Heroes (TV series)/Headscratchers/Claire

If Claire can heal herself from anything including radiation (as we saw when Sprague went meltdown in the Bennett house during season one), how can she have a tan?

• Actually, there's this cream or whatever that you can put on which will give you a tan.
  • Also, just because her body naturally undoes the damage from an injury doesn't mean her power cancels the body's other responses to potential harm. She can't die from getting shot, but she feels pain nonetheless. Likewise, she can't be (permanently) burned by sunlight, but her cells could still produce melanin anyways.
• And while we're at it, how did her hair survive unscathed while going through that? I mean, I can see it growing back right away, but that's just madness.
  • Hair definitely isn't healed by the regeneration power. If it was, regenerators wouldn't be able to cut it, and Adam's hair would more than 150 feet long. Of course, the real reason her hair survived was because no one was willing to ask the actress to shave her head.
    • Or maybe it's like Anne Rice's vampires. Their hair regenerates, but never grows.
  • The main part of hair isn't technically alive anyway. Still doesn't explain why it grew back to such and such a length and then just stopped.
    • Maybe her hair unlike normal hair actually is alive due to the regeneration power and therefor can grow back? (Ok, maybe that should be in the wild guess wiki, but just a thought.)
  • For that matter, how did her regenerated toe know how long its nail should be?
  • I think the power only works against dangerous levels of bodily threats. In theory, Claire should be immune to sunburn - although, by the same token, she'd have to shower constantly in order to remain socially acceptable as her skin layers wouldn't die.
    • Doubt it, else she'd be bleeding red sludge from her gums and eyesockets from a built-up excess of erythrocytes. Presumably, those of her cells which are required to die for her body to remain healthy have continued to die on schedule.
    • Cells refusing to die properly is called cancer, and would be lethal, so Claire's healing factor must be able to differentiate natural cell death from unnatural cell death.
• Claire hasn't always had her power - in the beginning of Six Months Ago, she hurt her hand and it didn't heal until she manifested later in the episode. She had her tan before that, problem solved.
• Considering Claire's regeneration power, wouldn't the girl be, technically, a permanent virgin? I mean, won't her body regenerate her hymen every time it gets broken?
  • The idea of the hymen being some membrane all women have that is ruptured the first time she has sex is actually far from the truth. Very, very few women have anything resembling the common idea of a hymen (if women did have it, they wouldn't be able to menstruate) and there is no barrier to breach the first time a woman has sex.

Back in season one, when Peter gave Claire the gun to shoot him if he begins to go nuclear, why didn't Claire offer to tranquilize him instead, as she had very effectively done to Ted in "Company Man?"

• I guess she didn't grow back all of her brain from earlier in the season.
  • Not really. So what if she WOULD tranquilize him? As soon as he'd wake up and get near another hero he'd go nuclear all over again. Remember when he did at first and then passed out and had that Surreal dream with Charles Devaux? Same thing.
  • I've always wondered why he didn't go for telling her to stab him in the head, instead. That way, they could have controlled when he woke up by waiting to take the knife out of his brain until they were safely away from anyone who's power he didn't already have.
  • Because the writers didn't think it through.
    • More than likely it's because Peter didn't know the full extent of his powers or anyone else's at that point and - horrified that he would lose control eventually, if not in the incident he saw in his visions - he wanted Claire to be prepared for the worst case scenario.
    • Perhaps Peter's regenerative powers would have neutralized any tranq drug in his body immediately. Ted didn't have that option. Still, it's like the writers can't make up their minds if regenerators are basically indestructible (Season 1 and 3) and can grow back whole limbs and recover from being burned to a crisp (Season 2) or get "killed" by a simply shot in the head (Season 2). In Season 1 finale, Claire wasn't even told to aim for Peter's head, plus it's damn hard to make sure a bullet goes into the brain but doesn't exit the skull again. It would be easier to just take a pumpgun and blow his whole head off pointblank, which works even for Highlanders.
    • Regenerators will recover from any injury except the ones that directly incapacitate the brain. It was a bit sloppy, as Peter would have regenerated anyway if the bullet had exited his brain, but they were a bit pressed for them. When you see gaps in logic like this in shows, think of it this way "it's easy to think of the perfect solution when you're sitting comfortably, getting all the facts like some sort of omniscient God, but if you were in their shoes, stressed and exhausted, will you care to remember "hey, why don't we just grab some tranquiliser in case I go nuclear?" Plus, it's just not as dramatic.
    • Also, given Peter's inferiority complex, maybe he was too eager to die in a Heroic Sacrifice to think of alternatives.

