I thought there was plenty of action and powers usage. My sense is that they're trying to ignore season two as much as they can, focusing on only the most basic elements at the end, namely that Sylar is alive again with exactly two of his powers: the ability to absorb other powers and telekinesis (if they really wanted to press the reset button on Sylar, they should have nuked telekinesis as well), and otherwise we have a list of some people who are alive and others who are dead.

We instead have a large stack of mysteries: Mom Petrelli as Sylar's Mom? (She saw it in her prophetic dream?) What's up with the formula, and why would a sheet of paper be meaningful in Hiro's glimpse of the future where Tokyo is already being blown to bits? What's up with Ando (the real Ando?) attacking and killing Hiro (the real Hiro? what about goatee Hiro?)? What did future Nathan do to current Nathan to "trap" him inside a bad guy (and is current-Nathan powerless, does he have the bad guy's powers, or does he have all of his powers)?

On and on it goes. It's hard to predict exactly how it's all going to pan out, but I suspect future-Peter's "this just ain't right" theme is going to play out in some way that he tries to go back and undo some of the mess that he's made. Meaning that much of what we "know" to be true could well be undone.

I wasn't annoyed much by the repeated earth-go-boom paintings. One could have been painted by our Season 1 prophet painter and the other could have been painted by our Season 3 bush prophet. That's about as important as understanding where those stupid curly "f" symbols come from. I was, however, deeply annoyed by the plugs for Sprint. I can almost tolerate all the characters using Sprint phones (never mind that real politicians always have BlackBerries), but having a random dude in Africa pimping for Sprint, when that company has zero presence there? Give me a break.

Dignan's main complaint, if I can compress things, is that we're not seeing a whole lot of wonder or happiness (unless you count Suresh discovering that he's Spiderman). Indeed, this episode was very dark. About the only character who I think I'm going to really like is the "Run Lola Run" homage thief character.