I agree that the Heroes characters are getting a bit strange. I'm a bit of a sucker for an unanswered mystery so long as there's some clue that we're making progress (e.g., Babylon 5) versus going nowhere (e.g., X-Files).

No doubt about it, they're basically burying season 2, save for the barest outlines. I have the sneaking suspicion they're going to play timeline hokus-pokus on us more than once to change out the ground rules they established in the first episode.

In other words, they decided that people really liked the idea of Evil Sylar trying to suck out peoples' brains, and thought "how can we build an interesting plot around this?" Along with random thoughts like "Malcolm McDowell was far too cool to leave dead. We have to get him back." "Oh, and I really liked this Run Lola Run thing. Can we have a character like that?"

I'm just hoping they bring in Ewan MacGreggor playing his "Renton" character from Trainspotting, only with super powers. Hey, why not?