MONDO EXTRAS

CB: Let's talk about the mysteries. If they're all going to be solved by the end of the season, that means we're going to find out what happened with Lynn Echolls, who Veronica's dad is, who raped Veronica, where Lianne has been, what the deal is with her and Jake Kane, and of course, who killed Lilly.

RT: That's right.

CB: You do know there are only eight ["seven, now" -- CB] episodes left in the season, right?

RT: [laughs] Yeah, but it's all there. They're going to be jam-packed, and the A-stories are getting a little smaller and the B- and C-stories are getting a little bigger to accommodate that. And we're not having any B-stories that aren't Lilly Kane-related or where she isn't at least in the periphery.

CB: I mentioned Veronica's parentage a little earlier. As I'm sure you're aware, the one plot point many posters really took issue with was when she shredded the paternity-test results. Were you surprised at the vehemence of that reaction?

RT: You know, I don't know why, but I didn't catch much of that reaction. But I'll tell you exactly where I got that story point from and why I'm excited about it. This is so funny -- when I was a kid, the most powerful Spider-Man episodes that I read were these episodes in which there's a storyline where Peter Parker is cloned, and it's very existential, as he's faced with not knowing whether he's the real Peter or the clone. And he ends up fighting the clone or himself, he isn't sure which, and at the end of the episode, somehow he's got the results from the lab telling him whether he's a clone or not. But since he's in love with this girl, he decides he needs to be the real Peter, and doesn't want to prove it or disprove it, so he throws the results into a smokestack. And the thing I remember is that it was profound to me as a ten- or eleven-year-old kid, it made me think, so we had this idea of Veronica having the power to find out, but recognizing -- having that emotion of "this is the man I want to be my father, and I don't want to disprove that."

CB: Now, you said in the forums that another producer on the show described reading TWoP as like "getting hit with a tidal wave of love tempered by a million paper cuts." Do you guys read the site and go, "Uh huh, uh huh...oh, OUCH."