How can Claire have earrings?

• She didn't develop her powers until she was 15 (see the episode "Six Months Ago"). She got her ears pierced before then, and scar tissue had already been formed by the time her powers manifested.
  • But in Season Three, I think it was, after she was shot and her body completely rebelled and Sandra ended up taking her to the Hospital didn't one of the doctors comment something along the lines of 'It's like she's never been sick a day in her life.' And in an earlier episode didn't Claire herself comment that she'd never been sick?
  • Except she survived that fire without a mark on her...
    • That's because HRG rescued her before she got burnt, as seen in the online comics. And her mom talked about how she had a cough as a baby, indicating that smoke inhalation had lasting effects. "Six Months Ago" clearly portrays her as not getting her power until that episode, anyway, not to mention that they talk about "when she manifests" in "Company Man".
• It's like the tanning question. Maybe her body didn't count it as an injury.
  • I don't see any conflict in having earrings... it just really hurts when she takes them out. Of course, she's done worse...

Exactly how does Claire know Hiro Nakamura by name?

The two of them never met. Did everybody get together at a coffee shop after the final battle of season 1 and compare notes?

• If so, it was a really good idea, not a silly one. Poor Communication Kills, remember? Most of the collisions between heroes on this show happen because each knows only part of the story. Anyway, when you're fighting for your life and people you've never met show up to fight with you, of course you'll talk to them afterwards.
  • Except for that Hiro wasn't around after the final battle of season 1. He was in feudal Japan. Claire could possibly have met up with Ando, I suppose...
• All the characters getting together and comparing notes is indeed a really smart idea, but if they did so after the end of season 1, their constant in-fighting and failure to seek help throughout season 2 just makes them seem even sillier.
  • None of the characters would have had this chance, though. From what we saw in "Four Months Ago", Niki and Micah pretty much took DL to the hospital right away, where they met Bob. Mohinder, likewise, took charge of Molly and probably went to the hospital with Matt. Bennet and Claire took off for Odessa to go into hiding in California. And Peter took Nathan to the hospital before being jumped by Elle.
• The obvious answer is that at some point when Peter and Claire were living together during the later part of Season One at Nathan's house, Peter finally had a chance to tell Claire about how he had come to save her from Sylar in Odessa. Peter DID know the name of Hiro Nakurma and Claire was probably bright enough to figure out who the Japanese guy who stabbed Sylar was in the aftermath.
• Another obvious answer is that Claire learned it from Noah, when they had a chance to sit down and talk things over between the end of Season One and Season Two. Even though Noah never met Hiro, he had multiple opportunities to know of him and his power. Eden, who was watching Mohinder, told Noah about the story Peter told Mohinder; about a man who could paint the future and a man named Hiro Nakamura who could time-travel. For that matter, Isaac could have told Noah about the Japanese guy who called him and claimed to be able to stop time and/or shown Noah his comics which featured Hiro as a character. That may have stirred Noah's memory of his boss Kaito Nakamura and think "Hmmm... doesn't he have a son named Hiro?"
• Explained in the (currently) latest episode, "Our Father". While standing in the greenhouse with Hiro, Claire explicitly says that Peter had told her about him.

So Peter can be killed permenantly by a bullet to the head, but he and Claire can survive being at the epicenter of a nuclear explosion? Huh?

