When they start implanting microchips into people’s brains, I’ll be the first in line

Posted by Dan February 26th, 2007 at 11:41am In Heroes

Tonight's episode of Heroes promises to be pretty HRG-intensive, as we find out how the whole Parkman/Radioactive Guy/Internet Woman hostage situation goes down.  This newfound coalition among the three heroes is kind of fun — I enjoy the motley assortment — but it is kind of weird how two of the three of them (Radioactive Guy and Internet Woman) have superpowers that are functionally useless except for very specific situations.

But I'm finding myself a little more obsessed with Internet Woman.  Now, I don't think she's quite as ridiculous as Nikki/Jessica (and I don't want to see her summarily killed like N/J), but as far as superpowers go: lame-o.  When they introduce new Heroes, I always use Nathan Petrelli as a yardstick for superpowers.  Are superpowers more, less or equally as awesome as the power of flight?  For instance:

• Invisibility – Equally awesome
• Invincibility – More awesome
• Bending time/space – More awesome
• Mind-reading – Equally awesome
• Melting metal – Less awesome
• Painting the future – Less awesome 

While being able to access the Internet is indeed a cool trick, as a superpower it's on par with "always has a pen when somebody needs one" or "makes unparalleled peanut butter cookies."

In terms of sheer practicality, this might be a kind of useful superpower to have for the layman.  I'd totally love to have technology implanted in my head.  You'd never be lost because you can just Mapquest it.  Movie reservations would be way easy.  You can be sitting in a boring-ass staff meeting and afterwards you can just say, "Well that was fun, I just posted ten pages of Lost fan fiction on a message board."

It'll be interesting to see how Internet Woman makes use of her gift.  I'm inclined to think that, realistically, having the Internet in your head all day would be pretty distracting.  Like, on the next episode, HRG will break away from Parkman, steal his gun and shoot Radioactive Guy (who, by the way, kind of looks like a homeless Michael C. Hall), and when Parkman asks why she didn't do anything she just says "Oh, sorry about that.  But guess who just won her eBay auction?!"

PS – I realize it's annoying for me to refer to these people as Internet Woman and Radioactive Guy — but I have some sort of learning disability when it comes to remembering character names.  If you recall my previous inability to remember that Matthew Perry's character on Studio 60 was named "Matt."