Thanksgiving. A time for gathering, a time for celebration. A time to remember exactly why you hate everyone in your family and wonder why you put yourself through this hell every year.

Of course for some, "hell" takes on a whole new definition.

There's the vanilla, "modern-family" hell of HRG, who decides his little family gathering will include ex-wife Sandra, her new dog-crazy boyfriend Doug, their two foofy little puffball dogs, and HRG's ex-squeeze Lauren, who doesn't remember she had the hots for him but just happens to be at the supermarket he's stalking her in.

He begs Claire to come join the little dinner disaster in the making, but she begs off, moping that nobody likes her, everybody hates her....apparently she's having worms for dinner. Finally he convinces her to come along in the interest of family. Dinner is an uncomfortable, twitchy mess. And that's before Claire slices her arm open to impress Mommy's new friend.

There's the "Dinner and a movie" hell at the carnival, where Samuel now knows what Chandra was worried about, and Hiro is rather ticked off that old Sam tricked him. He wants Charlie back, but he won't do anything against Samuel because he's the only one who knows where she is, apparently. He takes Lydia into the past to see exactly how the mean old government man killed Samuel's brother Joseph eight weeks before (you mean this season has taken place over only eight weeks! It's seemed like a lifetime!!).
 
Except, oddly enough, there is no government man. Just Samuel and Joseph arguing over the film. And Samuel's quest for power. And Joseph's refusal to let him be himself. It's that family motif: when younger brothers say they're mad enough to kill you, sometimes they really are.

That pair of brothers leads to the other set, and the Petrelli Thanksgiving. Mama Petrelli has catered a lovely spread, getting her boys together to have a nice meal, otherwise known as the "Raising the evil incarnate bar" hell. Most of the time, she can jolly the boys into coming on board with all this family talk, Nathan because he's always been the golden boy, Peter because he always wanted to be. But not this time.

The boys are united against their mother this time, and they demand to know what really happened. Why there's Nathan's dead body in someone's freezer. Why Matt Parkman's raving about Sylar. Why she even thinks they want pumpkin pie at this point.

She confirms what they already suspect, and Nathan gets that "nobody likes me because I'm a sociopathic killer" mopy look. But no one counts on the fact that a starving man has been invited to this little party. In an amazing burst of pyrotechnics, Sylar pulls himself together, as it were, and decides he's ready for dinner with his "family" before taking revenge on Angela and Peter.

Despite the fact that the storylines seemed a little contrived to fit the holiday, each was interesting in its own way. Seeing Sylar himself again--yet not--was fabulous. Earlier in the season, I'd thought Samuel might become a legitimate rival/opponent for Sylar, but he's clearly off in the "dictator seeing his power slip psychotic disintegration" mode. Pity. Sylar's at his best when he's at his worst, pitting the others together against him, like in season 1. But then--there's one more big holiday dinner left this year. Maybe we'll all get a great present-- and a showdown--next month.