• As long as the explosion doesn't lodge something in his brain... But seriously, yes, even a regenerator should not survive being burned to ash. The only reason I could see for Peter surviving the first explosion in Season 1 was that he exploded, or rather the energies blasted outwards from him instead of his actual body actually exploding. We've never seen if Peter was even injured, we ony saw Nathan get roasted during the flashback at the start of Season 2. When Ted started to go "nuclear" in that scene in Season 1 at the Bennet House, Ted's clothes and furniture around him started to get charred from the heat radiating from him, but Ted himself was unmarked, being the source of the energy, and being immune to his own radioactivity and energy powers. So, the real question is, where was Sylar after Sylar going nuclear in grief and anger in "I Am Become Death" after his son had been killed? If Peter and Claire survived, Sylar totally should have done, too.
  • Maybe it's because Sylar didn't want to survive. One of the reasons he was such an interesting threat (in S1 at least... hope springs eternal for S3) was that he had complete mastery of all the powers he stole, in many cases above and beyond that of the original owners. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to think he may have found some way to turn off the ones that are usually involuntary like healing. Hiro lost his powers when he lost his self confidence and Elle lost control of hers when Sylar tried to kill her, so emotions can dampen/increase powers.
  • Plus... it's conceivable that Sylar did survive, and just didn't do anything camera-worthy after blowing everything up. Just because it happens offscreen doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
• Now that I think about it, it's probable that Future Peter was permenantly killed because the Haitian was there to block his regeneration, not because Future Claire shot him in the head. So, if headshots are NOT permenant kills, then by Magic A Is Magic A logic it's conceiveable that Pete and Claire could survive a nuke... although of course if you use real world logic you run straight into another brick wall (would there be enough of them left to regenerate from?).
  • Eclipse shows us that regenerating powers work after death if the source of blocking is gone, and the Haitian is nowhere to be seen where they keep the body. Furthermore, after Sylar explodes, we see Present Peter by Claire, they both have healing powers, but while Claire is normal save for that, Peter is full of powers, How the hell did she catch him? she didn't even have a weapon, since it was destroyed in the explosion. And then, Slyar+ Peter vs. Claire+ Daphne+ Knox doesn't make any sense either: two powerhouses versus two medicre at best powers and one that's useless in battle (a gun is not the best choice against telekinesis), easy call, right? wrong, knox was only powered by Sylar's son, and he had been owned by him in the present. Everything about the future is pure unadulterated nonsense.

What, so Claire goes after the one Level 5 Villain with a power that can actually harm her?

• Smart move there, Claire. Yeah.
  • She's probably getting cocky about the fact that she can't be killed.
    • Far more likely she went through the files and found the one who had a last known address close enough that she could go away overnight without being missed.
      • I don't think she even knew what his power was. She apparently didn't look at the file very closely.
      • Or the file only listed his power by a code name that all the Company people understand, but she didn't. "Intuitive aptitude" hardly equates to "rips open people's heads to copy their powers" at first glance, so other powers might have equally-uninformative names.
        • Indeed, Stephen's power seems to be "Gravity Manipulation." Doesn't exactly scream black holes.

Claire. Just... Claire.

Look, I know she's been through a lot, okay? And I know discovering this whole other family is also weird. BUT! Why, in the NINE HELLS, have we gone through THREE SEASONS now and she hasn't changed at all from "OH WAH MY POWERS! MY FAMILY! WAHHHHHH ~" Isn't it enough that she wound up with not one but two families that wanted to protect her and keep her safe? Does she have some kind of Messiah complex that compels her to smash all attempts by both Noah and the Petrellis to keep her out of harm's way? And why does it seem like she's only gained even greater degrees of "DAD GOD I MEAN STOP PROTECTING ME ALREADY LIKE GEEZ!!!" Even if she disagrees with them and their plans, does she have to throw their attempts to give her that normal life she's always going on about back in their faces? And the thing is, each season she seems to mature a little, and then she's back to being worse again with the next season premiere. I know Status Quo Is God but...

