BLADE: THE SERIES' JON KROLL

SAN DIEGO -- Spike TV's Blade: The Series kicks into a new gear with Wednesday's episode, "The Evil Within."

After Sunday's Blade: The Series panel at Comic-Con International, The Continuum caught up with executive producer Jon Kroll of New Line Television to talk about the show.

Question: What can viewers expect in upcoming episodes?

Kroll: We're about to start a really exciting serialized arc in which several stories come to fruition. This is not going to be one of the shows where at the end people do not have satisfactory answers to their questions. The most important questions will be answered and we'll start some new things to go into the second season, but you will get satisifaction at things regarding the Krista and Chase relationship, the Marcus and Krista relationship.

We're introducing some really interesting new characters. The character of Charlotte is unique to television, a 200-year-old pureblood in the body of a 13-year-old girl who does the most horrific things imaginable.

Question: Who is the actress playing Charlotte?

Kroll: The actress' name is Emily Hurst. She actually had a role on Smallville at one point and has done some TV movies. She's incredibly accomplished.

Her arc starts with this coming episode. I think it is really a unique role. This is a character television has never seen before. People will be talking about her. The Entertainment Weekly review calls her Eddie Munster meets Tony Soprano, that says it all.

So we've got some pretty exciting new characters. Chase has an old flame who shows up at one point. And, also, it's fair to say that Krista's mother has become terminally ill and that leads into some incredible conflicts and outrageous results.

Question: You're actually shot in Detroit?

Kroll: We did some second-unit work in Detroit. The show is primarily based out of Vancouver, but shot second unit Detroit. That material was not in the pilot. We started it in the early episodes, so there's more and more of it.

Question: Spike put out a press release after the first episode, touting 2.5 million viewers for the pilot. How has the show done since?

Kroll: The cume is about -- because we air five times a week -- is about 3 million viewers a week. We had an average of about 1.7 million on the first four episodes (premiere), so we feel like we've developed a really solid and loyal fan base that we're going to build on at this point.

At this point, word is starting to spread. And one thing that's really important is we really up the action ante with this next episode, so there's a lot more explosiveness and a lot more show-stopping visuals that start happening, in addition to the ashings and some of the fighting.

Question: When do you expect to hear if there will be a second season?

Kroll: I would expect with a second season, we would know in the next couple of weeks. And we would probably start shooting late this year.

One of the reasons for that is we shot the pilot in November-December and the benefit of Vancouver's very long nights. Shooting the episodes going into June has been very challenging because we have about four or five hours of night. So it makes our night shooting really, really difficult. So we're hoping we get the order quickly so we can shoot during those long nights and get great night exteriors.

Question: Vancouver's a great city...

Kroll: Yeah, very diverse architecture and terrain that makes it really easy to shoot a lot of things there.

Question: So you're pretty pleased with the show?

Kroll: We're very, very happy right now. It was such an enjoyable process. The cast are all terrific, there's not a diva in the bunch. And the network's been a great partner on it. We had a great group of directors. Our Vancouver-based crew all want to come back, and they're fantastic.

It's really been one of those magic projects that everyone can't wait to get started with again. We have a lot of people holding out from other opportunities to wait and see if we can get this pick-up.