Before you watch the second episode of NBC's Awake, "The Little Guy," tonight (you are going to watch, right? RIGHT?), check out what writer/creator Kyle Killen had to tell me about how he's definitely sticking to the premise that one of Detective Michael Britten's worlds is real and one is fake. That's right. There will be no "he's in a coma" third option, folks. None of that "it was all a dream" stuff.

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"I personally tend to not be interested in the 'it was all a dream' stuff," Killen said. "Even if it takes you seven seasons to get to 'it was all a dream.' If you want me to invest in an idea, just do what you promised. You told me in the first week that one of these worlds was real and one was fake and that [Britten] couldn't tell the difference. I understand that there's a value to put a twist on a twist, but I also feel like there's a value to seeing that first story through to the end and finding out, emotionally, what it would mean to discover that there wasn't a way out of the box. That the rules were exactly the way they were in the beginning."

Killen then said that answers to burning questions will be dished out regularly, but that he didn't consider the show to be fully serialized. "I think the question of the car crash is the story of the first season," Killen said. "So I think if you can stick with us for 13 episodes then you'll get an answer for that. For us, the idea of which world is real or not isn't a question the show's trying to answer. It's a question the main character's trying to avoid the answer to. Once you stake your claim with wanting to live in two different worlds, that are going in two different directions, then the drama and conflict comes from seeing that person try to live in those two diverging universes. So I don't know that we're going to, any time soon, answer the question of which one is real. We're out to look at what happens when you absolutely, fundamentally refuse to commit to one or the other."

That being said, and with Killen ruling out the coma/dream scenario, there's also not going to be any sci-fi elements to the two universes. "I think we've tried to say as grounded as possible," he stated. "That is to say as grounded as one can be with alternate universes. I think we've tried to stay with the notion that 'one is a mental construction that takes place when his eyes are closed and the other is the reality that he takes in when his eyes are open.' You just cannot separate one from the other. As opposed to, say, him literally transferring between parallel universes. I am more intrigued about something the closer it is to something either you or I could experience."

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The Awake episode, "The Little Guy," airs tonight at 10/9c. Look for IGN's review of the episode as soon as it airs on the east coast.

Matt Fowler is an Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @MattIGN.

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