• Actually, Claire's behavior is the polar opposite of Status Quo Is God. Season One, she wanted nothing more than a normal life and to not have her powers. Season Two, she wanted more freedom to do what she wanted with her life. And from Season 3 onward, she wants to follow in her dad's footsteps because she realizes - that because of the current climate and because of her own sense of morality - she can't blind herself to the evil in the world.
• There's also the sheer illogic of everyone wanting to protect Claire when her powers make her the least fragile person on the show.
  • See Missing White Woman Syndrome and Damsel in Distress. Plus, I assume that what they want to protect her from now isn't just physical injury but also that 'being locked up and experimented on' thing.
• Even ignoring that Claire's behavior in the last episode was less casual whining and more her trying to emotionally torment both Noah and Nathan (guilt-trips galore), I find Claire's behavior completely natural. Everyone is trying to tell her what to do with her life and to go "be normal" someplace else, while telling her how great it is to have a normal life and how Claire should appreciate what they are doing for her. Claire, quite rightly, recognizes this as pure Grade-A BULLSHIT given that it is coming from the people who are doing everything possible to stop people like her from being able to live a normal life. Especially the foster father who could have gone on to a normal life after Season One, but chose to keep playing Spymaster, placing his family in danger AGAIN.
  • Plus, Claire clearly doesn't WANT the life they keep trying to force on her. Why should she be something she's not for them? Better for her to be who she wants to be than follow the path set for her by her overprotective father
  • If she wants to get away from all the people trying to lie to her, fine. LEAVE. Don't keep coming home! And as for the people who are stopping folks like her from living 'a normal life'? DITTO. I sincerely don't think her guilt-tripping is intentional emotional torment rather than just whining at both her dads, because the show attempts to present her as a teenage girl trying to do the right thing, and it would be foreign to that character to attempt such manipulation. Claire is just lashing out, and if she's really that pissed off maybe she ought to at least try talking things out with Noah if not Nathan; since Noah is trying to do the same things Claire is (though she cares about the other mutants and he really doesn't), surely she'd be able to convince him that working together would at least keep her from running into trouble on her own? Of course, that's too smart for Claire's character, so... Besides! The one placing the family in danger is Claire, since Noah's actions are to cooperate with Nathan and keep the government (through Nathan) from hurting his family, including his very meta-human daughter. And Claire's acting out? Just nullifying everything Noah's doing.
    • • Yeah, Noah's real "cooperative". Just like all those filthy collaborators in WW 2 were real "cooperative" with the Nazis. He's helping a flagrantly-fascist government operation hunt down innocent people and chain them up. And he's not doing this to protect his family. "Cold Wars" made it clear that he's helping Nathan because he couldn't stand normal life.
    • Except Noah's just as guilty, if not more so, than Claire when it comes to endangering the family. Is what she's doing in acting out endangering her family? Yes. But Claire wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if it weren't for Noah's own inability to just sit back and do nothing. If he had just settled down, lain low, forgotten The Company and in short done everything he told Claire to do back in Season Two, The Company probably wouldn't have found them again, as it was Noah playing spy-games with Mohinder trying to bring The Company down that allowed them to find "The Butlers" again. That's the grand irony: Claire takes after Noah in stubbornness and her sense of responsibility, even though her ethical alignment is Neutral Good with Chaotic leanings vs his True Neutral with Lawful leanings.
    • And the main reason Claire sticks around? Annoyed as she is at her dad, she still wants to see her mom and brother protected and things have never reached the point where Claire would feel they were safer without her than with. Yet. I suspect that may change as Season 4 continues...
• Claire is completely justified in her attitude to the people around her. Noah is a two-faced SOB whose betrayed everyone he ever worked with, murdered his mentor, worked for the Company, against it, with it, against it, tormented Sylar when he was trying to turn good and is now helping a band of fascists, led by a hypocrite and a slap-headed Nazi, round up innocent people and stick them in a superpowered Guantanomo. Sandra is a stepford smiler who seems determined to pretend her husband ISN'T a bastard (thankfully that's changed in volume 4); Lyle is a whining brat. Her only friend is gone, her boyfriend left her because Claire wanted to get revenge (justifiably so) on the people who murdered her father, her biological father is a hypocritical scumbag running a fascistic operation that abducts and locks up innocent people, her uncle is an emo nurse who nearly nuked New York, nearly wiped out 93% of the worlds population and then told her she was destined to murder him. Her OTHER uncle is a brain-dead southern hick who tried to abduct her. Her grandmother is a manipulative bitch who wanted to blow up New York. Her grandfather was a psychopathic smug snake who wanted to build a superpowered army while murdering innocent people. And her bio mom only wanted to use her to get some quick cash, then locked her in a storage container and tortured her to make a point. With all due respect: It's a miracle Claire hasn't just snapped and KILLED everyone by this point. She's surrounded by more awful crap than Batman and Robin combined and the only living being she knows who's halfway decent is Mr. Muggles. Oh yeah, and she's going to live forever and the only other person who shares this situation is the man who opened up her skull and fingered her brain. So...cut her a little slack? Maybe?

Why didn't they just use Claire's Blood?

