Heroes: Season 2 love
Nov. 18th, 2007 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakGoing to the alps always puts me in a meta mood. Now, I'm aware s2 of Heroes is flawed (but then so was s1, imo, and in pretty similar ways), but I've also found a lot to love in it. To wit, in no particular order:
Mohinder and his storyline. I'm saying this as someone who wasn't a Mohinder fan in s1. In fact, when I rewatch s1 episodes, I still tend to fast forward through his scenes unless I need them for research or a character I'm really interested in shares them. In season 2, though, not only am I captivated by his subplot but I'm actively looking foward to scenes he's in. One of this season's best ideas was to use a deceptively black and white looking, James Bondian formula - Mohinder teams up with Bennet to bring the evil Company down - into a Le Carré plot, where Mohinder starts to lose faith in Bennet and simultanously begins to see the Company, embodied to him for now by Bob and to some degree by Niki, as people instead of Evil Overlords (tm), and people who might actually have a point. Which is not to say that he sees them as good guys, or even that he should trust them - but his increasing dilemma and growing difficulty in figuring out what the right thing to do is (so easy when you, say, deal with a crazy serial killer) hits all my "double agent scenario" buttons. Which brings me to:
Noah Bennet and The Road To Hell. One of my biggest fears post-Company Man was that now his conflict between being Claire's loving father and being a Company Man was solved in favour of Claire, the previously shades of grey HRG would be characterised as a White Hat, and/or that the occasional ruthless action would always be justified by the narrative as the right thing to do. This did not happen. On the contrary. Again, what looked like a clear-cut James Bond scenario (Noah plus allies versus The Company, only lacking a purring white cat) turned out to be Le Carré territory. Even better, we have some logical consequences to Noah B. being the kind of man who worked for the Company for many years, volunteered for this, was not blackmailed into this, and didn't have the Claire factor as a justification for his actions until later. I think the difference between what I feared and what turned out to be the case is best illustrated by the quite different way the show presents Noah B. killing a former ally and colleage in s1 and s2. In s1, when Noah kills Thompson, it's a clear-cut black and white scenario, HRG-as-bad-ass. "What am I thinking now, Parkman?" "Your last thought." Bang, bang. And the audience goes, ohhhhh, cool. Not only has Thompson been presented as evil in all his appearances up to this point, whithout redeeming sides, but he's currently holding a gun to the head of a sympathetic regular, Matt, when Bennet kills him. Now fast forward to The Line. Where Noah tortures his old mentor Ivan for hours; he's the one holding the power, Ivan, while a member of the Company, is never presented as a direct threat to anyone. The method of torture, the loss of precious personal memories via the Haitian, hails back to the terrible damage done to Sandra Bennet in s1, and s2 makes the point in another storyline, Peter's, that without your memories, you're nothing. A zombie, a cripple. They make you human. Loss of humanity is, as every reader of spy novels and viewer of spy shows knows, what almost inevitably happens in degrees when you stay in the business for too long. Here, it works two-fold: Ivan loses bit for bit of his memories while Noah loses more of his humanity, until Ivan caves in order not to lose his daughter; his memories of her. (If we're in doubt Ivan is basically an older version of HRG, this hammers the point home.) Noah then ends by shooting the helpless Ivan. This isn't shown as a heroic or cool moment, and the words exchanged aren't the action movie snappy catch phrase type. Instead, they concern both men's predictions that this is the road to hell for Bennet. If I've killed one man, I've killed two, Sylvia Plath would say. In the very next episode, we see the photos of the executed Ivan staring Mohinder in the face and contributing to his fatal decision to come clean with Bob.
Call me Bob. Speaking of whom. In the past, we had Thompson and Linderman, both firmly belong in the James Bond school of villainy, their evilness never in doubt. This season, we get Bob, unassuming, unglamorous and at first obviously just the latest Company stooge, clearly destined to be defeated by Mohinder and Bennet. Turns out Bob's a little more complicated than that. He doesn't twirl his metaphorical moustache, he has yet to commit a dastardly deed (though if the hints about the Shanti virus are anything to go by, he and the other Company members certainly committed this particular one in the past), and while he, like the other Elders, deals in half truths and manipulations, as Nathan comments, you can't automatically assume he's lying, or that whatever he suggests must automatically be the wrong thing to do. I never can decide whether he or Monica Dawson are my favourite new characters. Since I'm assuming Bob won't survive the season (let me put it this way: they don't let him wear the glasses just to make a point about Noah; imo it's pretty obvious that that last painting of Isaac's doesn't actually show Mr. Bennet), and Monica will stay with us, he's currently slightly pulling ahead.
