Yatta!

After five years of being off the air, "Heroes" is back with a vengeance in the form of "Heroes Reborn," a new mini-series on NBC. The season premiere just wrapped tonight (September 24), and so much happened that it's already hard to keep track of what's going on. But gosh, wasn't it nice to see the gang back together and trying to kill each other?

Let's hope you remember what went down in the original series, because we're about to jump headfirst back into the world of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

First, we say goodbye to Claire Bear -- and to the status quo.

At the start of the episode, things are not great for Evos, the new "Heroes Reborn" term for people with supernatural abilities (like "mutants" in "X-Men). Oh, sure, it seems promising at first -- Noah Bennett (Jack Coleman), the HRG himself, is wandering through a Primatech-sponsored convention that's meant to bridge the gap between normal humans and super powered ones.

Except it doesn't, because a giant explosion goes off and decimates the whole town of Odessa, Texas -- and Claire Bennett (Hayden Panettiere, whom we hear briefly in a voicemail), the infamous cheerleader and HRG's daughter, is one of the casualties. Mohinder Suresh (Another character from the original series, played by Sendhil Ramamurthy) appears to claim responsibility for the attack, now known as "June Thirteenth," and Evos are hunted down more vigorously than they ever were before.

A year later, things are even worse.

A year later, Tommy (Robbie Kay) is one of those Evos in hiding. He meets up with a secret support group of Evos, all of whom have been tracked and chased all over the world, but leaves when he receives a text from a stranger -- which is a good thing, because soon after two renegade Evo-hunters, Luke (Zachary Levi) and Joanne Collins (Judi Shekoni), shoot everyone and burn the place down, swearing revenge on all Evos for the death of their son on June 13. They track him down to finish the job they started, and he's forced to reveal his power to his high school crush, Emily (Gatlin Green); he can teleport people and objects away, which he does to Luke, Joanne, and the gun Joanne is pointing at Emily.

Emily is glad to keep Tommy's secret, but her jock boyfriend Brad tries to use it to his advantage by forcing Tommy to teleport his abusive stepfather away. Tommy can't go through with it, but the stranger who's been following Tommy does the job instead. Which begs the question -- who is this guy, and what's his deal with pennies?

Across the country, we meet our first actual superhero.

In a world where people are developing superpowers and reading comic books, how are masked vigilantes not suddenly cropping up everywhere? "Heroes Reborn" addresses that with El Vengador, a Luchador style hero who's protected the streets of Los Angeles since June 13 -- at least, until he's lured into a trap and fatally injured.

We mett El Vengador by way of Carlos (Ryan Guzman), an alcoholic former soldier who might not be as heroic as everyone thinks. He stumbles upon his wounded brother Oscar in a secret room in his garage, who admits he's the man behind the mask and makes Carlos promise to look after his son, José, just before dying. Later, Carlos also discovers that Oscar was running an Underground Railroad on the side, helping marginalized Evos get safetly to Canada. It seems like Carlos might consider donning the mask himself, but in the meantime he's working to discover just who set his brother up to get killed.

We also meet Katana Girl.

Of all the vignettes we see over the course of these two first episodes, Miko Otomo's (Kiki Sukezane) is by far the weirdest. We meet her after self-proclaimed gamer Ren (Toru Uchikado) arrives at her apartment, recognizing her as a character from the game "Evernow" called the Katana Girl. He explains that Katana Girl's mission is to find her father using the sword he left her -- something which rings very true for Miko, who's real-life dad, the creator of the game, is missing.

She finds the sword, and when she removes it from her sheath it transports her into the world of "Evernow," where she beats up samurai in order to save her father while Ren helps out from the outside world. The two of them also learn that Miko returns to reality when she sheathes the sword -- and that her movement in the game directly maps out to real-life Tokyo, as she discovers when she quits a battle in-game and finds herself surrounded by security guards at Yamagato Industries. Hey, isn't that the company Hiro's father used to own?

Meanwhile, Noah Bennett is beginning to uncover the truth.

But something even bigger is happening behind the scenes of all this, which is where everybody's favorite mysterious company man comes in! Noah Bennett is now living in Dallas as a car salesman, and even has a new identity and a loving fiancée. But their peaceful existence is interrupted by Quentin (Henry Zebrowski), who knows that Bennett worked for Primatech and demands to know what they're planning.

The trouble is, Bennet has no idea what Quentin's talking about because his memories been wiped, so he traces his own steps back to a front organization run by the Haitian, René (Jimmy Jean-Louis). Things get intense when René tries to kill Bennett (on Bennett's own orders, apparently!) and gets fatally shot himself. Holy crap, the Haitian's dead! Now Bennett knows something's up and heads to the ruins of Odessa with Quentin to find information.

Of course, things go badly from there. Remember how Luke and Joanne were teleported away by Tommy earlier? They find themselves deep underground at Primatech (because Tommy was kidnapped and held there for observation there once), shoot their way out of the underground facility and steal Bennett's car to escape. Oh, and they discover all Quentin's files detailing the identities and locations of known Evos. Uh oh.

Meanwhile, Bennett arrives too late to the Collins' bloodbath to find out what happened, except that Primatech is hoping to monetize Evo powers somehow, and they need Molly Walker -- who's all grown up and in some very serious trouble by the way -- to do it. But he knows this for sure: Claire's location is "unknown," meaning she might not have died after all...