Why didn't they just use the syringe that Peter had to take Claire's blood inject into him and just cut Sylar's head off? While I understand that it probaly didn't help Angela was grieving and they didn't have the Hatain with them to make the fake memories semi perment (regeneration will kick in eventually ) it would have been a much better plan than one that's going to backfire bigtime.

• This is particularly jarring since you'd think that Noah of all people would remember that Claire's Blood = Lazarus Juice.
  • A troper above mentioned that the "Lazarus Juice" trick would make death cheaper than it already is. However, if the writers don't like a show breaking piece of phlebotinum, they should never have created it in the first place!!!! Urggghhh.
• If they really were set on killing Nathan off for real, they should at least have had Sylar steal his brain. That would have avoided the whole glaring "regenerating blood" plothole (without a brain, there's no "mind" left to regenerate). Plus, Sylar would have flight, so he'd still be able to use while he thinks he's Nathan.
  • Hell, Sylar got Level 10 Disintegrate just last episode. If they really wanted Nathan's death to be permenant, Sylar could have just cast that on him.
• Shit, at this point their only real option is an Ass Pull about how the changes to Claire's power (i.e. the whole "no longer feeling pain" deal) have made it so that her blood no longer heals others. That or (more likely) ignore the whole thing completely.

The Carnie Plan To Recruit Claire Into Their Family...

Okay. So the Carnies feel that they need to recruit certain people into their group, based on a vision on their tattooed lady's body and Claire is one of those people. I can spot you that. And they decide that the best way to recruit Claire is by driving her apart from everyone in her life, preventing her from making connections with other people and making her dependent on them - a fine time-tested, cultist-approved technique.

Okay, it's a bit difficult to work on Claire, given that she is the youngest scion of a powerful family that has a vested interest in keeping an eye on her. She also has a close bond to both her parents. And her dad is the world's greatest living expert on dealing with people like their family. And they've apparently had a run-in with him in the past and are rightfully wary of Bennet.

"But hey - the tattoo can't lie, so we have to recruit her anyway!" I can let all of that slide. That being said, let us consider the Carnies' plan.

A. Get our agent into Claire's college.

B. Use said agent to drive a wedge between Claire and her family/any friends she might make.

C. Once Claire is alone and needy, recruit her for our family.

Not a bad plan, on the surface... until you consider the logistics of just how they went about it.

I. They would had to have known, at least a year in advance, what college Claire would wind up going to. This is something, it should be noted, Claire herself did not know until fairly recently. Chapter 5 picks up just six weeks after Chapter 4 ended and Claire hadn't made any progress on picking out or applying for colleges that we saw during Season 3.

II. They would have to have made arrangements for their agent to enroll in said college. The agent would then have to get into the same sorority as Claire's mother. The agent would then work towards earning a position of authority in said sorority, where they would make decisions about who got rushed and who got selected afterward. Realistically, this means that they would have needed at least 2-3 years notice in order to get their agent into place.

Incidentally I'm assuming they could manage the basic detective work to learn all this about Claire's mom, assuming the tattoo just didn't give them the details.

Now here's everything that is wrong with this scenario.

1. If the carnies have the power to see all this coming and can arrange to place one of their number in a college (at least) one year before she is needed AND arrange for said agent to earn a position of power to where they can recruit Claire into said sorority, why not just use that pull to arrange for their agent to become Claire's roommate? Much easier in the long run.

2. They want to seperate Claire from her friends and family... so they try and fix things so she joins the sorority her mom was in? Soroities are insanely social and it's likely Mom will become even more attentive to Claire's life given that her daughter is following in her footsteps, so to speak.

It just doesn't make any sense at all. Why arrange to kill some random girl and then set another one up to look like a crazed stalker when it would have been so much easier to just set your agent up as Claire's rooommate in the first place? Better yet - why not just have her approach Claire as someone with common interests and befriend her the good old fashioned way without dragging the sorority into things?

