Tim Kring and Zachary Quinto Discuss 'Heroes' Season 3

Talking to Tim Kring is as difficult as task as any TV fan could face. The creator of Heroes thrives in answering questions as vaguely as possible, so when Kring and Heroes star Zachary Quinto addressed questions on a conference call today, finding out specific details about Heroes season 3 was the hardest part.

However, Kring did reveal a few general ideas about how the next year of Heroes will play out, and Quinto spoke about the similarities between Sylar and Spock, who he will be playing in the new Star Trek film.

Kring did reveal that the structure of season 3 will be that volume 3, “Villains,” will last for 13 episodes, while the second half of the season will feature a 12-episode volume 4. In a slight acknowledgment to the problem of Maya and Alejandro, Kring said that all new characters introduced this season will immediately be a part of an established character's storyline.

Sylar will play a major role in the new volume, and the creator and star both spoke about what's to come. Quinto said that in a flashback episode, fans will see more of Gabriel Gray, the pre-Sylar watchmaker. This goes along with what director Allan Arkush mentioned in BuddyTV's exclusive on-set video interview about a season 3 episode going back to before the events of the pilot. Kring added that Sylar will evolve and his life will become complicated by his interactions with others. “He'll have a series of very human relationships in this season.”

Kring also addressed several unanswered Heroes questions, which may or may not excite fans. Regarding Caitlin, the Irish lass Peter befriended and accidentally left in the future, Kring admitted that we were supposed to find out what happened to her in the third episode back last season, but due to the writers' strike, Kring flippantly said that we may never get to find out her fate.

Another big question is what power Kaito Nakamura had, and the fact that a deleted scene on the Heroes season 2 DVD revealed he has the ability to see all the variables of a situation and predict an inevitable outcome, such as analyzing the stock market to earn money. Kring said they intentionally revealed this on the DVD for hardcore fans, though he set no time table for when people who only watch the show on TV might get to learn of Kaito's power.

Quinto was asked about his upcoming role as Spock in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, and the actor revealed that he sees several similar traits when playing the logical Vulcan and the sociopath villain. “There are elements of the characters that echo each other, but from opposite ends of the spectrum,” Quinto said. He added that they both have “a stillness and a rich internal point of view that informs the way they behave.”

Heroes returns for season 3 September 22 with a three-hour event that starts at 8pm with a countdown special to remind fans what has happened, followed by the first two episodes of the new volume.

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HEROES Goes Deep In Season 3

Tim Kring, creator and executive producer of NBC's HEROES, told SCI FI Wire that the upcoming third season will take the show and its characters in entirely new directions--including deep into the backstory.

"One of the things that this volume is going to do that, I think, is really going to be fun for the audience is that there were very initial sort of primal questions that the show asked," Kring said in an interview at the Saturn Awards in Universal City, Calif., on June 24, where he accepted an award for best television DVD. "Who am I? What's happening to me? How am I connected? Where are these powers coming from? All of those questions get reframed and turned on their head in a very interesting way in this volume."

As with the previous two seasons, the third will be divided up into volumes. The first is titled "Villains" and will focus on the nature of good and evil, Kring said.

"You're going to see a lot of bad guys in this one," Kring said. "The idea, also, is we're playing off the idea of our characters as Heroes or Villains. So it's really the duality of good and evil. ... We're playing off of this duality of good and evil. All of our characters were given these powers and possess these powers, and at some point it becomes sort of free will and human nature as to what you're going to do with that. And all of us are given the choice to make decisions that lead us down very dark paths or towards heroic ends. And so, literally, every one of our characters gets faced with that dilemma."

Kring also said that the popular villain Sylar (Zachary Quinto) will continue to be an integral part of the show in the third season. Quinto had originally been written out of the last half of the second season due to his shooting schedule on the upcoming Star Trek film. But because of the writers' strike, that part of the story was pushed into the third season, and Sylar was written back in.

"Well, we have no plans of saying goodbye to Sylar right now," Kring assured fans. "I mean, that was yet another silver lining for the strike, was Zach Quinto's availability to us in the third volume. I mean, that was a huge thing for us to be able to have him back. As you guys know, he would have disappeared for a large chunk of the second half of season two. And so, for us, it was a big, big deal."

The third-season premiere of HEROES is scheduled to air on Sept. 22. (NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) --Cindy White