Angela Petrelli, Queen of the Universe: still on the subject of Elders. On my s2 wishlist was "more Angela scenes, fleshing out of Angela and her relationships", and each time she appears, I'm dancing the dance of fulfilled requests. Whether she pwns telepaths who try to interrogate her or slaps Kaito for making a point, whether she tells her older son in that screwed up, dysfunctional method of communication they have that she cares ("Just because you've shaved doesn't mean you're sober... don't let your children hate you. If you continue with this, you're going to get yourself killed, and I couldn't bear to lose another son") oder makes her younger son remember herself (and only herself), whether she has tears in her eyes at the sight of her firstborn as a burned wreck or coldly manipulates his wife into believing he's crazy, Angela slays me. Long may she continue to rule, scheme, manipulate and reveal yet more layers.
Matt and his storyline(s): as opposed to Mohinder, I already liked Matt in s1, but I also felt he was more often than not severely underwritten. (It says something that the most Matt character stuff from season 1 was in the one canon AU episode so far, Five Years Gone, and that was Matt at his worst.) In s1, however, Matt has arguably the juiciest storyline so far, Greg Grunberg more than rises to the challenge, and I've gone from liking Matt to loving Matt. On the rare time where I have a niggling complaint (would Matt really leave Janice and the baby?), the show turns this into a character point (first by Matt's remark about the divorce to Nathan, and then in the magnificent nightmare sequence where it turns out he does feel guilty, still in doubt whether or not the baby was his, and it feeds into his fears about becoming his father). His scenes with Molly showcase both Matt's strengths and weaknesses in a very human way (he loves her and is there for, but he clearly doesn't know how to react when she tells him using telepathy for his detective exam is cheating, and of course he does push her to find his father for him), as a parent, which ties in this season's "generations" theme; his two scenes with Angela were great; his scenes with Nathan make me wish we'd get an episode solely devoted to the Parkman & Petrelli Detecting Duo. This particular combination, like the Matt, Mohinder and Molly household, is a highly successful example of the show coming up with combinations the fans didn't among the already established regulars. The only character with whom Nathan on the surface has less common than Matt is Hiro, and of course their relationship in s1 was one of the most delightful surprises of the first season; Matt 'n Nathan don't have that flavour of adorability, but they're an endearing odd couple, their wry, exasparated exchanges ("I'm not a cargo jet." "Oh, please.") and the tentative bonding are a joy to behold. Lastly, Matt's confrontations with his father might be a retcon re: daddy issues, but it's a retcon of the type that works, because it makes complete sense with what we know of Matt, and they're tied to Matt learning more about his power and expanding same in a very gripping way. Both the nightmare sequence from Fight or Flight and the nightmare sequence in Out of Time, with Matt breaking out of the first and ending the second by locking Maury into his nightmare, are among my favourite scenes of the season.
Nathan Petrelli at Large. Separating the Petrelli brothers at the start of the season was an obvious dramatic necessity. As it turned out, it worked to Peter's disadvantage mostly because the amnesia storyline didn't make any progress between his arrival in and departure from Ireland, but it worked to Nathan's advantage because the writers actually gave him something to do each time he showed up, and let him interact with other regulars. I already raved about the teaming up with Matt and the awesomely dysfunctional scenes with Angela, but this was from their pov. From Nathan's, it's telling that even when his relationship with his mother has hit rock bottom, he can't turn his back on her when she's threatened, even or especially when she doesn't want his help; as for Matt, it's an education in normal human interaction. You know, with people not Petrellis he neither feels attracted to nor needs something from. They come from opposite sides of the social hierarchy, but both had their lives turned upside down, and they're not each other's responsibilities, which is helpful; the term that most comes to mind, given their recent Philadelphia experience, is "comrades in arms". We got to see glimpses of Nathan as a father; his scene with his sons was more of Simon and Monty than we ever got in the first season, was a great impetus in addition to the threat to Angela for Nathan to make steps forward, get out of Peter's apartment and get active again; there's also his brief telephone conversation with Claire, where he's not her father because he can't be, but responds to her in a way that has nothing of the awkwardness in their few s1 interactions. His brief scenes with Niki provided great emotional continuity to their s1 encounters, especially their conversation about having children in Collision, and what would have been cumbersome exposition exchange with other characters turned into an excellent character scene when we had the Nathan-Bob encounters. (Which, again, were something new; Bob isn't Linderman, whom Nathan both despised and feared, or Angela; these scenes are the closest yet we have to one of the current generation interacting with one of the previous one while going for an equal level, though not yet completely succeeding. ) All this was accomplished while simultanously maintaining the importance of Peter in his life through Nathan's searing sense of loss and longing. See, I don't need Nathan to be in every episode, favourite character or no favourite character; I need him to get interesting scenes when he does show up, and to have emotional progression, all of which I got in spades. Thank you, show.
