This article will be an attempt to describe the multitude of timelines featured in Heroes, a show with a heck of a lot of time travel and prophecy aversion. As of the end of the fourth season, there are twenty-nine (or seventy-four; see below) different timelines in the Heroes story – wow! Hopefully this can help with wrapping our brains around the complex plot. Note that this will not cover any alternate timelines that may be featured in the graphic novels, as I haven’t read all of them and I don’t have a good grasp on their goings-on. This is complicated enough already.

The first timeline...