[IMG:L]In its first season on the air, Heroes set the bar so stratospheric, Season 2 might need an assist from high-flying Nathan Petrelli to surpass it. But the team behind TV’s most talked-about series thinks the new season is ready to soar.
Masi Oka, who was nominated for an Emmy and Golden Globe for his breakout performance as Hiro, summed up the upcoming episodes succinctly and nonchalantly. “New season, new stories,” he explained. “It’s about ordinary people who have extraordinary abilities trying to regain their ordinary lives.”
“I think if you were to take a cross section of 10 people and ask them where they think Season 2’s going to pick up,” offered Zachary Quinto, who played the villainous Sylar, “about nine of them would be wrong.”
Fortunately, Heroes fans have Hollywood.com to come to the rescue: we talked to that top 10 percentile who do know what direction the series is going in–the cast and creators, who at great risk to themselves heroically revealed some of secrets.
[IMG:R]‘Generations’ Gap
One thing that series creator and executive producer Tim Kring wants to do is make it easy for viewers who may have missed some of the debut season or are just catching the episodes on DVD to jump aboard, and for long-term fans to avoid potential burnout by dividing Season 2 into distinct story arcs “so you don’t get a sense that if you jump on the train that you’re aggressively being pushed off of the train because you don’t know what’s going on. That’s a big concern with us.”
“We called Season 1 Volume 1 and it was entitled ‘Genesis.’ It just happened to be 23 episodes long,” said Kring. “Volume 2 is entitled ‘Generations’ and it by no means has to be an entire season long … In fact, we’re looking at that volume to end in the middle of the season, which allows us to wrap up certain stories and allows us to have new stories begin.”
Producer Jeph Loeb, who’s also worked on Lost and written virtually every major comic book superhero in their monthly titles, said the first 11 episodes comprise the first story arc, airing through December. “That is actually going to be the end of Volume 2 so that if you started watching the show, we’re not asking you to come on for 24. I mean we would love for you to do that, but you can just watch the first 11 and you’ll have a complete story with a beginning, middle and end.”
Kring said viewers can expect Volumes 3 and 4 to round out the rest of the season.
Given that the title of the first episode is “Four Months Later,” it’s safe to say Season 2 will definitely not pick up exactly where things left off, when Nathan (Adrian Pasdar) flew his about-to-explode brother Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) away from Manhattan and into the sky, where the other Heroes witness a massive detonation, leaving the fate of both Petrelli brothers hanging.
“There is tremendous mystery in what happened during those four months and that’s part of why you’re watching these first few episodes,” revealed Kring. “They’re revealing what actually happened.”
“I don’t think we’re going to disappoint,” enthused Sendhil Ramamurthy, who plays geneticist Mohinder Suresh. “There’s really great stuff coming up. There’s relationships building between people that I certainly never would have thought there would be relationships between. There’s kind of a whole new beginning for every character. So everybody is starting from a whole new place.”
[IMG:L]Samurai Jacked
Despite the fast-forward for the rest of the cast, Season 2 will zero in on the immediate whereabouts of Hiro, the show’s breakout character who found himself lost in space-time in the season finale.
“We start off with two parallel time lines,” explained Oka. “One is starting four months after the event and another timeline starts 400 years prior to the event in feudal Japan. And somehow that’s going to coincide and overlap and it’ll all make sense.”
Oka was thrilled at the opportunity to find himself acting in an era that has always fascinated him due to his Japanese heritage. “What’s fantastic is as a kid growing up, you grow up with the Samauri and Ninja stuff, especially with my culture,” he said. “American kids wish they could be like cowboys. We wish we could be like samauris and ninjas so I grew up on reading those kinds of mangas and reading the history behind them. I know about all the daimyos and the single coups, feudal terror, so it’s cool. It’s great to be able to act it out.”
