May 18th, 2007
Tim Kring Talks Heroes Season Finale: A Cliffhanger and New Characters?
Writer/producer/creator Tim Kring has got a couple of things up his sleeve for the Season 1 finale of Heroes. In this interview with Sci Fi Wire, he talks about “new characters” that will be introduced in the season finale, and how the show will end on a cliffhanger that will “slingshot into next season”. This follows previous reports that the last 3 or so minutes of Chapter 23, “How to Stop an Exploding Man” will also be the first 3 minutes of the Season 2 premiere episode.
Here’s what Kring had to say:
“There are several new characters coming in the immediate future… The idea of the show from the start was always to basically honor the origin story of the first sort of blush and discovery of these powers. And so, in order to do that, new characters will have to be cycled into the show. And by extension, older characters will cycle out of the show.”
What exactly does he mean by “older characters”? Are we talking Linderman, Mama Petrelli? Or is he talking about “old” meaning “they’ve been there for a while”, i.e. Peter, Niki, etc?
He goes on:
“The idea of multiple generations has started to crop up on the show… And in the second season we will deal with that more, hence the title, ‘Generations. … The idea was that we wanted to make it easy for viewers to be able to come on in the second season. And we thought if we wrapped the show too tightly around itself so that you had to watch 23 episodes before, I would be harder for new viewer to find the show. And we always want to be a show that has the barrier of entry low enough so that new viewers can join if they want.”
Translation: “We are doing everything humanly possible not to follow in ‘Lost’s’ foosteps.”
Kring confirmed that the show will indeed end on a cliffhanger, but one that hopefully won’t be frustrating for the viewers. “No, I think it’ll be intriguing more than frustrating,” he said. “The idea was to end one idea of the show, one story, and then slingshot you into the next season.”
Now I’m even more intrigued by this. Where will our heroes end up? In the past? In the future, maybe? In another dimension?
On a final note, the Sci Fi Wire article says that the finale will be 2-hours. Again, this is in contrast to the NBC media guide, which has the episode listed as 65 minutes.
