Claire Bennet - Powers and Abilities

Powers and Abilities

Claire can spontaneously regenerate any tissue in her body, allowing her to recover from almost any injury within seconds to minutes — though she does need larger, embedded foreign objects (such as a branch or a shard of glass) to be manually removed from her body, or bones pushed back into position for the wounds to heal properly. Although Sylar, after studying and taking her power, remarks that he wouldn't be able to kill her even if he wanted to and that she will never die, writers Joe Pokaski and Aron Coleite have confirmed that methods such as decapitation or incineration would indeed kill her. On the other hand, she has survived nuclear explosions in "Company Man" and "I Am Become Death".

In addition to simple healing, Claire has been shown to regenerate at least small extremities. In the second season episode "Lizards", she experiments with the limits of her powers, cutting off a toe. A new toe rapidly grows into place. When her blood is injected into others, they are also healed, even if they were dead for a while, with no apparent ill-effects. In the graphic novel "Resistance", dark future-Claire is able to regenerate her entire right arm after detonating a grenade during a terrorist raid while working as a HLS agent.

In the episode "Into Asylum" Claire reveals that she cannot become intoxicated. She has a drinking contest with a man to get more money for her and her father, Nathan. She drinks over 20 shots and does not demonstrate any signs of being intoxicated. She pretends to be drunk to hide her ability from the man. She later points out to Nathan that her tissue regeneration extends to internal organs like her liver.

Thanks to her power, she has an incredibly high pain tolerance; Claire states in "The Butterfly Effect" that, when injured, she feels pain just as severe as anyone else who was injured in such a way, but her power quickly deadens pain. When asked about this, series writers Joe Pokaski and Aron Coleite would only comment that she "feels pain, but not the way most of us do." Claire, describing her response to pain to West, says "I feel pain; I just get over it quickly." Between her tolerance for pain and seemingly unlimited healing potential, Hayden Panettiere compares her character to the X-Men character Wolverine, although she is "less hairy and without claws." Since having her brain examined by Sylar, Claire has stated that she no longer feels physical pain of any kind.

With the temporary loss of her powers in "The Eclipse", it is shown that Claire's abilities protect her from diseases, although this also leaves her natural immune system weak, as she has not built up a resistance to any sickness.

It is revealed in "Tabula Rasa" that her injected blood cannot cure tumors; her rapid cell reproduction would actually accelerate a tumor's growth due to it being living tissue.

In "Brother's Keeper" Claire is able to continue regeneration even after being accidentally frozen by Tracy Strauss; she thaws out and her frozen foot, which had broken off in Tracy's hands, is replaced with another foot that regenerates, going beyond Claire's experimentation in "Lizards" in which she cut off her pinky toe from the same foot.