Tim Kring says that Heroes Reborn will function as season ten of the series

In some alternate universe Tim Kring's Heroes managed to avoid its drastic slide into mediocrity and stuck around as a piece of quality television and is in fact premiering its tenth season later this year; however, in our universe, the series was rightly cancelled after four seasons, but in Tim Kring's mind the show has been continuing on for the past five years.

Speaking during the NBC party for the Television Critics Association, series creator Tim Kring elaborated on why you'd be correct in calling Heroes Reborn season ten of the series:

I would actually say that it is season 10, I know that sounds a little provocative but the point is, one of the things that we talked about at the very beginning in the writers room was how we wanted every single bit of the mythology to feel as though there was a continuum from the show, and the show picks up five years later. So, ergo, it would be five seasons later and this would be season 10. That was the thinking.

It won't just be the audience wondering what happened during those intervening years, Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman) will also be working to uncover the mystery of what happened to the heroes. Kring elaborated on the main drive of the Heroes Reborn storyline which apparently has to do with a disastrous event which occurred on June 13th.

There was a seminal event that happened a year prior to when our show started on June 13, the June 13 date has all kinds of mystery attached to it. By having to go back to discover what happened or follow the trail of what happened, we unpack a lot of what happened in the intervening years, in a thriller-esque kind of way. His storyline has very much a ‘70s thriller / Three Days of the Condor quality because it’s a bit of a paranoid thriller. Who does he trust and what does he know and who’s telling him the truth?

The series will consist of thirteen episodes but it was just announced that the premiere of Heroes Reborn has been extended to two hours. Before the series has its television debut, it will first screen at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) which runs from September 10 to 20, 2015.

I'm about to dive into some minor spoilers here, so be warned. Many of the characters who won't be returning for Heroes Reborn will be revealed to have been killed during the June 13 attack, including Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere), the cheerleader with regenerative powers who could not be killed. Kring explains that "it’s a big mystery because we all know that Claire shouldn’t die. Don’t know how, don’t know why? We uncover a lot of that.”