Peter: The Return. As I said, the problem with the Irish scenes weren't so much that they were away from New York but that they didn't go anywhere; it was pretty obvious they were simply there because Peter couldn't be reintroduced to the main story yet. They - and their complete contrast, Peter's brief reunion with Angela and his long memory flashback in the subsequent episode - did, however, prove something to me. One thing I always liked about Peter's s1 storyline was that it didn't go the expected route of "Peter turns his back on his overbearing family/Nathan and becomes the hero he's meant to be" but on the contrary showed that Peter maintaining his connection to Nathan/his family, NOT breaking away from them, was crucial. For Nathan, and s2 shows this is true for Peter as well, because in theory, the amnesia is a gift - he's free of the past and his past connections, he uses his power better than at any other point save in the 5YGverse. But you know what other parallel between Amnesiac!Peter and 5YG!Peter exists? They're both numb, drained, and nearly without the passion which is crucial to Present!Not Amnesiac!Peter. For 5YG!Peter, this comes back the moment he realizes the guy currently presiding over tyranny and planning genocide isn't his brother but Sylar. "You'll pay for what you did to Nathan, what you did in his name!" (Observe the order of priorities. Oh, Petrellis.) For Amnesiac!Peter, the first stirring comes in that superb scene with Angela in Out of Time, which turns out to be just a prelude for the full deal, the return of all his past via his memories of "what matters most to you in this world", Nathan. As a character exploration depicting Peter's sense of guilt, self-punishment, and then growing connections (and finally a return of hope), his scenes in Four Months Gone hit the jackpot. I loved them to bits. Lastly: the final scene from The Line, the transition from present day Montreal to New York in the future, instantly became one of my favourite moments of awe in the show, because of the clever, clever way it was done - so different from Hiro's jumps through time, and fooling the audience into assuming this is a vision Peter is getting until we see Caitlin responding to the sight as well.
Monica and the Dawsons: Monica is my other favourite new character, as mentioned above. Her introduction in Kindness of Strangers avoided all the traps this show often falls into with (young) female characters: there was no sexual threat to her, she wasn't in a romantic storyline, and her power was not presented as something she couldn't handle. She has charm, energy, and her problems while real enough - that loss of a college future, the need to work in the fast food industry in order to support her family - again aren't presented as something impossible for her to handle; she's taking a pro-active approach, trying for a manager course so she can both support her family and one day return to that college future. Speaking of her family - what we've seen of them and their interaction so far strikes me as a great everday counterbalance to the high drama of the Petrellis and the Bennets. Which is not to say they're an ideal haven of fluffyness (Monica's younger brother being not Dudley Dursley but a bit of an oaf at times, as boys can be, and Nana does resent having the time to wach cooking courses on tv), but they basically get along, and Micah starting to integrate with them and bonding with Monica came at a natural pace. Monica's delighted exploration of her powers with him in a non-hubristic way again provides a good counterbalance for the Claire/West storyline in California, which is more along the lines of JD and Veronica in Heathers. The comics cover Micah shows her, which depictions "St. Joan" as well as Bob's final words to her in The Line, seems to hint that Monica might become the first of the heroes to actively start a superhero-in-disguise career, becoming the Maid of New Orleans. I, for one, can't wait.
