Heroes Scoop!

More Heroes Hints Revealed

Tim Kring, creator and executive producer of NBC's Heroes, told SCI FI Wire that he is not afraid to answer mythology questions definitively in the upcoming third season--which will only raise more questions. Among other things, the season premiere will settle the question about Claire's (Hayden Panettiere) invulnerability in a scene with her and Sylar (Zachary Quinto).

"We've always had kind of a weird philosophy on the show that no question was so precious that we couldn't answer it, because there's always more questions to answer," Kring said in an interview at a party for the third season in Hollywood last week. "One of the things we really tried to do in this volume is to take all the core questions of the show, the basic questions that we started off with--Who am I? What's happening to me? How am I connected? Where did these powers come from?--we take every single one of these major questions and turn them on their head in this particular volume.

Each one of those gets answered in new ways." Kring added that the answers can change. Take the solution to the issue of Claire invulnerability. "We left a little bit of a backdoor on that question, so there's a tiny little 'out' there," he said. "It's still not completely clear what Sylar's doing, so that part of the question is still there. But, like I said, ... as a show we need to be able to answer questions." The first hour of the two-part third-season premiere answers so many questions, most shows would have a hard time keeping up that pace in subsequent episodes. Kring promised--even bragged--that Heroes has the ability to keep up the pace.

"People are always shocked that that's really not a problem for us," Kring said. "What happens is when you create a storyline that has so many twists and turns and so many reveals and so many surprising moments, in a weird way, it actually generates more story. It's not like a tank of gas where you just run out of story. That really hasn't been a problem for us. You'll see as you stay tuned, we keep the pace up."

Kring will keep up the third season's breakneck pace in part by breaking it up into shorter chapters, or "volumes." "Volume [III, 'Villains,' ] is 13 episodes long," he said. "Now, if we were a serialized show that just dragged our story along from year to year to year, we wouldn't be able to have that kind of pace. Because we know we are going to contain the entire story in 13 episodes, we're able to cram a lot into each episode."

The season will also reintroduce fan-favorite characters thought to have died in previous episodes, including Nathan Petrelli, who will survive his second Heroes death. "You know, I think he's got about four more deaths in his contract before we use up his quota," Kring joked. "But, no, this idea of people who are dead and not dead is something that we play with all the time. People come back on the show in very different unique ways. That's one of the things again we love to do is find ways to take characters you thought were dead and gone and bring them back.

As Jack Coleman answered, quoting Princess Bride, he said, 'On Heroes, people are only mostly dead.'" The third season of Heroes kicks off on Sept. 22 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

Source: Scifi.com