Oka also confirmed that, as the “Generations” title implies, George Takei is expected to return as Hiro’s stern father, and the actor hinted that there may be a love interest in wings as well, in the form of Japanese royal. “The romance storyline’s there,” he said. “I didn’t want Hiro to forget about Charlie but a broken heart still ticks, so it’s kind of nice to see him find another love interest.
[IMG:R]New Blood
There will be an infusion of new characters in the coming episodes, which has left some fans wondering if the beefed up cast might muscle out some of their first season favorites, but Kring says they newbies will be easily integrated into the established ensemble.
“One of the things that we are doing this year, because we’re not asking the audience to start absolutely from scratch, we’re not so concerned about every episode having every single character in it, ” said Kring. “So we’re able to sort of pull back in the ebb and flow and let certain characters come to the surface for an episode and sit out an episode.”
And Loeb said some of the characters will only be around for brief arcs, while other will simply appear in recurring roles, fulfilling niches that other now-departed first season characters once owned. “[Our casting announcements] made it sound like there were a lot of new characters, but the truth is a lot of our characters moved on in the new situation,” said Loeb. “So you’re going to be picking them up brand new. So for example, Claire always had a best friend and Claire always had a rival at school. So now that she’s moved to a new environment, those characters are simply being replaced…so it’s not as though the cast got bigger, the cast just got different.”
For examples, fans are clamoring to know how long Veronica Mars actress Kristen Bell’s stint on the show will be, and Loeb indicated that she may only be passing through the Heroes-verse. “Kristen has an arc, but it’s a long arc, but she’s not a regular,” said Loeb. “But someone like Dania Ramirez, who joins the cast–she’s from the first one on.”
“I’m coming at you hard right from the beginning,” laughed Ramirez, who’s playing the mysterious Maya, a new powered character in the mix. “The first time you see her she is picked up somewhere in Central America, on the run from the cops, and chaos. She’s trying to cross boarders to get to the U.S. It’s really, really interesting,” the actress said. The character, who is accompanied by her twin brother (played by Shalim Ortiz), definitely has her secrets. “All you know is she is on the run … She is essentially a good person, however her abilities she has a hard time controlling.”
Ramamurthy revealed that his character’s sharing scenes with another addition, the shadowy hero-hunting boss behind HRG’s Primatech paper company, played by veteran character actor Stephen Tobolowski, last seen as the Mayor of Beverly Hills on Entourage. “Stephen and I have a fairly antagonistic relationship. I think I can leave it at that,” said Ramamurthy, who may also get to break in another rookie castmember. “I’ve been told that I’m working with somebody else new coming up really soon but they won’t tell me who.”
The regulars are excited to welcome the fresh faces aboard. “I haven’t really gotten a chance to be around them a whole lot, other than a few passings on set but everyone’s pretty thrilled to be a part of the show,” said Panettiere, who’ll be sharing scenes with a new, superpowered boyfriend named West, played by Nick D’gosto. “The funny thing about Claire is that, as much as she has that beautiful naivety about her and as sweet as she is, she does have a spitfire. She has that sass about her so it’s fun to watch her, but I think when she meets West–I mean, you guys will see.[PAGEBREAK][IMG:L]Horn-Rimmed Devil?
It’s a whole new world for Claire and her father, who after reuniting in the finale, find themselves living new lives under new identities in a secret locale. “Claire’s really just trying to get in touch with her inner teen self once again,” said Panettiere. “She hasn’t given that up and I think it’d be a sad thing if she did. And she’s struggling to fit in but not stand out, and obviously they’re still hiding and running from these people.”
“The Bennet family is in a different location but very quickly old habits and old ghosts will reappear,” teased Jack Coleman, who plays Claire’s morally slippery dad H.R.G. (Horn-Rimmed Glasses), whose name has now been revealed as Noah Bennet. “There’s a familiarity but the circumstances are definitely different. It’s very interesting that the dynamic within the family is quite different, and yet you start to see that the idea of full disclosure is not really one that comes naturally.”
