Heroes: The Sylar Mystery

Eventually I'll get to some more extensive thoughts on the Heroes episode Dying of the Light, which in short I thought was another great episode (except for the Matt Parkman storyline - he's starting to annoy me perhaps more than Mohinder), but I wanted to touch on an entirely different subject. It's the mystery of Sylar, or Gabriel Petrelli, as it makes sense now that this is who Sylar is.

The mysterious thing about him that occurred to me yesterday is, in accepting that he is truly a full brother to Peter and Nathan, then when was he born? Nathan is older than Peter, and he appears to be substantially older. But Gabriel seems to be much, much closer to Peter's age than to Nathan's. There seems to be a substantial enough age difference between Nathan and Peter that Nathan would have to have remembered when Peter was born. I mean, I remember when my sister was born and I was only about four and a half then. The age difference between Nathan and Peter in the show seems to be at least a few years greater than four and a half years.

Angela Petrelli has stated that Gabriel was given up for adoption, and so I can only conclude that given that Nathan does not remember Gabriel and at least there has never been an acknowledgement on his part that he remembers his mother being pregnant other than with Peter (of course the show has never had to touch on this so the explanation could be that Nathan knew that his mother was pregnant with another child but the child died at birth), Peter and Gabriel must be fraternal twins. I guess this could kind of make sense in their each having the ability to take others' powers, albeit in different ways. And it would explain how Nathan would be none the wiser when it comes to his other brother. Of course this would imply that Gabriel was given up for adoption immediately upon birth and one would be left to question why.

There is of course the sort of "cheating" explanation that exists that the Petrellis used the Haitian to erase Nathan's (and perhaps Peter's) memory of Gabriel being born, but I would hope that this sort of easy explanation is not the one the show is going to use.