Snowy morning catch-up

As I watch the winter's stubbborn refusal to go away, time to finally offer my own thoughts on Monday night's "Heroes" and "24," plus last night's "Gilmore Girls" and "House," all coming up...

You fine people have covered almost every aspect of "Heroes" in your comments, so I'll just add a few random thoughts:

• While it was a strong episode overall with plenty of cliffhanger goodness to drive us crazy over the six-week break, it wasn't as good as last week's all-HRG and Claire hour, losing in emotional resonance what it tried to make up in business. I wouldn't want this show to become season two or three of "Lost," where most of the characters disappear for weeks on end while one person gets a spotlight at a time, but I think I'd like to see "Heroes" try at least a handful of single-focus episodes a season.
• The Sylar/Peter cliffhanger would be scarier if we didn't know that Peter has to live to be involved in the nuke story, and that Future Hiro has seen him with a scar. Still, nice of Sylar to finally cut Peter's stupid hair.
• Why would Linderman hire Jessica to kill Nathan if he was going to offer him the vice-presidency? Fienberg's theory is that Jessica wasn't supposed to kill him, just get rid of the feds and scare him into taking Linderman's offer, but Niki sure seemed to think Nathan's life was in danger from her alter ego.
• The Haitian's "higher power" is Nathan and Peter's mom. Nicely done, a surprising revelation that at the same time makes perfect sense.
  
• Either Ando is secretly a mole for Linderman, or Linderman's casino security is awful. You make the call.

Moving on to "24," I'm still not feeling this season. There are isolated good moments, like Lennox turning in Chad Lowe at the earliest opportunity, and Powers Boothe is going to be a more interesting figure than D.B. Woodside, but I still don't feel like a nuke actually went off in the LA area, and Jack is being dumber than usual with his method of assault on the consulate and inability to let Chloe know what was up. (Couldn't he have just kept his cell phone on in his pocket or something?) Even more than Daniel Craig's James Bond, Jack is a blunt instrument, but he's shown himself to be capable of slightly clever thinking in the past (see him stinging Logan last year), and I get bored when the plot rests on Jack thinking only with his fists and the nearest torture implement. (Also, Sam Raimi deserves some kind of royalty for stealing the cigar cutter gag from "Darkman.")

I feel like I'm still watching "Gilmore Girls" out of habit rather than anything in the show itself. I was glad to see Rory finally call Logan on his tired act of being a jerk and then pulling a grand gesture to make up for it. It was nice to revisit the lingering issues of Lorelai and Rory's time away from Emily, even though the recasting of Mia was distracting (if they hadn't done it, they could've run a scene from "The Ins and Outs of Inns" in the previouslies). But the humor doesn't really feel there right now; Zach, of all people, was the only character to make me laugh last night.

Very, very good "House," in both the patient storyline (Kurtwood Smith was wonderful, and seeing Hugh Laurie and Dave Matthews jam on the piano was a treat) and the "cancer" plot for House. I'm torn on the latter, though, since on the one hand I appreciate that the writers are letting their main character be pathetic and despicable to the degree that he would fake cancer to get high, but on the other hand this should be the final nail in the coffin of his career at this hospital, if not in medicine. After everything Cutty and Wilson did for him during the Tritter mess, he cheats his way through rehab and then pulls this? This is not a man's whose judgment on anything should be trusted anymore. I know that the show has always bent plausibility with the stuff House gets away with, but this felt like him going too far even within the rules the writers have laid out.

What did everybody else think?