Tim Kring: In terms of West and Claire, I’m sure there’s lots of questions that the audience has as to whether West is ultimately good for Claire or not. And we’ll just have to stay tuned. As for Mohinder and Matt and Molly, we wanted to sort of do a, in a way, our version of My Two Dads, a kind of domesticated life for these two characters who, you know, we saw circling each other all last year. And one of the interesting things that’s happening this season is the joining of different characters that we never saw last year. Mohinder and Matt is certainly one. Matt and Nathan, Suresh and HRG, Claire’s father is another one. So it’s a continual sort of quest to try and shake things up.
CraveOnline: With all the new characters coming on, do you ever worry about overpopulation?Tim Kring: Yes, on a show like this, you have to be able to fold people in and fold people out. So the audience should fully expect to see characters leaving in the near future.
CraveOnline: What can we know about Kristen Bell's character?
Tim Kring: We introduced the character and she is looking for Peter Petrelli. And I think one can assume that she finds him. The one thing that we will say is that we are tying this character’s side to this company that we have talked about for the last year on the show that Claire’s father was involved with. So one of the ideas was that this character, Elle’s character is actually raised within the company. And it’s in some ways a cautionary tale of what would happen to any of our characters had they lived with their powers their whole life the way Elle had.
CraveOnline: With the photo of the 12, will we be seeing more of the ones we haven't met yet? And will the same actors be playing them as the ones who posed for the photo? Was one of them Joanna Cassidy?
Tim Kring: Yes on almost all of those accounts. We will be seeing the people in the photo. I think all of them will be the same one which I just have to tell you, the photo has got a life of its own. Logistically it was so difficult to actually come up with this photograph that’s used now and refers to things that are shot well in the future here, it was very difficult to get that all lined up. But yes, the photo is as accurate as we can make it. And it did look an awful lot like Joanna Cassidy in there.
CraveOnline: What impact has the writer's strike had on your production?
Tim Kring: Well, to be really honest, it has not had a lot of impact. We, like everybody else, had assumed that a strike would be well after our season ended. So we never really prepared for it. The fact that we were a little ahead of other people, we started production a month earlier than most people has been mistakenly interpreted as that we were doing it because of the strike, but in fact it was that we were doing 24 episodes this year. Since our show is so much more complicated production-wise than almost any other show on TV, we just needed the extra time. So once that train starts rolling, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. You can’t speed it up and you can’t really slow it down. So in reality the strike doesn’t have a lot of effect. It clearly will have a tremendous effect when it happens but in terms of what we’ve done up until now, no not really. I wish we could have done more.
CraveOnline: You didn't bank scripts?
Tim Kring: No. You can only write them as fast as you can write them and we’re already moving at such a pace that we can’t really accelerate the process much.
CraveOnline: With so many new stories going on, how long will you stay away from some storylines before coming back?
Tim Kring: Well, we actually are not a show that tries to keep answers away from the audience. Our sort of feeling is that no answer is so precious that we can’t tell the audience what it is. That being said, there’s a certain amount of fun with drawing things out enough that it keeps your interest. Our show changes and morphs all the time. One of the things that we did this season that we didn’t do last season, last season we had one volume. It was called Genesis. And it happened to be 23 episodes long. So one of the things that we found is that by the end of the year we were dragging a tremendous amount of story behind us that had to be paid off in that final episode which made for an episode that the expectations are so high that it’s hard to meet everybody’s expectation. So this season we’re going to have multiple volumes. The first one is called Generation, started with Episode 1 of this season and ends on Episode 11 where every question that is raised will be answered within these 11 episodes so that it’s one complete volume that then slingshots us into another, cliff hangs us and takes us across the break into another volume. So if people are feeling the frustration of wanting answers, usually I think people say they want answers, but they really enjoy the idea of following the mystery and watching it twist and turn.
CraveOnline: Starting a new volume also let new viewers catch up. How do you balance that with keeping the story moving forward for us?
Tim Kring: I think you very much hit the nail on the head. One of the problems with starting a season is that you have to start everything pretty much at the same time, or at least that’s the impulse. On a show like ours where there’s a lot to cover, it can get a bit cluttered, but we have now settled into a pattern of telling fewer stories and I think which allows for a deeper sort of experience with the show with each one of these stories. One of the pressures becomes the balancing act of people coming in and people sitting out so not everybody can be in every episode. Part of what happens on any show is that you enter a relationship with your viewers where you teach them how to watch your show and they teach you what they seem to be responding to. So for us, we I think are in this process right now of teaching the audience how to get used to the idea that not everybody is going to be in every single episode.
CraveOnline: Will Nichelle Nichols have more to do and how many more Star Trek actors will you cast?
Tim Kring: Nichelle Nichol’s character will be in the sort of support of Dana Davis character for a while but I think we can look for around mid-season for that character to start to emerge in its own right. As for Star Trek, it’s not really our intention to bring characters on from that show. It in a strange way has been an odd coincidence. The best people who walked in to read for both the character of Kaito Nakamura and for the character of Monica’s grandmother just happened to be former cast members of that show. It’s been a lot of fun for a certain segment of the audience to see that but clearly there are not many others that we can tap into to. As of now we’re leaving it at these two.
Tim Kring: I was not particularly a science fiction writer, although I co-created a show called Strange World a few years ago. What draws me to an idea is almost always the character and the idea of how to put a character into a certain amount of drama that makes it compelling. So the sci-fi elements of the show were really just a vehicle to tell dramatic stories about characters who were going through extraordinary things and on an extraordinary journey. Clearly the sci-fi elements are very enticing to a certain audience. And that was intriguing to me as well is to try to capture that audience.
CraveOnline: At Comic Con you said there'd be a future announcement about harnessing the power of the Heroes fan base towards something good. Any update on that?
