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I consider myself a bit of a time travel expert, which is why I have serious misgivings about Heroes. The show has done a great job in season three of bringing me back in and moving the plot forward at a decent pace, but the way the show addresses (or doesn't address) the inherent flaws in the way it portrays time travel is a bit discouraging.

In the latest episode, Peter traveled to the future once again with his future self to find a way to prevent disaster. If you just got a feeling of déjà vu, it's because the exact same thing happened in the first two seasons as well.

My issue isn't with the future. In fact, I was fascinated by what happens four years in the future. I wished the entire series would just move forward and let us see bad-ass Claire trying to kill her uncle, Parkman settling down with Hiro's nemesis Daphne and Sylar playing Mr. Mom for a son named after HRG. Sadly, that will never happen because Peter is going to change all of that.

And this is where my brain starts to hurt. If Peter changes the past so that this future never happens, Heroes becomes a paradox. In the future, Peter takes Sylar's power to understand the way things work, leading him to become a forehead-slicing, brain-stealing serial killer himself. If this changes the future, how can Peter have gone into the alternate future to get the power in the first place?

I realize that when it comes to time travel, Heroes prefers the Back to the Future approach over Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. To explain: Back to the Future allows for the future to be altered, resulting in different branches of the timeline. In Bill and Ted, there is one constant timeline, and so anything changed during time travel is already accounted for in the present.

The reason Back to the Future could feasibly make sense is that with only one form of time travel, there were a finite number of alternate time lines. But on Heroes, since Peters and Hiros from all different times are constantly traversing the space-time continuum at their leisure, there are far too many possibilities and the universe becomes clouded in chaos.

Is the Future Peter who Claire shot the same as the Future Peter from season one who was drunk in a bar with Niki? Certainly not, since Niki is now dead. But does Future Peter from season one still exist? Can two future selves from alternate timelines interact? Is there enough aspirin in the world to cure the headache this conundrum poses?

Heroes has potential when it focuses on the primary struggles of good vs. evil, of heroes vs. villains. Though the element of time travel and alternate futures provides the immense fun of seeing these characters in different circumstances, the downside is that plot holes and paradoxes grow exponentially the more times Peter and Hiro travel in time.

If you still think these are small issues and that the time travel on Heroes actually makes sense, consider this final paradox. In season two, Peter and his Irish girlfriend Caitlin traveled to the future, where the virus was released and most of the world's population was dead. Peter returned to the present, but Caitlin was left behind. In the end of season two, the virus was not released, preventing that future from happening. Does it cease to be? Is Caitlin dead or sealed off in an alternate future that no longer exists? If you can provide a coherent explanation for what happened to Caitlin, then maybe you're the one with super powers

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