Manipulative BS, or not? When I watched the episode again, I suddenly reached the conclusion that Nathan is Rebel. Which is crazy, I admit. But could he know about Rebel? Or is he referring to help in just the sense of preventing Danko from shooting them all?

Nathan being Rebel wouldn't make sense to me. He would be undermining his own plans when he first started.
Nathan being totally self absorbed and political can lie easier than tell the truth. He might save her an inch after he dropped her a mile.

The only thing that links Nathan and Rebel is the word hope. When Nathan said he was Tracy's last hope, that got her attention and made her start thinking. But No, Nathan can't be Rebel.

There were some hints in there that Nathan may somehow or another be in cahoots with Rebel -notice how the monitor told Tracy "There is still hope" as she was being escorted into the cell, and then shortly thereafter Nathan tells her "I am your last *hope*" with special emphasis on the "hope"? Then Claire gets the message that her free pass is up, followed almost immediately by Nathan's arrival to rescue her? These could both be coincidences, but it would surely seem reasonable to suspect that something might be going on there, perhaps even moreso when taking into consideration that Rebel turned off the security camera as Nathan was pushed out the window, presumably to protect his secret.

All of that said, I believe Nathan was referring to the way that he has repeatedly prevented Danko from slaughtering the Heroes pretty much from the start of the mission. I don't think there's anything "manipulative" or "BS" about it. If Nathan is thrown out of the project, it turns into a genocide. He is and has been the only thing within the project protecting the Heroes at all from the complete force of Danko's craziness.

I too think that he only meant that he is the only one that can prevent danko and his men to kill her.

All this shows is that Rebel either knows Nathan really well and knows how he thinks and things he would say, or that Rebel is a precog or working with one. Rebel has shown that s/he can manipulate computers and other devices without drawing much attention to themselves with split second timing. My guess is that it is Micah (or one of Nathan's boys) working with Angela.
I also agree with this.

I second (or third) that. To me, Nathan telling Tracy he was her last hope was just another case in point that he is clueless to what's going on with his organization - that he can't do a thing to protect anyone, no matter how much he protests he can, and that there are others who do so behind his back.

I don't think Nathan is Rebel. I think Rebel is a collection of people kind of like Anonymous or /b/.

Here's how I think it goes:

This whole time Rebel has been Angela with Micah, Noah, and possibly Molly. Nathan figured it out and when he realized Danko was getting out of control and going rouge, he no longer fought it and joined in. He's been "helping" Tracy the entire time by not letting Danko & co. kill her.

So the next event Danko has to track him down at will not be a state dinner, but rather a Scientology protest or a tentacle-porn convention?
But seriously, I think you're right, it's not just one person. Perhaps Nathan wasn't involved with Rebel at 1st, but was brought in the loop later, meaning: I wonder if THAT'S what Angela whispered to him..?

lol! Magnifico, what've you been on lately?

Nathan being a part of Rebel would deeply disappoint me. The guy believes he's right. He's the one who always said how preposterous it was to put on a costume and play the Avenger at night. He won't, neither metaphorically nor literally.

It would be a cheap cop-out to Nathan's dilemma. If he turns around, he'll do so now, but until now, all he's been trying to do was to bucket water from his sinking ship while trying to stay at the helm. It would seriously take away from what he's been doing this volume if it turned out he'd been secretly helping the Heroes. The thing is that he is truly convinced he has been helping them all this time. It's so ironic, and so beautiful.

I'm curious to ask how this would factor in and yet I'm afraid to know at the same time.



I would be disappointed as well given how much time and effort Nathan has devoted to this as well as how much conviction he put behind it. Conviction that I find quite believable given what his experience with people with abilites has shown him.

i thought he meant that he was telling her that what he is doing is something meant to help all the people with abilities.he feels he is doing something that will protect them from the angry masses(represented by people like danko)when the general public becomes aware of them and so forth.

Yes, and that's what's so beautifully hypocritical: That the angry masses would never have found out about specials if Nathan hadn't told them.

Without going into literally gory detail, /b/ refers to a very loose group of folks, mostly young men, who are into video games and anime. They discuss these and many other things on their boards and the topics are frequently of the lowest common denominator type of humor/subject. In other words, you probably don't want to know.


Anyway, I think Nathan was combining truth with manipulation when he said that about being her last hope. He most likely believes what he said and, being a politician at heart, can't help himself to use this to his advantage.

I think you're confusing /b/ with animu and otaku nuts.

/b/ is a messageboard. where they use images to communicate (ergo, macros).

Politicians are naturally manipulative. I think he meant it honestly, though. But probably not because he's a politician.

Nonsense. Now that the company is gone, it would only have been a matter of time before the truth about Specials got out regardless of what Nathan did. I don't know if the writers are thinking this far ahead, but it's another reason why what Nathan has been doing is really not terribly hypocritical or evil: the Company has been preventing the truth about the Heroes from getting out for decades through their covert operations, and they were eliminated at the end of the last volume. Do you seriously think that, without some secret organization of Specials pulling strings to prevent it, growing numbers, in the hundreds or thousands, of people with freakish superhuman abilities could exist within our population without the government or public becoming aware of it? Of course not. And once they did, it would be inevitable the government would take action to put down the threat; what's more, it is quite likely that, without someone sympathetic to the Heroes like Nathan in charge, the government's action would amount to something unrestrainedly brutal and even genocidal.
This being the case, then, Nathan, by cutting to the chase and telling them himself in order to get to the helm of this action, is able to personally protect the Heroes from the more extreme reactionary elements within the government. Just imagine if, instead of simply being told about the Heroes by Nathan, the government and public at large had found out about the Heroes when some other Peter somewhere out there lost control and blew up a major city; do you think people who don't understand that these are simply ordinary people with extraordinary powers they sometimes can't control would temper their reactions with sympathy and moral restraint like Nathan has? Not likely. It would be a murderous witch-hunt. Hence, both to protect the public at large from any further acts of destruction by the Heroes, either intentional or unintentional, and to protect the Heroes from the public at large, Nathan really has a very good case for the course of action he has taken.

That really depends. There are so many unexplained phenomena in this world, and as long as they didn't create ground-breaking news, it could be kept secret. Who knows if the Mothman isn't really an evolved human, and instances of spontaneous self-combustion are Flint-like powers?

I do agree that a new Company needed to emerge to take care of business, and it's definitely what Nathan meant to do, and where Noah meant to support him, before he realised Nathan was taking a much more drastic approach. I don't really see that great a discrepancy between what you said and what I meant (whether I was able to convey it that way is another matter. ) Specials have lived hidden for decades, because the Company was there. With the Company gone, Nathan's agency has taken over, with a new agenda, which he put in place because he sincerely thought he could help his "fellow specials" that way. Those are my main points, and there's not much of a contradiction there.

But the point is that they WOULD create groundbreaking news without something stopping them. Someone would come forward to seek fame and fortune using their power, someone like Peter would explode without his brother there to avert it at the last second and would destroy a city, etc. With growing numbers of people developing incredible superhuman powers, it's only a matter of time.


I don't see where Nathan's approach is more "drastic" than the Company's at all. They were willing to go ahead and kill people they deemed too dangerous, people who were just "in their way," or even simply to advance some kind of vague goal (such as Angela "feeding" Bridget to Sylar) and were planning to blow up New York in order to grab greater power. Nathan has far more ethical restraint than the Company did. I imagine, of course, that most members of the Company probably started out considerably less evil, something like Nathan himself, with the relatively idealistic founders viewing it as a way of maintaining balance and what have you, but gradually slid into ever more morally grey territory until they reached the point where they were by and large downright evil.