"Part of what happens on any show is that you enter a relationship with your viewers where you teach them how to watch your show and they teach you what they seem to be responding to," Kring said. "And we, I think, are in this process right now of teaching the audience how to get used to the idea that not everybody is going to be in every single episode."

With all the characters and the all the storylines, "It can get a bit cluttered," Kring said. So popular characters like Hiro (Masi Oka) and Peter (Milo Ventimiglia), for example, were both absent from a recent episode.

"And you watched that episode ... and it's compelling and intriguing," Kring said. "And I don't think that you really miss seeing them for one episode because you know that their stories will pick right up where they left off last time."

Which is not to say that he intends to keep adding more characters without subtracting any old ones.

"On a show like this, you have to be able to fold people in and fold people out. So the audience should fully expect to see characters leaving in the near future," Kring said.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com