Sounds like Bennet may be going back to his old clandestine ways. “I’m looking forward to playing the line between loving father and lethal operative,” confirmed Coleman. “I think that what’ll happen is as the season goes on, the dark side of his character will start to come out more and more.”
After achieving some redemption last season, why is HRG headed back to the dark side? “The truth is, most of us are really just who we are,” said Kring. “We can redeem ourselves in certain ways but there are certain character traits of who we are that just keep coming back into our lives. I would not say that HRG’s character is bad or evil. He is a very pragmatic person and as a company man who had to do things for the company, he takes that same zeal and that same zealousness and puts it to use as protecting his family. So those same traits just come out for a different purpose.”
“I think we all have proven that in this show we all have our dirty little secrets,” Panettiere said of her TV father’s shifty nature. “I think him becoming the ‘house dad’ wouldn’t be very exciting, the good dad. People like watching good bad people and you sometimes want to hate Jack‘s character and sometimes love him.”
[IMG:R]Evolutions
Ali Larter said her character Nikki Sanders’ storyline will be “a little bit La Femme Nikita” and fans can look forward to the schizophrenic hero’s ruthless alter ego Jessica to become more fully integrated. They’re coming into one character,” she said, and that the notion of Nikki retaining Jessica’s superhuman strength is “definitely being explored.”
“The trick with that character is that we will learn that the separate characters were a byproduct of something else that we’re going to learn about fairly early on in the season,” explained Kring. “That character is going through a transformation for the audience.”
Greg Grunberg’s also enjoying the maturation of his character, the telepathic cop Matt Parkman, who barely survived the finale. “This season, for me, has been an unbelievably character-changing, life-changing thing for the character,” said Grunberg. “I’ve become much more of a part of the lore, of the backstory. I’m not just this peripheral character. I play a major role in why all of this has happened … The mind reading is just the very, very tip of the iceberg of what powers my character is developing.”
Meanwhile, Ramamurthy’s Mohinder has taken on the care of hero-sensing Molly Walker and “grown a really big set of balls … You’re going to see a butcher Mohinder.”
What of the villainous Sylar, who disappeared after leaving a bloody trail to a manhole? “I would say that we have not seen the last of Sylar,” said Kring.
“You are going to find him in a radically different landscape than you would expect to find him in,” added Quinto, who will briefly depart the series to play Mr. Spock in J.J. Abrams’ reinvention of the Star Trek franchise. “He is just going to find himself in a place where I don’t think he, or anyone else, would have ever expected him to be.”
And, as Molly Walker feared, there may be an even nastier Bogeyman than Sylar waiting for someone in the shadows–possibly more than one. “It’s definitely possible to be worse than Sylar,” said Panettiere. “[The new villains] will be bad. They’ll be real bad … I think they’re freakier in a different way. I think it’s kind of a mind trip, in a way. Sylar’s very physical. And these characters are just creepier, from what I’ve seen of them, from what I’ve heard about them.”
Though they’ve split apart after their ultimate meeting in the season finale. the core cast will frequently unite in new and unexpected combinations, which has thrilled the members of the ensemble. “What I love about this season is that I now am getting to work with a lot of people I didn’t last year,” said Larter.
“There are some unique pairings,” confirmed Loeb. “Certainly some stuff that we learned towards the end of the season where more of the characters were crossing into each other. We saw a lot of that magic … That’s one of the gifts of being able to write this show is that when you see something that is working down on set that you can bring it in with the script and make it work.”
[IMG:L]And finally, the most burning question of all: will the creative team ever run out of ideas for new superhuman abilities? Kring has a surprising answer. “Oh yeah,” he said. “The truth is there are only a few really cool powers and then everything else is sort of variations upon those. So we’re positing a theory that this is happening all over the world to multiple people, so there can’t be only one guy who can fly. There can’t be only one guy who can turn invisible. It would be silly to think that. There is a duplication of some of the powers, but the powers to me have always been very minor aspects of the show. It’s what’s happening to the characters, how these powers are affecting their lives that is still the stuff of the drama of the show.”