Mohinder and his storyline. I'm saying this as someone who wasn't a Mohinder fan in s1. In fact, when I rewatch s1 episodes, I still tend to fast forward through his scenes unless I need them for research or a character I'm really interested in shares them. In season 2, though, not only am I captivated by his subplot but I'm actively looking foward to scenes he's in. One of this season's best ideas was to use a deceptively black and white looking, James Bondian formula - Mohinder teams up with Bennet to bring the evil Company down - into a Le Carré plot, where Mohinder starts to lose faith in Bennet and simultanously begins to see the Company, embodied to him for now by Bob and to some degree by Niki, as people instead of Evil Overlords (tm), and people who might actually have a point. Which is not to say that he sees them as good guys, or even that he should trust them - but his increasing dilemma and growing difficulty in figuring out what the right thing to do is (so easy when you, say, deal with a crazy serial killer) hits all my "double agent scenario" buttons. Which brings me to:
Noah Bennet and The Road To Hell. One of my biggest fears post-Company Man was that now his conflict between being Claire's loving father and being a Company Man was solved in favour of Claire, the previously shades of grey HRG would be characterised as a White Hat, and/or that the occasional ruthless action would always be justified by the narrative as the right thing to do. This did not happen. On the contrary. Again, what looked like a clear-cut James Bond scenario (Noah plus allies versus The Company, only lacking a purring white cat) turned out to be Le Carré territory. Even better, we have some logical consequences to Noah B. being the kind of man who worked for the Company for many years, volunteered for this, was not blackmailed into this, and didn't have the Claire factor as a justification for his actions until later. I think the difference between what I feared and what turned out to be the case is best illustrated by the quite different way the show presents Noah B. killing a former ally and colleage in s1 and s2. In s1, when Noah kills Thompson, it's a clear-cut black and white scenario, HRG-as-bad-ass. "What am I thinking now, Parkman?" "Your last thought." Bang, bang. And the audience goes, ohhhhh, cool. Not only has Thompson been presented as evil in all his appearances up to this point, whithout redeeming sides, but he's currently holding a gun to the head of a sympathetic regular, Matt, when Bennet kills him. Now fast forward to The Line. Where Noah tortures his old mentor Ivan for hours; he's the one holding the power, Ivan, while a member of the Company, is never presented as a direct threat to anyone. The method of torture, the loss of precious personal memories via the Haitian, hails back to the terrible damage done to Sandra Bennet in s1, and s2 makes the point in another storyline, Peter's, that without your memories, you're nothing. A zombie, a cripple. They make you human. Loss of humanity is, as every reader of spy novels and viewer of spy shows knows, what almost inevitably happens in degrees when you stay in the business for too long. Here, it works two-fold: Ivan loses bit for bit of his memories while Noah loses more of his humanity, until Ivan caves in order not to lose his daughter; his memories of her. (If we're in doubt Ivan is basically an older version of HRG, this hammers the point home.) Noah then ends by shooting the helpless Ivan. This isn't shown as a heroic or cool moment, and the words exchanged aren't the action movie snappy catch phrase type. Instead, they concern both men's predictions that this is the road to hell for Bennet. If I've killed one man, I've killed two, Sylvia Plath would say. In the very next episode, we see the photos of the executed Ivan staring Mohinder in the face and contributing to his fatal decision to come clean with Bob.
Call me Bob. Speaking of whom. In the past, we had Thompson and Linderman, both firmly belong in the James Bond school of villainy, their evilness never in doubt. This season, we get Bob, unassuming, unglamorous and at first obviously just the latest Company stooge, clearly destined to be defeated by Mohinder and Bennet. Turns out Bob's a little more complicated than that. He doesn't twirl his metaphorical moustache, he has yet to commit a dastardly deed (though if the hints about the Shanti virus are anything to go by, he and the other Company members certainly committed this particular one in the past), and while he, like the other Elders, deals in half truths and manipulations, as Nathan comments, you can't automatically assume he's lying, or that whatever he suggests must automatically be the wrong thing to do. I never can decide whether he or Monica Dawson are my favourite new characters. Since I'm assuming Bob won't survive the season (let me put it this way: they don't let him wear the glasses just to make a point about Noah; imo it's pretty obvious that that last painting of Isaac's doesn't actually show Mr. Bennet), and Monica will stay with us, he's currently slightly pulling ahead.
Angela Petrelli, Queen of the Universe: still on the subject of Elders. On my s2 wishlist was "more Angela scenes, fleshing out of Angela and her relationships", and each time she appears, I'm dancing the dance of fulfilled requests. Whether she pwns telepaths who try to interrogate her or slaps Kaito for making a point, whether she tells her older son in that screwed up, dysfunctional method of communication they have that she cares ("Just because you've shaved doesn't mean you're sober... don't let your children hate you. If you continue with this, you're going to get yourself killed, and I couldn't bear to lose another son") oder makes her younger son remember herself (and only herself), whether she has tears in her eyes at the sight of her firstborn as a burned wreck or coldly manipulates his wife into believing he's crazy, Angela slays me. Long may she continue to rule, scheme, manipulate and reveal yet more layers.
