The people who brought Homecoming Season 2 to life knew they had a challenge ahead of them. After all, the first season of the Amazon half-hour drama was unique in so many fascinating ways: It was based on a scripted podcast, starred a very de-glammed Julia Roberts, and experimented with every aspect of production, even the shape of the frame itself. Much of that came courtesy of Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail, who directed every episode and clearly had a ball incorporating long takes and classic film scores into the noir thriller about a mysterious military program with the ability to alter memory.

As fascinating as Season 1 was, the very busy Esmail did not return for the second, and with Heidi's journey wrapped up by the end of Season 1, neither did Roberts. So that meant creators Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg were faced with the challenge of figuring out how to move forward — which meant figuring out what, exactly, Homecoming is as a show, and who would be the right collaborators to move forward with.

In approaching Season 2, the first step was finding the pieces from Season 1 that, in Horowitz's words, "we knew we wanted to work with." The first was the very last scene of Season 1, in which Audrey (Hong Chau) takes down her now-former boss Colin (Bobby Cannavale). "We had some ideas about how to unpack that scene in some unexpected ways and show that there was more going on there. We knew that we wanted to explore the character of Audrey Temple in an interesting way," he said.

From there, Horowitz said, "We had this idea for like essentially a Geist operative or someone who works with Geist, who is undercover and falls for her own cover. That started to seem to us like a great way to hook the audience." This led to the character of Jackie (Janelle Monae), whose own memory loss and true identity is central to the mysteries of the season.

Also, they knew they wanted to bring back the character of Walter Cruz (Stephan James), but also "take his character from a passive damsel-in-distress mode into something more active and maybe a little bit more dangerous. And so those were the pieces we knew we wanted to play with. It was just a question of getting them in the right order and getting the timeline worked out in a way that we thought was advantageous to us."

Was there any doubt they would bring back James, given how Walter's storyline was seemed to get something resembling a happy ending? Horowitz said they "had lots of different iterations of the season, but we kept coming back to him. It's a great way to drive the consequences of Homecoming into the story and drive the fallout. I think there's no better representative of the consequences than him as a character. So we kept gravitating back towards him."

Meanwhile, finding a new director for the season represented its own challenge, but what Horowitz said he and Bloomberg were looking for was "the same level of energy and innovation and dedication and attention to detail that Sam had, beyond any of the particular aesthetics. That's what Kyle really blew us away with. He came in with a lot of specific ideas that were great, but the main thing was the idea that like he was going to pour everything he had into this project."

Anointed new director Kyle Patrick Alvarez may not have even known that that attitude helped him get the job. "It was genuinely, for me, one of those things that as soon as I got the job, I was like, 'I'm going to put like everything I have into this, emotionally and physically.' I just cared about it a lot," he shared.

That level of commitment was necessary. Even though Alvarez had plenty of experience directing TV, taking on Homecoming Season 2 was a different beast from doing episodes of 13 Reasons Why or Tales of the City. As he observed, "There are not a lot of cases where you direct every episode... I had to remind myself every day to be, yes, I have an immense amount of respect for Micah and Eli but that also, hey, I was hired for a reason. I'm not just filling in a spot on a 10-episode order. I have to bring more of myself to this than I ever have, because that's what the job asks for. Being a good episodic director is about blending in with the style, and being good at this job was going to be the opposite of that."

Alvarez's approach, ultimately, was based on answering the same question that Horowitz and Bloomberg were trying to answer: What is Homecoming? However, he was primarily focused on figuring out what elements from Esmail's approach would be essential to telling the story, and which he should reimagine from his own perspective — because, as Alvarez told Collider, his goal was "to try not to copy," especially when it came to elements Esmail's signature long takes. "In my mind, I was like, 'I'm not going to do a long take unless it feels driven'," he said.

While Season 2 did feature some longer-than-usual shots, Alvarez did know which elements he knew needed to be exclusive to Season 1: The aspect ratio changes and the use of classic film scores.

According to Alvarez, "Those were two of my favorite things about Season 1, but... I was certain that if we used them again — we could have, but we would have been shoehorning them in, right? Season 1, those were inspired choices, and they were inspired by Heidi, what she's going through."

This especially applied to the aspect ratio changes which were used to differentiate the two different time periods in which the show was set. "If we did that here, it would turn it into a gimmick and take it away from being an inspired choice, as opposed to, 'Oh, well, we've got to find some way to make the screen change size at some point.' And as much as I love those qualities, as much as I would love to shoot something in a custom aspect ratio, it didn't feel driven by the script and the story," Alvarez said.

So, to add his own touch to the show's aesthetic, Alvarez expanded the use of split-screen. "I love split-screen, and the fact that the show [in Season 1] was using it for phone calls was cool, but it was used as an objective device in Season 1. So, now, it was like, how do we use this as a more experiential device and not also overdo it? That was a lot of fun."

When asked if he'd come back for a (still unannounced) third season, Alvarez said, "It's almost weird. I would come back, but I'd be thrilled to find out that someone else came on board. Because I think that, in a way, that is maybe the fun of the format, right? It's passing a baton — but passing the baton to someone who has reverence for what came before, as opposed to just wild, new styles each season. And so, I would be encouraging of it, but at the same time, if they were like, 'Hey, look, this worked, and do you want to come back?' I would be back in a heartbeat."

Will there even be a third season? That's an impossible question to answer in a world where all of these interviews were conducted via a remote video junket. But Horowitz did say they're definitely thinking about how the show might go forward: "We try to always leave kind of secret doors into future seasons... And I think a lot of the fun of Season 2 is things that you thought were resolved, you actually didn't understand at all. And so, same with after Season 2 — hopefully you have a feeling of completeness and it honors this journey that you and the characters went on, but at the same time, yeah, we could definitely wow you with a third season."

Bloomberg added there's a strong chance a third season would not feature Monae's character as the protagonist, but would instead revolve around a new star. He revealed, "One thing that we expect from ourselves when we start to break a new season is it needs to have its own feel. We're not a full anthology, where we're going to revamp everything completely and we're going to be talking about a new universe, but I think the idea of us not having a new person to focus on, that can feel a little bit strange. In one way or another, each season needs to stand on its own."

Homecoming Season 2 is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video. For more, check out our review of Homecoming Season 2.