When tomorrow nights episode of HEROES ends, be prepared to wish you could harness Hiro’s time traveling ability in order to jump ahead to January for the next new episode. HEROES creator and executive producer told SCI FI Wire “that the December 4th cliffhanger, entitled “Fallout,” will follow a strategy plan that’s been in place since the show’s pilot. The strategy, Kring said in an interview, is designed for a dual purpose: to ensure that everyone in the large ensemble cast gets his or her moment to shine and also to entice viewers to come back each week for the latest chapter in the serialized drama.”
“The pilot had cliffhangers for every single character, so it forced you to come back in the next episode to the same idea,” Kring said. “By the fifth episode, we were able to winnow that down so that we could tell fewer stories. In episode six we basically told two characters’ story. It was Claire [Hayden Panettiere] and Niki [Ali Larter]. And we’ve sort of fallen into a pattern of three or four stories per episode now.”
“Fallout,” which is episode 11, returns to telling everyone’s story, and it will end with a cliffhanger. Or several of them. “We’re off the air for six weeks after episode 11, and so we cliffhang once again most of the characters’ stories, which forces us in episode 12 to come back to everybody’s story,” Kring said. “So it has been a real balancing act, a real juggling act, and the only thing I can say is that if you miss certain characters for a while, just stay tuned, because they come back. They all sort of ebb and flow.” Heroes airs on NBC Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. It will return on Jan. 22, 2007. 