Matt and his storyline(s): as opposed to Mohinder, I already liked Matt in s1, but I also felt he was more often than not severely underwritten. (It says something that the most Matt character stuff from season 1 was in the one canon AU episode so far, Five Years Gone, and that was Matt at his worst.) In s1, however, Matt has arguably the juiciest storyline so far, Greg Grunberg more than rises to the challenge, and I've gone from liking Matt to loving Matt. On the rare time where I have a niggling complaint (would Matt really leave Janice and the baby?), the show turns this into a character point (first by Matt's remark about the divorce to Nathan, and then in the magnificent nightmare sequence where it turns out he does feel guilty, still in doubt whether or not the baby was his, and it feeds into his fears about becoming his father). His scenes with Molly showcase both Matt's strengths and weaknesses in a very human way (he loves her and is there for, but he clearly doesn't know how to react when she tells him using telepathy for his detective exam is cheating, and of course he does push her to find his father for him), as a parent, which ties in this season's "generations" theme; his two scenes with Angela were great; his scenes with Nathan make me wish we'd get an episode solely devoted to the Parkman & Petrelli Detecting Duo. This particular combination, like the Matt, Mohinder and Molly household, is a highly successful example of the show coming up with combinations the fans didn't among the already established regulars. The only character with whom Nathan on the surface has less common than Matt is Hiro, and of course their relationship in s1 was one of the most delightful surprises of the first season; Matt 'n Nathan don't have that flavour of adorability, but they're an endearing odd couple, their wry, exasparated exchanges ("I'm not a cargo jet." "Oh, please.") and the tentative bonding are a joy to behold. Lastly, Matt's confrontations with his father might be a retcon re: daddy issues, but it's a retcon of the type that works, because it makes complete sense with what we know of Matt, and they're tied to Matt learning more about his power and expanding same in a very gripping way. Both the nightmare sequence from Fight or Flight and the nightmare sequence in Out of Time, with Matt breaking out of the first and ending the second by locking Maury into his nightmare, are among my favourite scenes of the season.
Nathan Petrelli at Large. Separating the Petrelli brothers at the start of the season was an obvious dramatic necessity. As it turned out, it worked to Peter's disadvantage mostly because the amnesia storyline didn't make any progress between his arrival in and departure from Ireland, but it worked to Nathan's advantage because the writers actually gave him something to do each time he showed up, and let him interact with other regulars. I already raved about the teaming up with Matt and the awesomely dysfunctional scenes with Angela, but this was from their pov. From Nathan's, it's telling that even when his relationship with his mother has hit rock bottom, he can't turn his back on her when she's threatened, even or especially when she doesn't want his help; as for Matt, it's an education in normal human interaction. You know, with people not Petrellis he neither feels attracted to nor needs something from. They come from opposite sides of the social hierarchy, but both had their lives turned upside down, and they're not each other's responsibilities, which is helpful; the term that most comes to mind, given their recent Philadelphia experience, is "comrades in arms". We got to see glimpses of Nathan as a father; his scene with his sons was more of Simon and Monty than we ever got in the first season, was a great impetus in addition to the threat to Angela for Nathan to make steps forward, get out of Peter's apartment and get active again; there's also his brief telephone conversation with Claire, where he's not her father because he can't be, but responds to her in a way that has nothing of the awkwardness in their few s1 interactions. His brief scenes with Niki provided great emotional continuity to their s1 encounters, especially their conversation about having children in Collision, and what would have been cumbersome exposition exchange with other characters turned into an excellent character scene when we had the Nathan-Bob encounters. (Which, again, were something new; Bob isn't Linderman, whom Nathan both despised and feared, or Angela; these scenes are the closest yet we have to one of the current generation interacting with one of the previous one while going for an equal level, though not yet completely succeeding. ) All this was accomplished while simultanously maintaining the importance of Peter in his life through Nathan's searing sense of loss and longing. See, I don't need Nathan to be in every episode, favourite character or no favourite character; I need him to get interesting scenes when he does show up, and to have emotional progression, all of which I got in spades. Thank you, show.
