Claire Bennet

Template:Heroes character box Claire Bennet is a fictional 17 year-old character in the 2006 NBC drama Heroes, portrayed by Hayden Panettiere. She attends the fictional Union Wells High School in Odessa, Texas and is a popular high school student and cheerleader. Her life is changed drastically when she discovers her healing factor.

Character history

Claire's character was introduced in the first episode. Her school classmate, Zach, videotaped her climbing up to an 80-foot height and jumping off. After falling to the ground, Claire brushed herself off and re-located her dislocated shoulder. She turned to Zach's camera and said, "That was attempt number six." She lists her attempts as breaking every bone in her body, stabbing herself in the chest, and shoving a steel rod through her neck. In another incident videotaped by Zach, Claire rescued a man from a semi-truck/train accident. She fled the scene without injury. After coming home, she attempted to tell her mother about her abilities during dinner, saying, "I walked through fire and didn't get burned." Claire's mother believed her daughter's statement to be metaphorical.

Later, Claire mentioned to her mother that she was aware the she was adopted and asked about her "real parents." Claire talked with her father about her adoptive parents. Mr. Bennet is revealed to be the man with the horn-rimmed glasses who encountered Mohinder Suresh in India and New York.

At school, on the football field, Zach told her that he could not find the videotape. Shocked motionless, Claire was accidentally tackled by Brody Mitchum, a quarterback on the school's football team, suffering a broken neck. She recovered quickly without her injury being noticed. After coming home, Claire's adoptive father told her that he was in the process of finding her biological parents, and admitted that her earlier comments had convinced him. After Claire left the room, Mr. Bennet was shown to be in possession of the missing tape, which means he also knew of her regenerative abilities.

The team, cheerleaders and other students held a bonfire after a football game. Claire and Brody wandered off to the nearby bleachers. When things got too sexual for Claire she tried to stop it, but Brody attempted to rape her. As she tried to get him off and get away, she was knocked down on a pile of wood and a branch embedded itself through the back of her neck into her skull, apparently killing her. At the end of the episode, the branch was removed and her eyes reverted from glazed-over back to their original color as she gasped and coughed for air. Looking around, she noticed the severity the situation: she was on an autopsy table with the skin of her entire chest laid open for the examination, exposing her ribcage. Claire's body began to heal itself after the coroner pulled the tree branch out of her head. When the coroner stepped out of the room, Claire sat up, got off the autopsy table and stole a lab coat. She snuck out a side entrance as the coroner returned.

Later, at school, Brody saw Claire in the hallway and was stunned. Claire's friend Zach questioned her about her attempted rape and murder the previous night. Later, another girl approached Claire and said she saw Claire go off with Brody. She says she was also sexually attacked by him. Claire later waited in the stands for Brody to finish football practice. She pretended not to remember what happened and asked him for a ride home. She asked him to let her drive. In the car, Claire says she remembered his attack on her. Brody responded that she "wanted it" and she should get over it. Claire realized he planned to keep assaulting girls. Brody told her that there was nothing she could do about it. Claire responded, "I can do this," and deliberately crashed the car into the wall of a building at high speed. Claire meant to kill Brody, but the attempt failed.

Claire and Brody were taken to the hospital, where Claire's mother found her on an examination table, covered in dried blood. The teenager told her worried mother that she lost control of the car. Brody, on an examining table across the room, stared angrily at Claire and muttered "crazy bitch." Later, Claire's father came to her room. A tearful Claire told her father that she deliberately crashed the car and said she did it because Brody tried to assault her the night of the bonfire. She said she hit her head and woke up in a strange place. She begged her father not to tell anyone. Mr. Bennet agreed.

Later, Claire went to visit Brody and apologized for crashing the car. She said his attempt to rape her was wrong, but her actions were also wrong. She said everyone deserves at least one "do-over" in his or her life. Brody looked at her blankly and told Claire he didn't recognize her, saying further that he didn't even remember his own name.

Powers and abilities

Claire possesses a powerful healing factor which allows her to quickly recover from any injury. While she is able to take physical damage and recover swiftly, she also shows no visible sign of pain from burns or even compound fractures. She did, however, grimace when her hand was damaged during her retrieval of a class ring from an active garbage disposal. She has not yet reached a limitation in her powers. Along with the injuries stated above, she suffered an injury in the second episode where her neck was turned around 180 degrees. This would be fatal for most humans, even other instant self-healers or otherwise durable characters. Indeed, between her tolerance for pain and seemingly unlimited healing potential, Claire is somewhat similar to the X-Men character Wolverine. Panettiere herself even loosely compared Claire to that same character when explaining her powers during an interview. Apparently, Claire cannot heal herself if a foreign object is left in the injured area. The Oct. 9th episode was billed by a TV Guide article as a extreme test of her powers. True to this claim, she was apparently killed, only to revive when the object which had killed her was removed. This is true of other characters with healing factors who can still heal incorrectly, incompletely or not at all if certain conditions are not met, just like normal humans. For example, in the first episode, the bones of Claire's ribs were sticking out at one point. After a comment from Zach brought this to her attention, Claire had to move them around a bit before they would heal properly.

The third episode also proved that her healing powers seem to restore her to health even from the destructive biological processes that happen to bodies immediately upon severe trauma or death (brain death, lividity of blood in the tissues and coagulation of same, et al). Despite suffering a fatal puncture wound in the base of her brain, and having been clinically dead for what was most likely hours, Claire returned to life fairly quickly. She also showed no apparent sign of the normally irreversible destructive processes that would undoubtedly have occurred in her body. Still, as stated before, there were limitations to this healing effect: because her upper torso had been spread open from the classic "V-Cut" made in the chest of autopsy subjects, she had to close the flaps of skin back into place manually before they could heal.

Trivia

• It is the scene in the episode "Genesis" in which Claire puts her hand into an activated garbage disposal that has provoked Emerson Electric Company, manufacturer of the In-Sink-Erator garbage disposal to sue NBC for pecuniary damages.

External links

Claire Bennet's official MySpace page