• I was under the impression that the invisible Carnie girl just snuck onto campus, not that she actually became enrolled in the school.
  • Except we see her giving orders at the sorority speed-date mixer and leading the group of girls going around telling the rushes they've been chosen. So it's clear she has some position of authority which means she has to have been there for a while.
    • As for how the girl got into the position of authority, the Carnival has someone who can send others through time (the guy on oxygen). They sent Samuel to Hiro's childhood in the season opener, so if you had a super-committed agent like they seem to, it would be easy: Learn where Claire goes to school in 2009, send them back to 2006 and use The Slow Path to work their way up the Sorority ladder. Or alternatively they might just have a telepath to make all the girls think she was there all along. As for murdering the roommate, it made Claire a social pariah as I recall. No one but Gretchen would hang out with her. So then the agent tries to recruit Claire into the Sorority (which Gretchen was vehemently against), but Claire convinced her to come along anyway. THEN she tries to suggest that Gretchen was a creepy stalker and potentially Alice's killer. THEN she tries to impale Claire with the flag and frame Gretchen for it. I just don't think she counted on Gretchen being so doggedly in love with Claire that she wouldn't go away. Why did they offer Gretchen a bid? Maybe for the chance to kill her, maybe because she might have talked Claire out of her bid otherwise.
    • The only problem with that idea is that Arnold (the carnie time/space manipulator) is at death's door and that Samuel promised him that sending Samuel back 14 years to talk to Hiro would be the last time he'd ask him to use his power. While Samuel is a bit dodgy morally, he obviously does care about his family and it seems unlikely he'd further risk their health or go back on his word to one of them.
      • Re: Samuel. True, Samuel seems to care about his family, but he is clearly very manipulative. When Ray Park tried giving him lip, he choked the guy until he agreed to get the compass from New York. If he really needed Claire, I don't doubt that he'd ask Arnold again. Perhaps sending the girl back was easier because it was a shorter time. Maybe the girl did it herself? She does have some kind of teleportation power of her own.
        • Word of God is that Becky's only power is Invisibility.
    • Additionally, that STILL doesn't answer the question of why they're taking this enormously complicated route. Even if they have a time traveler who can send Becky back to the appropriate time AND they have the means of getting her into the college with no questions asked, it would still be a heckuva lot easier for them - once they have the name and face of Claire Bennet - to go to a point when Claire would be more easily influenced, say the beginning of Chapter Two when she was rebelling against both her parents and falling in with an anarchist flying boy? They could even kidnap her at a young age and raise her as their own rather than pull this whole rigamarole with the murder and the sorority and everything else.
      • They may not have known where Claire was until she went to college. Noah is a master of hiding. And for all we know, they did try to take Claire at some point. Remember how terrified Samuel was when he saw Noah's face in the tattoo? Mess with the Claire-bear and he * WILL* bring the sky down on your head.
    • You just made my point for me! If they didn't know where Claire was going to college, how did they get Becky into place AND in control of an entire sorority? Even with a dozen telepaths at their disposal that would take some doing...
      • The episode "Tabula Rasa" shows that Damien is a carnie with mental/memory powers of some sort.
    • And if they're so scared of Bennet, why are they messing with his daughter in the first place now? It's not like they're horribly estranged. Actually, she's been going out of her way to spend time with him despite her busy schedule starting college. And with Nathan's Nazis shut down, The Company in ruins and his marriage in ruins, Noah has nothing else going for him at this point EXCEPT Claire-bear.
      • They might not know all of this. Presumably they spent the last volume on the move because of Nathan's Nazis (several of whom were watching Claire's house). This Volume is the first time in the series that Claire has lived on her own, in a place where they could find her. They need to take a complicated route because it's subtle. Claire can't be brainwashed (especially with powers), so she needs to choose them of her own accord, and it has to look realistic enough that Noah won't intervene. They haven't explained why they need Claire specifically, but their method seems understandable.
    • I'm not entirely sure how the whole sorority system works, but is it possible that Becky enrolled at Claire's college, but claimed to be a transer student from another university where she was already a well established member of that sorority?
  • Wait...didn't the Carnies have a time-traveller? They could have simply traveled forward in time, seen which college Claire is going to, and enroll Becky.

And Another Thing, re: Becky and the plan to recruit Claire...

Let us ignore the difficulties in kidnapping someone from a college dormitory without campus security or the R As asking questions about the large group of people wearing all black and face-concealing masks. Let us consider how incredibly lucky that Becky and the other sorority girls were that there was not somebody else in the building who heard the sounds of a struggle, followed by female screaming, jumped to the logical conclusions and jumped out into the hall guns-a-blazzing. And let us forget that no decent accredited sorority would ever allow hazing rituals that take place in a secluded, abandoned slaughterhouse.

