[Meanwhile, Niki has to erase herself from her son’s life in order to protect him from the danger she actively poses to him - a peril demonstrated by D.L.’s death, which was gratuitous in ways that highlight the gendered mode of punishment. She’s tainted even before she becomes Patient Zero for the virus. This is not at all the same as how Noah tells Claire in the season 2 finale that she’s right and he has to leave their family in order to keep them all safe, because the show has set up the storyline so that it is Claire’s fault in the first place that Noah died and then had to return to the Company.] Niki goes out of control, gets her husband killed, and has an expiatory death in her fireman husband’s place. [If I say any more here it’ll involve spoilers for season 3.]

Claire is deprived of the agency she was claiming as the person to reveal her powers, as she’d been arguing for nearly all season long. [Given the fact that her blood can literally bring back the dead, any government would immediately try to kidnap her and keep her in a lab for the rest of her life, as Sandra pointed out - but it’s almost the only independent decision Claire would have gotten to attempt all season. (Incidentally, I wished Sandra had brought up the adverse physical effects she's suffered due to all those memory wipes, which would have lent weight to whatever side of the argument she chose: Sandra's already paid a huge price for living with and caring about Claire, and public revelation of Claire's superpower might well bring down worse consequences. But, y’know, the show would rather downplay the physical aspect of Noah’s abuse at this point, in the spirit of wiping the slate clean.) And of course, Nathan independently reached the same conclusion Claire does and got to carry it out, even if the shooting cut off his actual point. It's like the show stole the words out of Claire's mouth and put them in Nathan's; I have the bad feeling it's going to keep doing that.]

I don’t think the problem is that Kring et. al. deliberately set out to minimize women and people of color. I think that the assumption that the Important People are white men is so deeply ingrained in the writing staff that they just keep making plot decisions that reinforce it.

If a white man’s plot doesn’t work, jettison the wife and have him interact more with other men: Matt Parkman or Nathan Petrelli? If a woman’s plot doesn’t work, kill her off. If a man of color’s plot does or doesn’t work, kill him off. [Sure, not all of the women and characters of color are written off by the end of season 2, but it’s a pattern, with no sign of net improvement. Someone else noted that the show effectively killed D.L. three times, which is really gratuitous – at the end of season 1; in season 2 when Niki, alone, parts from Micah; in the flashback when we actually see his death. And that’s just one example among many.]


Kim Richey covers a different song. I'll upload it later.