He continued: “I’m trying to make the best show I can, and on any given day there are 10,000 things I would do differently. Nobody ever asked me that before.”

Image From left, Milo Ventimiglia, Greg Grunberg and Adrian Pasdar in NBCs Heroes, returning on Sept. 22 after a nine-month gap. Credit... Adam Taylor/NBC

Ms. Pope jumped in with a laugh, “And we won’t let anybody ask that again.”

But Mr. Kring’s analysis now is much the same as it was: The audience got used to the “adrenalin pace” from the end of Season 1, and when Season 2 started with the introduction of still more new characters, the viewers “lost a bit of patience for the build-up.” That has led him to conclude that “when any new characters come in we need to connect them to the story line and characters they’re already familiar with.”

As to the Hiro trip back in time, Mr. Kring acknowledged that “some people didn’t like that we had separated Hiro from the other characters.” And romance? “I had sort of said romance would be a different thing for a show like ours because we have such adrenalin in the storytelling. It has to be a battlefield romance. These are things you learn along the way.”

The long dry spell for original episodes will be less a problem, Mr. Kring said, because of a decision he made at the 11th hour in December. The original idea for the second volume of last season was for a vial of some deadly plague to be released in the finale of “Generations,” setting up eight (presumably adrenalin-filled) episodes of the next volume, “Outbreak.”

Instead, sensing that a long strike was looming, Mr. Kring, who at 51 is a television veteran, writing for shows like “Providence” and creating the crime series “Crossing Jordan,” had an inspiration. He decided to reshoot the ending of “Generations,” having the Peter Petrelli character (played by Milo Ventimiglia) catch the vial filled with deadly virus just before it was to hit the ground and explode, thus ending that story line and conveniently wiping out the entire next eight-episode story arc. With that one move two new, fully written and partly shot episodes were scrapped.