Four years in the future, Peter Petrelli is stegging it through an industrial estate, gritting his teeth as he runs. He enters an empty warehouse, but a silhouetted figure holding a gun is already waiting for him. As the camera pans around the person with the gun is revealed as Claire. She’s wearing extra mascara and lip gloss, is wearing her hair up and is wearing a skin-tight catsuity thing. She looks as though she means business. These are the opening scenes of Heroes, episode one, series three. I saw it this morning at a BBC screening. It was nice.

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So we have Claire pointing a gun at Peter. Peter is imploring her not to pull the trigger. He says he can go back and change things; can stop all the trials and experiments; can stop the way they have become hunted. She doesn’t believe him and, with tears in her eyes, pulls the trigger. But Peter has already gone, vanished back into the past.

It was a pretty good start, I have to say. Before the screening Roly Keating, controller of BBC Two, explained that he didn’t have a clue what was going to happen, so he was approaching it as a fan himself. This is one of the gratifying things of the BBC’s new policy of quick turn-around-transmission-from-the-US policy – everyone is coming at it fresh, and no one has watched it on the internet yet. It’s like watching telly the way we used to.

But back to Heroes. Hiro is sitting in his brand-new office after he inherited his late father’s fortune. He muses to Ando how dull everything is and just as he’s explaining he needs a quest or something to sink his teeth into, there’s a knock at his posh office door – a man has brought in a DVD containing a filmed message from his late father.

On it, his dad says that there is something locked in his safe that Hiro must never, ever let slip to anyone. It’s probably best he doesn’t even open the safe at all, he suggests. Hiro opens the safe. The message says press play. Hiro’s dad, knowing that his son would obviously open the safe, immediately tells him that he told him not to open the safe. His dad goes onto explain that the contents of safe could destroy the world – it’s some sort of formula.

While Ando and Hiro muse about the true nature of what they have found, a flash of light whirls past and the formula has been plucked from Hiro’s hands. Stopping time – the only way he can catch up to this thing – he meets Daphne, a playful and mischievous speedster who, after a few entertaining exchanges, punches him and rushes off again.

To find out what would happen if they never retrieved the formula, Hiro jumps into the future and sees pure carnage everywhere. Looks like Hiro is on the kind of quest he longed for, and I could still watch these two entertaining Japanese fellows all day long.

Elsewhere (and this is a spoiler) Nathan gets a bit born again Christian (yes, he survives the shooting), present day and future Peter run about causing trouble, Matt is looking for the guy who shot Nathan, and Mohinder tries to cure the gorgeous Maya but only succeeds in doing the complete opposite when he makes an earth-shattering scientific discovery. There’s also a fabulous confrontation between Sylar and Claire, and an old character comes back from the dead. Oh, and we also meet Tracy Strauss and get a tantilising glimpse of Level 5 and all its nasty criminals.

Business as usual then.