As a viewer, (I) like shows like that. I like shows that have a breadth to them and that you can pick apart and watch again and again. I think that's fun.

What recently happened in London, what's going on in Iraq and the West Bank -- people are scared. Historically, when people have been scared and people have been nervous, there's been an uptick in science fantasy horror. It happened in the '50s with the Red Scare and the space race. . . . You're telling allegorical tales and shining a light back on society. . . . It's a way to talk about what's going on, but from a sideways angle.

They're going to be exploiting our cellular phones, our TV signals. They're going to be using our own technology against us. We're going to spotlight how we are really quite vulnerable in ways we hadn't anticipated before.

It's also one of the ways we're going to talk about [how] the aliens might even communicate or be communicating, ... One of the things we're trying to do with the whole first season is ... Molly and her red team of the threshold people are scrambling to try and find out what's going on and may frequently be wrong about what's going on, because it's not like the aliens just come down and say, 'Well, we're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this.' A lot of what we're trying to do is posit the aliens as genuinely alien, so that even struggling to communicate with them is really difficult. And because our show is going to be a slow rollout, it's going to be a while before there's even any really secondary communication with them.

Historically when people have been scared and nervous, there's been an uptick in science fantasy horror. You're telling allegorical tales and shining a light back on society.

In science fiction, historically, you're telling allegorical tales. You're shining a light back on society -- what's happening now. It's a way to talk about what's going on, but from a sideways angle.