Crave Online: You answer so many questions right away in the season premiere. How quickly will you answer all the other ones, like how certain characters are back from the dead?

Tim Kring: Some of those questions will linger a little bit but I think by the end of the third hour of the show you have kind of most of those. One of the goals of this season was because we will have been off the air for nine months, we didn’t want to drag a lot of story behind us. We didn’t want to feel like you had to have watched two years of this show to catch up. So we wanted to answer things really quickly so that you could move forward on this volume and have a kind of clean path in front of you. So there really are not a lot of lingering questions that you carry with you from before. Literally 95% of the questions that are posed in the beginning of the volume will be answered by the end of the volume.

Crave Online: With certain “normal” characters getting super powers this year, do you worry about losing a certain perspective from regular humans?

Tim Kring: I would say yes and no. It’s one of the great challenges of doing a serialized story, is to try to keep the audience guessing and to keep things fresh. What we’ve always sort of prided ourselves on is the ability to have the audience not be able to predict where we’re going. So hopefully with Sylar, just when you think that you have figured out what his role for the rest of the series, he’ll change again and will reinvent where that character is. But yeah, somebody needs to be able to play the role of the outsider on this show and so I would just sort of say stay tuned to see who that is. It will be someone you know already.

Crave Online: What roles does family play this season?

Tim Kring: Well, it’s interesting that you say that because the truth is it’s all about family and at the core of this particular volume, we’re exploring the nature of dysfunction among family. There are two families that are at the core of this show, the Bennett family and the Petrelli family. Both of them will be tested and tugged in ways that you haven’t seen so far.

Crave Online: Is Kristen Bell coming back?

Tim Kring: Well, you will see her in the second hour of the first night back and she is integral and plays a very large part in the entire volume. So yeah, you’ll see plenty of Kristen. One of the fun things of doing this kind of show with this big of a cast is that I think the audience will be really surprised at how many kind of pairings up of people that will be new. Characters that have never really even crossed paths with one another will actually have some very unique pairings of characters. For the cast it was really a lot of fun because while they all know one another and get along with one another, and enjoy one another, there are several of the actors on the show that have literally never been in scenes with one another. So finding those combinations, I think, keeps it really fresh and not only behind the scenes but for the audience as well.

Crave Online: Will we see any more of group of 12, or are they all dead like Parkman said?

Tim Kring: You actually will see more, yes. You will see a few of them. That was referring to the idea of the previous generation. The second volume of the show was called Generations and explored the idea that there was a whole series of people who came before our characters and it’s basically the idea of the sins of the parents had been visited upon their children. We will see that some of those people survive in very interesting and curious ways in Volume 3. There’s still some remnants of that previous generation.

Crave Online: What was the biggest challenge you’ve faced in making the third season?

Tim Kring: In many ways, there’s a continuum on this show for us that the audience doesn’t experience. The audience experiences it in seasons. We haven’t. We have sort of experienced it as one long production. So in many ways it’s the same challenges. We’re making a very big, logistically complicated show by all accounts, maybe the biggest, most complicated show that there is. So the challenges are many fold. For me as a writer, it’s keeping it fresh and we have set a kind of bar for the audience of expectations of surprise and unpredictable storytelling. That bar gets raised, often by our own. We sort of raise the bar ourselves. In other words, we’ll do an episode that is filled with twists and turns, and we’ll really blow people away. Then the next week we have to find some way to top ourselves. In many ways it’s a very challenging game to play to keep topping yourself. Sometimes you get in a situation where you just simply can’t top an episode from the week before and so that for us is a continuing challenge to be fresh and new.

Crave Online: What do you think about comparisons between this volume’s storyline and some storylines from X-Men?

Tim Kring: I don’t really know anything about X-Men and I have no real knowledge of it or the world. I don’t read X-Men Comics and so I’m not really familiar with it. From my standpoint there’s clearly a kind of reinvention of the wheel that happens in this kind of storytelling when you’re dealing with really archetypical storytelling of good and evil, and characters that have powers. I don’t know that there’s any way to avoid things that have been done before. There’s such a vast amount of material in the comic book world that has actually dealt with these stories. I remember when I first came up with Heroes and pitched it to my friend, Jeph Loeb, for this reason alone to ask him what territory I was sort of entering into. He said every territory that’s ever been done I was faced with the decision,  does that mean that I should not do it or do I just plow forward and continue to tell the story that I wanted to tell? So to the extent there are similarities, it’s not by design.       It’s just by telling an archetypical story that has characters facing sort of big epic battles between good and evil, and trying to live normal lives at the same time.

Crave Online: Will you explain the double helix symbol in this volume?

Tim Kring: Some of these symbols, they morph their meaning as we go a little bit. The helix is an example of that and clearly it’s been revealed now as a part of the double helix of a DNA strand which plays into the themes of the show and was always intended to be revealed as that. But there are deeper meanings to both of the symbols of the eclipse and the helix that we have plans to reveal along the way. Its one of the very few things that we wanted to have as question marks that carried you through the series. We set out to be a show that answered questions along the way in a very, kind of regular and quick way but we always wanted to have a few mysteries that carried through the length of the series that would change and morph just enough to keep you guessing as to what the new meanings would be. Both eclipse and the helix are both the two real major examples of that.

