Editor’s note: This interview contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Invasion.
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When the debut season of the Apple TV+ seriesInvasionwas first released into the world, it took its time in fully leaning into the promise of the alien invasion, introducing us to the complicated lives of its ensemble cast scattered across the globe. As it turns out, this was only the beginning. After this much more methodical first outing, thesweepingscience fiction series reinvented itself in its second seasonand opened up to what may be a whole new world in the road ahead. It still leaves many lingering questions open which we put to co-creator and showrunnerSimon Kinberg—who discussed what was different this time, what may be next in Season 3, and the fate of a major character.
COLLIDER: When you come to a finale as big as this is, that feels like we’ve come into a whole new world, do you take a chance to rest? Or is your mind already racing to the places you’re gonna go next?
SIMON KINBERG: My mind is kind of always racing, period. It’s, I would say in some ways, a gift, certainly a curse. I don’t get a lot of sleep at any point in my life, which makes me productive, but maybe not so healthy. All to say, I definitely was very happy with season two. I had a vision for what the feel and the vibe and the energy of the season would be. I feel like we got amazing directors and the actors were great and for a big, big important part of it, the visual effects team stepped up and created some really great visuals. So yeah, there was a part of me that certainly did rest, for a moment, the second we were done-done with the season. Because a season of television is bigger than any big movie I’ve worked on before and I’ve worked on big movies. It just takes longer, you know, because you’re just shooting a long time. It’s the equivalent of five films time-wise. But we already had our writers' room going for Season 3 while we were in post-production on Season 2.
So you’re already jamming, you’re already going.
KINBERG: Yeah, man, we were deep into it before the writers strike happened. And now, luckily, the strike has ended and we are right back into it jamming away and hoping for a Season 3.
I wanted to dive into the visual effects component because there’s this entire other dimension that you are tapping into that, like you said, gets expressed so beautifully but also terrifyingly [with] how vast it is. What can you tell us about what’s out there? We’ve obviously gotten the glimpse with Casper going there, but what is it that you can tell us about what he might find there?
KINBERG: Once they get into that other dimension and what is really the mothership of the aliens, there are all kinds of life that we have yet to experience in the show. It is lurking in there and there are ways that they can impact human life that we’ve seen glimpses of in terms of the people that were abducted and came back and their consciousness is sort of transformed. But it would happen in a much more visceral, intense way as they get closer to that light in the ship. And so we have a lot of ideas about what happens in there and a lot of ideas about how it impacts the world we know.
I want to get into the characters that are still at the center of the season, but when you talk about these life forms that we haven’t seen before and that people can come back, there are people that still love and miss Sam Neilll’s character in the show from the very beginning. I don’t know if that’s ever a thing that could happen, and he wouldn’t be himself per se, but is that something that has ever crossed your mind?
KINBERG: It certainly crossed my mind. Part of the appeal of casting Sam, who is a much more established, bigger star than our other actors, was the shock of “oh, this is gonna be a Sam Neill show. Wait, no, it’s not gonna be a Sam Neill show.” Anybody could die and these people who I don’t know as well, these actors, I’m now gonna have to get to know. I think anything is possible and part of the fun of working in TV is that there’s just so much creative freedom as a writer to explore and experiment and be surprised and surprise yourself. I love working in a writers' room and I never had that when I worked primarily in features. You might work with one writer at a time, but you’re not bouncing around ideas with five writers, seven writers. I would say absolutely anything is possible because there’s certainly things that, when I went into the beginning of conceiving Season 2, I came out of it surprised by ideas, some of which I had, many of which came from the room.
When you’re talking about this creative freedom, there’s this very interesting thing that’s happening when it comes to Apple TV and science fiction and streaming. I think of you all, I think ofFoundation, I think ofSilo, I think ofFor All Mankind. What is this like working in it? Because obviously there are people from the outside seeing [that] this is becoming a home for original, inventive science fiction, but what is it like with you all working in it and hopefully continuing on into Season 3?
KINBERG: Yeah, I agree with you. I would even throw, in a different way,Severanceinto that. A different kind of science fiction, but it has a science fiction element to it. I don’t know if there’s a strategy at Apple, certainly their science fiction shows do really well, we had a much bigger audience in our second season than we had in the first season. I think some of that had to do with a sort of spillover audience fromSiloandFoundation. AsFoundationgrew andSilois, I think, their biggest drama season for any show in Apple’s history so far, all I can say is, for myself, for David Goyer, some of these creators who have worked in every medium, you don’t always get with big budget science fiction storytelling, real creative freedom. Often because you’re tethered to an IP that has an expectation based on the audience, but when you’re doing a complete original and Apple, your home, completely believes in your vision and really lets you go wild, or in the case ofInvasionin some ways, season one not go so wild and really make it more of a sort of brooding drama with science fiction and mystery elements to it that then explodes in Season 2 when they let you do some crazy stuff. I just think fresh storytelling and characters emerge.
