[Hero]

I don't think this interview has been posted, but it's from Infuze Magazine. I thought there were different questions answered in this one, which was refreshing. Two excerpts this time (separated by two sets of consecutive "..." and with some emphasis added):

Robin: I saw the pilot episode at Comic-Con and it absolutely blew me away. I need more!

Tim: Oh, you saw the seventy-minute version we showed? That was fun. It was a pretty wild event.

How long have you had the idea for HEROES?

I first came up with the idea about a year ago, in its nascent stages. I noodled the idea around while I was doing my day job, Crossing Jordan. Finally I got around to writing the pilot in October and November. I turned it in and went from there. I turned in a one hour script, and then it became a two-hour premier. But now we're back to one hour again for the premier.

So the seventy minute version shown at Comic-Con...?

There's fifteen minutes that was shot for the two-hour version that we showed there, that nobody will ever see again. The pilot that airs on tv will be one hour. Though some of the footage from the two-hour version has been worked into the second episode.

Can you tell us anything about that footage and why it was removed?

It's all of the introduction to Greg Grunberg's character. He was going to be introduced in the pilot, but we've since reworked a lot of his character's story -- through no fault of Greg's. The writers and the network simply decided to go in a little bit of a different direction with that character...

...So in the Heroes series bible, is there a master plan to all this? Is there a grand finale you're working towards?

There is no ending planned for the show. I didn't create a story with an intentional ending. It's a saga. Rather, I think the audience can expect each season to have an ending. Clearly, the pilot prophesies this nuclear explosion in New York, and I think you can expect that storyline to climax as the season ends. Each year, we'll come up with a brand new obstacle that they have to overcome.

I purposely didn't want to set up an with end point. Because I felt so strongly that the show was about the personal lives of these characters, and how they were coping and responding to the discoveries that they were finding within themselves. As long as the stories stay about what's happening to them, I don't need an ending. There's a kind of arbitrary-ness to giving an ending to this kind of show that you don't clearly need. As opposed to Lost, where the premise of the show is wrapped up in getting the characters off that island, Heroes is more open-ended.

Will we see the characters teaming up? And do you anticipate the cast fluctuating with characters coming and going?

At some point or another, all of their lives will cross in various ways. To me, that was one of the most exciting and challenging things about all this. How do you have a Japanese office worker in Tokyo and a teenage girl in west Texas cross paths? That's some of the fun of watching it, to find out how that's going to happen. The pilot points to how some of the characters are going to connect. Four or five episodes in, they are already crossing paths, and there's much more to come.

As for the cast fluctuating, I think the audience will get used to watching episodes where not every episode has every cast member appearing in it. The show will focus more heavily on specific characters in specific episodes. But the beauty of the show is that the premise is about these people populating the entire planet, and there are clearly more of them out there. Some are good, some are evil. And it's our intention to meet new people along the way, to keep it fresh and move the story forward.

So that's to say that yes, characters that are not servicing the plot any longer can be jettisoned.

Hope any jettisoned characters get a parachute, at least! :roll: Or petition that the characters continue servicing the plots! And I was hoping the director's cut would be shown again, but if the direction of the storylines has changed, then I guess it doesn't matter TOO much that we missed it.

Also, we should help give suggestions with the brand new obstacles every year, like maybe goa'uld, replicators, wraith, and ori, or how about Reavers!

[Super Ordinary Guy]

Tim Kring (TK) did answer the questions differently. This is like the 6th or so interview of TK, I'm sure he was getting sick of answering the same question over and over.

I wouldn't mind seeing the Heroes battle Vampires or Demons either. Would it be too much if they battled Drakh, The Dominion, or Skrulls? Oh! Oh! Niki battles the Shadows! (Shadows and Drakh are Babylon 5 shout outs for those of you scratching your heads)