Peter: The Return. As I said, the problem with the Irish scenes weren't so much that they were away from New York but that they didn't go anywhere; it was pretty obvious they were simply there because Peter couldn't be reintroduced to the main story yet. They - and their complete contrast, Peter's brief reunion with Angela and his long memory flashback in the subsequent episode - did, however, prove something to me. One thing I always liked about Peter's s1 storyline was that it didn't go the expected route of "Peter turns his back on his overbearing family/Nathan and becomes the hero he's meant to be" but on the contrary showed that Peter maintaining his connection to Nathan/his family, NOT breaking away from them, was crucial. For Nathan, and s2 shows this is true for Peter as well, because in theory, the amnesia is a gift - he's free of the past and his past connections, he uses his power better than at any other point save in the 5YGverse. But you know what other parallel between Amnesiac!Peter and 5YG!Peter exists? They're both numb, drained, and nearly without the passion which is crucial to Present!Not Amnesiac!Peter. For 5YG!Peter, this comes back the moment he realizes the guy currently presiding over tyranny and planning genocide isn't his brother but Sylar. "You'll pay for what you did to Nathan, what you did in his name!" (Observe the order of priorities. Oh, Petrellis.) For Amnesiac!Peter, the first stirring comes in that superb scene with Angela in Out of Time, which turns out to be just a prelude for the full deal, the return of all his past via his memories of "what matters most to you in this world", Nathan. As a character exploration depicting Peter's sense of guilt, self-punishment, and then growing connections (and finally a return of hope), his scenes in Four Months Gone hit the jackpot. I loved them to bits. Lastly: the final scene from The Line, the transition from present day Montreal to New York in the future, instantly became one of my favourite moments of awe in the show, because of the clever, clever way it was done - so different from Hiro's jumps through time, and fooling the audience into assuming this is a vision Peter is getting until we see Caitlin responding to the sight as well.
Monica and the Dawsons: Monica is my other favourite new character, as mentioned above. Her introduction in Kindness of Strangers avoided all the traps this show often falls into with (young) female characters: there was no sexual threat to her, she wasn't in a romantic storyline, and her power was not presented as something she couldn't handle. She has charm, energy, and her problems while real enough - that loss of a college future, the need to work in the fast food industry in order to support her family - again aren't presented as something impossible for her to handle; she's taking a pro-active approach, trying for a manager course so she can both support her family and one day return to that college future. Speaking of her family - what we've seen of them and their interaction so far strikes me as a great everday counterbalance to the high drama of the Petrellis and the Bennets. Which is not to say they're an ideal haven of fluffyness (Monica's younger brother being not Dudley Dursley but a bit of an oaf at times, as boys can be, and Nana does resent having the time to wach cooking courses on tv), but they basically get along, and Micah starting to integrate with them and bonding with Monica came at a natural pace. Monica's delighted exploration of her powers with him in a non-hubristic way again provides a good counterbalance for the Claire/West storyline in California, which is more along the lines of JD and Veronica in Heathers. The comics cover Micah shows her, which depictions "St. Joan" as well as Bob's final words to her in The Line, seems to hint that Monica might become the first of the heroes to actively start a superhero-in-disguise career, becoming the Maid of New Orleans. I, for one, can't wait.
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Date: 2007-11-19 04:14 am (UTC)Anyway, count me as a big S2 fan!
One of my biggest fears post-Company Man was that now his conflict between being Claire's loving father and being a Company Man was solved in favour of Claire, the previously shades of grey HRG would be characterised as a White Hat, and/or that the occasional ruthless action would always be justified by the narrative as the right thing to do.
I'm actually beginning to think that rather than being motivated by Claire, Noah is merely using her as an excuse. I've been wondering for quite a while, with Claire's family connections, just how much danger Claire is in from the Company. Given that we now know that Adam has the same power as Claire, and was likely experimented on, and also that many specials have been released by the Company unharmed, would they really imprison and experiment on Claire. I don't think so. But Noah betrayed the Company. And we already know their policy on people who hide specials from the Company. He was in danger before the painting ever cropped up.
(let me put it this way: they don't let him wear the glasses just to make a point about Noah; imo it's pretty obvious that that last painting of Isaac's doesn't actually show Mr. Bennet)
If they weren't hurtling so quickly toward the conclusion of that plot, I'd agree. But as it is, I think Bob's got a lot more manipulation to get before we say farewell to him, and there have to be serious consequences to the dangerous, selfish mistakes both Noah and Claire have been making.