I’m really hoping that this doesn’t then be a conversation that is sad if this doesn’t get to continue, because I really hope it does. With what you were saying about Season 1 being this brooding, slower, almost episodic story and then this bringing the characters together, was that always the intention? Because it almost makes Season 1 feel like a prologue.
KINBERG: For sure. I talked about it, internally with Apple and with the creative team and then now externally, as Season 1 was the quiet before the storm and Season 2, the storm had hit. I always imagined Season 1 as a sort of day one experience and Season 2, you’d be months into an invasion reality. It’s also that Season 1, you wouldn’t exactly know why we were telling these disparate stories, other than it just wanted to have a global perspective, and Season 2, you would start to pull these threads together in a way that would pay off. As someone that has worked in movies for so long on so many different movies, I think my brain is wired into cinema storytelling. I think it’s becoming wired to the different rhythms of television, but it was very wired to movies. So you call it prologue, I think that’s fair. I imagine Season 1 almost like Act 1 of a movie, you know? Season 2, you’re getting into the first part of Act 2. That escalation is the natural escalation of cinema storytelling and so we were doing that in a way as I was really learning how to tell a story in TV.
When you mention that this is like the start of Act 2, is it still your hope that it’s a four-season arc? I had been reading that was part of your plan.
KINBERG: Yeah. And it no longer really conforms to movie storytelling. But storytelling does have a first act, then the second act is twice as long as the first act, then the third act is the length of the first act again. So it does naturally fall into a four-quadrant storytelling pattern. But separate from that, in the way that I have imagined the show and the way that it continues to evolve, it stays a four-season arc.
Not to continue making references to movies, but I read you bring it up atone point with the New York Times, talking aboutArrival, because there are the science fiction battles and the spectacle, but when you step away from that, there’s this more metaphysical, existential thing that you’re tapping into. I wanted to ask where is it that you’re feeling that will go?
KINBERG: The metaphysical part of the character part?
I think they’re intertwined, so I’ll say both.
KINBERG: That’s cool. I think about science fiction sometimes the way I think about religion, which is that there’s a lot of mysterious things that we don’t know and we hold onto because of hope, because the mysteries of the universe are just too vast without religion. Science just can only explain so much at this point in our evolution and so the metaphysical and the character or personal or emotional are intertwined because it is like religion. You’re building mystery with some answers but not all the answers. You’re playing with things like consciousness and hope and identity and questions of why are we here? Are we alone? Is there life beyond this life? What does that life look like? I’m also fascinated by the way that science fiction fans treat their stories, their favorite stories, whether they be comic books or Star Wars or Star Trek, like deeply devout religious people.
Do you have a specific science fiction religion that you ascribe to?
KINBERG: Star Wars. It is real simple for me. I grew up Jewish, I am Jewish, and I grew up on Star Wars. I would say, I would say I am still… I don’t know what the noun is for Star Wars. I wish we had Trekkie. We don’t have Trekkie in Star Wars. We need a word for Star Wars, is there a word? I feel like Pablo Hidalgo, who works in Lucasfilm, he probably knows what the word is. He is like the resident everything Star Wars expert, he’s incredible. But anyway, yeah, Star Wars was it for me.
Getting to who I think is the heart of the show, and you might already know who I’m going to say it is, we don’t really know how Mitsuki’s doing at the end of this season. Will we see more of her? Because there were lines that were alluding to how she’s losing her mind and that she’s slipping away. Will she be back and be the same when we pick up with her next?
KINBERG: You don’t want the answers to those. That’s like you’re spoiling a whole new season. What I would say is I think you’re right in some ways. I don’t know that I would say she’s the heart of the show, I think she’s the soul of the show. Aneesha is the heart of the show because Aneesha is the character who evolves the most from season to season. If you think about the fact that she was living a deeply disempowered life when we met her in Season 1 all the way to being a kind of freedom fighter in Season 2, that’s a very broad arc for her. Often I think about the protagonist, especially in an ensemble having worked with something like X-Men where you’re working with lots of different characters — for me, different X-Men movies had different protagonists. It wasn’t always Wolverine or Professor X, it was just whoever had the broadest arc journey, and that’s Aneesha in this so far. But I will say, yeah, I think that Mitsuki is probably the most soulful character and the soul of the show. I will give you this: I don’t think I could imagine a show without that soul in it.
All episodes ofInvasionarenow available to stream on Apple TV+in the U.S.