Crave Online: How do you look back on Season Two and what do you want to do with Season Three?

Tim Kring: I wanted to kind of clarify something because it’s been brought up a couple of times, this idea of Season Two versus Season Three versus Season One. The truth is what you were referring as Season Two was not really our Season Two. It turned out to be Season Two because of the writers’ strike. It was really sort of like watching a movie and having the projector break 40 minutes into it. What we’re doing now for Season Three was really going to be contained within the body of Season Two. So to the extent of a character like Sylar who spent the first volume of Season Two without his powers, in the subsequent volumes he would’ve gotten those powers back and then gone on a series of adventures. I just kind of wanted to clarify that, you know, what people are referring to as Season Two was not by our design. It was really by the design of the fact that there was a writers’ strike.

 
Crave Online: Did moving Villains to Season Three open up any opportunities for you?

Tim Kring: I don’t know that I’ve had a lot of time to really think about what opportunities it opened for us. We closed some doors that we would have obviously had to explore and that’s always complicated. We had actually shot a fair amount of content already and that lives on as DVD extras in the second season that people can actually watch and see where we were planning to go with the next volume. What the truncated year did for us was allow us to do a kind of reassessment of how to tell a story in a very adrenalized way. Clearly the audience is really not very interested in a slow build on this show. They want to hit the ground running. So it gave us a little time to figure out just how to do that and in many ways how to tell a story without an act one, to start basically in act two. We think with Volume 3, Villains, that we sort of we figured that out, how to hit the ground running in a really quick way that has a tremendous amount of adrenalin. 

Crave Online: How do you feel about Zachary Quinto becoming a big movie star as Spock?

Tim Kring: You know, it’s a small community in many ways. There’s a real lineage of relationships between me and the people who do the television show, Lost, and the people who did the television show Lost are the ones who ended up doing Star Trek. So they’re fans of my work and I’m fans of their work and we speak all the time. Zach’s name obviously came up and conversations were had about making that possible. So in some ways, it happened on a very kind of human level with friendships and behind-the-scenes.

Crave Online: Are you going to continue to make Sylar more sympathetic?

 
Tim Kring: To be really honest, that is sort of a quest with this character, is to continue to play off of the duality of good and evil which I think has been at the core of a lot of characters in the show and will certainly become more and more thematic in the show in this volume, Villains, where so many of our characters will be faced with these choices of who are they really and what is their basic nature. So yeah, we are going in places this particular volume with Sylar that will, I think, cause the audience to be really torn as to how they feel about this guy. They know he is capable of tremendous evil and yet he has a kind of depth of pathos that makes you question your own sense of what’s right and wrong. He’ll have a series of very human relationships in this volume alone.

Crave Online: Will you ever bring back the virus storyline that was intended for season two?

Tim Kring: Well, the virus story was really the casualty of the strike and I think a lot of people have already heard this story. We re-jiggered literally the last couple minutes of that volume when we knew the strike was imminent and changed the ending so that that virus never broke out. The second volume of Season Two was going to be an outbreak story that would last eight episodes and it was all avoided by Peter Petrelli catching this vile of a virus and so it did not break and therefore, did not get out into the community. So three episodes into that volume we would have found out what happened to Caitlin, and as a result of the writers’ strike that has been sort of a lost part of the mythology of the show that may never return.

Crave Online: The show was so embraced by critics and fans in the first season, do you think it was judged too harshly in the Season Two?

Tim Kring: That is always the nature of something that hits in a big way, in a very zeitgeist kind of way. It’s very hard to be shiny and new all the time. So of course that’s something that always concerns us but there’s not a whole lot we can do. We just make the story that we make. As for how the season was judged, I think the fans that really stuck with the show saw what ended up being, especially the second half of that volume, finally came together in the way that the first season did. In the first season, we took about eight or nine episodes before the characters even crossed paths with one another. If you stuck with it, you were rewarded to see where that story went.     In the second season, as I said, there were 13 episodes that will never be seen. So I think it was obviously very hard to judge it as a whole without literally over half of it never being seen. So that’s kind of all I can say about it.

Crave Online: Watching the premiere with fans at Comic Con must have been wild. How do you look at fan feedback and does it ever inform the show?

Tim Kring: I would love to be able to say yes it does affect us. But the truth is that when we premiere on September 22, we will be I think just starting to shoot Episode 13 which is the finale of the volume. So to the extent that we could have any input from the audience after people have seen that, I think we’re so far ahead that there really is nothing that we can do about it. So unfortunately the audience is very, very far behind where we are creatively on the show. There’s not much we can do about it. The interesting thing is that we come at the show internally as the writers and producers of the show, and the actors of the show as real fans of this particular genre and real fans of this show. So we have to use our own sort of internal critics to let us know where we’re going. We very often have made course changes midway through when we’ve looked at episodes internally and tried to feel what the audience would feel, and have said, “You know what? I think we need to go this direction now. We’ve used this device too many times. Let’s start doing this.” So we very much are our own fan base while we’re making the show.