weeks; storylines that abandoned the teamwork approach of the first season in favor of characters battling each other with confusing motivation; and a dizzying variety of timelines and alliances resulting from various heroes jumping back and forth in time.

But while "Fugitives" hasn't been high art, it has mostly avoided these elementary errors. The different characters have had their own individual crises, but there has been one central plotline: the federal government attempting to round up people with "abilities" as menaces to public safety, and our heroes battling to stay free themselves and work for the freedom of others. There has been only one major new character, Danko, an amoral hunter of heroes played by character actor par excellence Zeljko Ivanek. And while Sylar (Zachary Quinto) is up to many of his old homicidal tricks, and both Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar) and Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman) have exhibited their traditional moral ambiguity, Danko has been the one clear villain of "Fugitives."

The decision to return to a basic action-filled story straighforwardly told and set entirely in the present day (with a flashback or two) has been the smartest thing Heroes has done in a long while, and was likely necessary for the survival of the program.

Heroes could stand to make a few more changes. The cast is one of the true ensembles on television today, in that no one appears in every episode and most of the main cast members have sat out several episodes. The strength in this approach is that a more leisurely pace makes for healthier and happier actors; also, the need not to be on set continually can serve to accommodate stars like Quinto and Hayden Panettiere who have serious movie ambitions. But in its first season, Heroes advanced most of its story threads a little bit every week, and weeks off for key cast members were rare. The current approach -- one week with the Petrellis and their issues, the next with the adventures of Hiro and Ando, then back to the Petrellis -- makes it harder to build narrative momentum.

Also, the producers of Heroes are still having trouble figuring out what to do with Sylar. Having built him up into a superman by halfway through the first season, the show keeps having to come up with contrivances to explain why he hasn't taken over the world yet. And there remains a tension in how we are supposed to react to him: Is he a "villain you love to hate" along the lines of Hannibal Lecter, a true psychopath; or has he been driven to do evil things by a horrible upbringing and the scorn of the wider society? Heroes usually takes the first approach, but there have always been interludes where the writers can't seem to resist trying to humanize the mass murderer. At one point in the most recent episode, which largely dealt with Sylar's drive to maintain his self-image as all-powerful even though he now has the power to morph into other, more innocent people, Sylar could actually be seen lying on a couch carrying on an imaginary conversation with the adopted mother he killed.

The finale (NBC, Monday 9 p.m.) ties together the season's main strands: Sylar's attempt to come into contact with the president, while disguised as Nathan, in order that he might one day assume the president's identity; Nathan's growing sense of duty to the fellow heroes that he spent the first part of the season trying to lock up; Matt Parkman's (Greg Grunberg) struggle for meaning in the wake of almost constant personal heartbreak; Bennet seeking a wary alliance with a former foe; and a mysterious threat to the well being of Hiro (Masi Oka). By the end of the episode, one of the key characters on Heroes will have died (and a real death, not one of those alternate timeline deaths the show specializes in), but it is by no means certain that the character is gone for good.

For an explanation as to how that will work, and for the reappearance of a character who seemed to have departed the show for good not long ago, look for "Redemption," the fifth cycle, which will likely come in the fall. Heroes may have to share its time slot with another series next season (we'll know for sure in another few weeks), but if that's the case, at least there will be something to look forward to this time. Four months ago, that looked like a longshot.

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