Tim Kring cannot emphasize enough that the lackluster second season of Heroes was not entirely his fault.

"Season 2 was not really our Season 2. It turned out to be Season 2 because of the writers' strike. It was really, you know, sort of like watching a movie and having the projector break 40 minutes into it," he says.

It’s not surprising that the show's creator and executive producer is a little defensive. After the NBC drama's stellar first season, fans were disappointed and even angry with the second installment. Most of the characters were kept apart for the majority of the season, following their own separate storylines that took place in different locations and time periods. First season menace Sylar was suddenly stripped of all his powers and forced into a dull plot with Maja, a new character who quickly became universally hated by fans for her constant crying jags and the amount of screen time she took away from beloved characters.

Although Kring acknowledges that second season made some missteps, he is adamant that the early episodes were leading up to an explosive story – but the WGA strike forced him and the other writers to rethink their plans.

"What people are referring to as Season 2 was not by our design. It was really by the design of the fact that there was a writers' strike," he insists. "So to the extent of a character like Sylar who spent the first volume of Season 2 without his powers, in the subsequent volumes he would've gotten those powers back and then gone on, you know, a series of adventures."

Sylar portrayer Zachary Quinto smartly stays out of any debate about Season 2, insisting that when filming the second season, it didn't feel like any of the characters were being ignored.

"I think our show does a remarkable job of tracking all the characters and then sort of bringing them back around to one another, and dovetailing the stories into each other," he says diplomatically. "For a cast as large as ours, I think all of my fellow actors would agree that each of us get a significant amount in all the episodes that we're in to chew on - you know, that there's never a feeling that one storyline is suffering in favor of another."

But he, too, gets a little defensive when anyone refers to Sylar as merely "evil."

"I feel like Sylar's evil is rooted in a great humanity and in a lot of smallness, and a feeling of sort of emptiness," says the 31-year-old actor. "I don’t really look at it again as like how evil could he possibly get. I sort of look at it as like, what he has in front of him and the choices that he makes in order to seize his opportunities or to feel - you know, he's constantly, constantly wrestling with the desire to feel special, the desire to feel valid, the desire to feel viable."

Of course, Quinto can't exactly complain about strike: his unusually long hiatus from Heroes allowed him to film the upcoming Star Trek film (in which he plays Spock) without needing any time off from the show.

"This whole year for me has been such a blur of good fortune – very little of it was by design, you know," he admits. "I feel like my experience on Heroes and the world in which it's rooted lends itself to the attention that led me to be a part of the movie."

Perhaps most surprising was the strike's unexpected upside for the Heroes writing staff: the long hiatus before Season 3 allowed them to really consider every angle before choosing a specific story. After experiencing first-hand what it's like to upset a fervent fan base, Kring was grateful for the extra preparation time.

"With any creative endeavor you just – you absolutely need some time away to reassess and to think about what to do next and to sort of assess what you've done well, and what you want to improve on," he says. "Clearly the audience is really not very interested in a very slow build on this show. They want to hit the ground running. We think with Volume 3, 'Villains,' that we sort of we figured that out, how to hit the ground running in a really quick way that has a tremendous amount of adrenalin."

Step one: no new people taking time away from other story arcs.

"This season we are not really introducing any new characters that have their own storylines," Kring says. "So we are concentrating very much on the core characters that we've had for, you know, two seasons now."

Step two: keeping the audience on the edges of their seats right from the start.

"What the truncated year did for us was allow us to do a kind of reassessment of how to tell a story in a very adrenalized way," he explains. "You take a story that would normally take ten beats to tell it and you try to find a way to tell it in five. And so it makes for a very exciting kind of storytelling where every scene is very complete and very full."

Kring is clearly hopeful but also anxious about how Season 3 will be received by fans. While he doesn't want to repeat any of his mistakes, you can tell he's at least a little annoyed that viewers judged the second season so harshly.

"In the second season, as I said, there were 13 episodes that will never be seen," he says. "And so I think it was obviously very hard to judge it as a whole with literally over half of it never being seen."

So while he does care about the opinions of the Heroes fan base, Kring doesn't want to get lost in trying to win everyone's approval.

"It's very hard to be shiny and new all the time," he says. "We just make the story that we make."


Heroes Season 3 premieres Monday, Sept. 22 at 9 p.m. ET on Global and NBC.

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