Ignoring ALL of that... how the heck does her plan to kill Gretchen work on any logical level?

Claire loses her only real friend to a mysterious death and gets found with her dead body and a crazy story about chains coming to life and strangling her? Even if The Carnies have some way of getting Claire out of jail after the fact, Claire is way too smart (Idiot Ball moments aside) to believe that a group of people showing up to save her out of the blue so soon after something strange happening is a coincidence... especially when Becky shows up as part of "her new family".

Claire's Powers Seem Inconsistent

Back in maybe Volume 3(4?) Claire's real mom (I forget the name) tries to convince Claire to not become a vigilante by locking her up in a small storage container, and using her flame powers to sap all of the oxygen out of the nearby atmosphere. This causes Claire to lose all of her oxygen and renders her into a fish out of water. (Why Claire's mom didn't suffer from the same effects is also an IJBM, but not the point I'm trying to make) So now, we're in the Carnies arc, and oh noes! Samuel's buried Noah and Claire alive in a camper 50 feet underground. Time passes, and Noah's slowly suffocating from the lack of oxygen, while Claire is perfectly fine because Noah helpfully explains to the audience that Claire's lungs will keep regenerating themselves forever and ever and ever, allowing her to survive with no oxygen. So why didn't Claire's lung-regenerating powers kick in while her mother was asphyxiating her?

• • She'd survive, not necessarily stay conscious.
  • As I recall, when Adam Monroe was in the same situation, Word of God says he suffocated and died and then regenerated, only to suffocate and die again.
    • Okay, I'm adding that to the 'Fridge Horror' wiki. He was stuck down there forever.
    • Maybe the difference between "slowly suffocating" versus "suffocating and also having lungs scorched by burning hot air" affected with the pain level was tolerable or not? As for Meredith, I assumed she was just immune to her own powers, and the Required Secondary Power's included an immunity to self-induced asphyxia.

Claire and Noah getting the same story arcs over and over...

Every single Volume has ultimately come down to Claire's idealism and Noah's pragmatism creating a rift between them and the two being forced to reconcile as Claire realizes what her Dad did was for her benefit or Noah realizes that Claire is growing up and that he can't protect his Claire-Bear forever. Don't believe me?

Volume One: Claire finds out the truth about her adopted father's secret life and comes to hate him... until she realizes what lengths he went through to protect her from his bosses, even as Noah comes to realize he did a good job of raising Claire to look after herself.

Volume Two: Claire finds out that Noah has been lying about giving up the secret agent racket and hates him for his hypocrisy, given that he refuses to let her try out for cheerleading or date because it might expose the family's new assumed identities. She hates him... until it is revealed he was trying to destroy The Company so they wouldn't have to hide anymore.

Volume Three: After experiencing a Mind Rape at the hands of Sylar, Claire decides she wants to follow in her father's footsteps and fight bad powered people for a living. Noah, who spent the better part of the last year trying to hide Claire's powers from his bosses so she WOULDN'T be put to work for them is less than enthused.

Volume Four: Claire comes to hate her father for signing on with a government group that is illegally imprisoning innocent people with super powers. Never mind that everything got out of Noah's hands very quickly thanks to Nathan's ineffectual management and Noah's main condition for not destroying the whole thing was that Claire be kept safe.

Volume Five: It looked like it was averted, until Claire suddenly remembers that her dad was a trained killer and comes to hate him after she nearly gets killed (kinda) by the daughter of a man he killed in the past. This somehow causes her to run away from home and join the circus...

• • Not quite true for that last one. They made up a few minutes later. She joined the carnival for a completely different reason.

• • • ...but now she hates him for turning Sylar into Nathan. She has no issues with Mama Petrelli, the one who actually planned the idea, even though her dad didn't do anything more than stand there, watch, and not tell her. So.

How was Claire even at the pre-game Homecoming festivities during Once Upon A Time in Texas anyway?

HRG grounded Claire and forbid her from going to school, in an effort to keep her away from where the paintings showed that Sylar would kill her. So why is she walking around town with the rest of the cheerleaders in uniform THE DAY OF HOMECOMING?!

• • Charlie was killed a few days before homecoming. And they're called pre-Homecoming events meaning before homecoming