OTHER TECH

1,000 suspended cranes ("Six Months Ago," Season 1, Episode 10). For pure visual èlan, says Oka, "the room with 1,000 cranes was very beautiful." Here, Hiro comes into the Burnt Toast Cafe in Midland, Texas to prove to waitress Charlie (Jayma Mays), his doomed first love, that he's actually from the future. He stops time to enact the "ancient Japanese tradition" of origami and suspends 1,000 individually folded cranes in the cafe in the seeming blink of an eye. "I love all of the Hiro and Charlie stuff," gushes Oka - and who can argue? Watch for the swaying wisps of black hair and the shimmering cheeks as Hiro squints to bend time, then follow the burst of white-yellow light that beams down his face before the awesome reveal of the myriad colorful cranes. Director Allan Arkush swoops around the lovestruck pair to showcase the scope of the cranes, all suspended on thin white strings. Orange, green, and yellow cranes dominate the foreground - observe the creases on the tails and wings of some of the yellow ones - while steam from the grill in the kitchen rises in the background. You should be able to read the logo on the drab brown Primatech Paper wall calendar and note the layer of makeup on Charlie's pale, still-stunned face during the close-up of the pair's elegiac hug. It's quite an accomplishment. Marvels Oka, "The amount of time it took to create that whole sequence - absolutely amazing."

The cherry blossoms ("Lizards," Season 2, Episode 2). Dissected quite beautifully in the Genetics of a Scene extra titled "The Anatomy of the Cherry Blossom/Swordfight Scenes," the cascading cherry blossoms that Hiro causes to fall all over Yaeko (Eriko Tamura) in Otsu, Japan in 1671 are a sight to behold. "You mean the scene where we're actually at Venture Farm [in Southern California] with PAs holding and shaking cherry-blossom sticks?" he asks. "It's definitely nice - a compelling storyline we're all proud of that's also visually stunning. There's not more you could ask for with that one." In the "Anatomy" extra, director Arkush acknowledges his debt to Akira Kurosawa and Seven Samurai for the visual style of the episode in which Hiro - posing as Takezo Kensei, the renowned swordsman and hero of tales told to him as a youth by his father Kaito (George Takei) - truly becomes, according to Arkush, "the warrior of legend."

FUTURE INTERACTIVITY

So where does Blu-ray go next? "I want to see Blu-ray Disc releases become more interactive and give the fan community more options," asserts Oka, who will be watching on a Sony Bravia 52-inch LCD. Agrees Jesse Alexander (whose system sports an InFocus Play Big IN76 projector), "We're excited about the potential of the interactivity for this format. In the DNA of the show, we have what we call a transmedia approach to our storytelling. We look at all the different platforms out there and figure out how to put our narrative across them in a way that's organic and authentic enough to supplement the storytelling. We first did that last season with the filmed commentaries at our Web site. We did so well there that we'd like to apply that level of forward thinking to the download and storage capabilities of Blu-ray."

Sounds like Heroes is a prime candidate for BD-Live, a feature that connects Blu-ray Discs with the Internet. Setting up a live event where users are given a date and location to log into, watch a select episode together, and then comment on it in real time - with one of the stars (like our friend Mr. Oka) responding in kind - "sounds like a fabulous idea," says Tim Kring. "It's a great idea," echoes Alexander. "We have actually talked about doing something like that." To borrow from our man Hiro, "Blu-ray interactivity is our destiny."