Editor's note: This interview contains mild spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Invasion, "First Day."

Invasion, created by Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Futures Past, Star Wars Rebels) and David Weil (Hunters), is undeniably a different kind of sci-fi drama. The Apple TV+ series follows various characters across the globe as their respective lives are upended by an unexpected alien invasion. As Earth is dealing with confusion and panic in this tumultuous situation, humanity must come together for not only answers but a means of establishing contact with these visitors from another world. The series stars Golshifteh Farahani, Shamier Anderson, Shioli Kutsuna, Firas Nassar, Billy Barratt, Azhy Robertson, Tara Moayedi, Daisuke Tsuji, and Sam Neill.

Ahead of the news that the show had been renewed for a second season on Apple TV+, Collider had the chance to speak with Kinberg about what has now become the Season 1 finale of the series and whether it was always in the plan to include that big fakeout in the last episode. He also talks about the lessons he learned from working on the X-Men franchise that he then applied to his own original creation, what surprised him most about the Mitsuki (Kutsuna) and Hinata (Rinko Kikuchi) storyline, his plans for Season 2, and more.

Collider: Before the show really premiered, you had talked about how X-Men was something that you drew from in terms of crafting this new show. With the season now out, were there more specific lessons that you took from working on that franchise that you applied to this original world?

SIMON KINBERG: Yeah. First of all, because this is essentially my first time really immersing myself in television, creating a show, writing or co-writing all but one of the episodes, I didn't have anything to draw from in terms of experience, other than talking to friends.

And the closest thing I had was the X-Men movies, because those were serialized. You count however many movies I made over 10, 15 years. It was a lot of movies when you count the Deadpool movies and Logan as well, but even just the mainline X-Men films. It taught me a lot about serialized storytelling. How you can come back to characters and [the] progression of all those characters, even though the previous movie or previous episode has closed off certain things, closed off arcs for those characters. So part of it was just the mechanics of, "How do you come back to the same characters, but give them a new dilemma?"

And then a big lesson I learned from the X-Men films, I think I kind of ... I learned it not accidentally, but I sort of discovered it, I guess, on Days of Future Past. Even though it's an ensemble, and even though in some ways in the films will reign as the main character, what I learned is you have to choose the main character. And the audience may not be aware that that's the main character. On Days of Future Past, it was very clear to me, and it was a guiding light for me that Charles was the main character, that young Charles, that McAvoy's Charles was the main character because he has the broadest emotional arc over the span of the film. Wolverine's in the most scenes, he's in both time periods, but it's really, to me, Charles's movie.

And so, that helped me with the show, because even though I have all of these perspectives and all of these stories, for me, Aneesha was actually the main character because I felt like she had the most growth over the span of the season. Again, that may not be the experience for the audience. But that was the lesson I learned from X-Men as well.

And I guess the last thing I would say is the comics [which] I loved as a kid, and I loved adapting [them] because they are so character-driven. There's so much about the intimacy and the complexity of those characters living in the world. And then there's a bunch of great action and aliens and interpersonal conflicts, primarily Charles and Erik. But it's really about characters. And it's really emotional. So that's what I was trying to capture in the show, is that same kind of grounded, intimate interpersonal drama with the backdrop of this massive science fiction thing happening.

What struck me while watching the show is that it feels very slow burn in terms of things happening in real-time. You get episodes where you're basically picking up right after the events of the one prior. It's a sci-fi series that doesn't focus on those bombastic action set pieces where it's just massive wide-scale destruction. I'm assuming that was always the goal.

KINBERG: You said it perfectly, and you said the alternative perfectly. And look, I've done the alternative. I've made big bombastic action movies, some of them better than others. And I like doing them, and I like watching them. But you're absolutely right. The intention of this was to do more of a real-time, on the ground, what it would be like to really experience an alien invasion, most especially if you were already dealing with some heavy personal stuff in your life.

Circling back to the emotional through-line of these characters, it is an alien invasion story, but the big human story that really feels like it drives a lot of the action is the love story between Mitsuki and Hinata. Was there anything about that storyline that surprised you in the development process?

KINBERG: Yeah. That for me is the most emotional story, at least as executed and maybe as written too. And perhaps it's a love story, and it's even more emotional because it's a love lost story, right? For me, the thing that's always most emotional, whether it's any story, literature, plays, movies, TV, is the feeling of yearning. And I think that that yearning, the balance of that, it's tricky. It's easier to do in a two-hour format. In a 10-hour plus format, you don't want it to feel repetitive. You don't want to get to a certain place where you just feel like you want to shake the character and say, "Go to therapy, get over it."

So, teasing out just enough of a hope that Mitsuki could actually retrieve Hinata, despite the fact that literally, in the first episode they're in, you see that Hinata's spaceship gets blown up in space, right? So like there's no chance that Hinata is alive from a logical standpoint.

It might sound cheesy, but one of the things about love is that it doesn't conform to the rational mind. It doesn't conform to logic. And that's what was such a great engine for Mitsuki's story. People are constantly saying, "Here's the logic, here's the logic. Here's the reasons why you are wrong." And she's constantly saying, "Here's the reasons why I have to be right." Which is just deeply emotional, but it's also very heroic. Because it's a great underdog heroic story. When the whole world tells you you're crazy, you're the one who's saying, "I'm saying you're crazy."

If anything surprised me about it, it was only that, and I don't say this often, so I'm not saying it sort of in a casual way, just how extraordinary Shioli's performance is. That I think is what surprised me. Not that I didn't think she had it in her, but it's just a very special performance and surprising in moments and tender in moments and violent in moments. More often than not, that tends to be people's favorite storyline in the series. And maybe that surprises me to some extent.

RELATED: 'Invasion' Renewed for Season 2 at Apple TV+

I was definitely fascinated by the finale in general just from a storytelling standpoint. Because it feels like it's not only the characters but also the audience that gets lulled into a false sense of security before what I'm assuming is the mothership shows up. Did you always know that that was going to be the planned ending?

KINBERG: Yeah. I really like when television shows, when the second to last episode is the big massive action episode. And then the last episode is the sort of aftermath for the characters episode, as opposed to going out with a huge bang. So I always knew just from a structural standpoint that Episode 9 would be our big blowout, knock the ship out of the sky, fight the aliens on the ground episode. And that Episode 10 would be what the emotional aftermath would be when you've lost the people that you love so that you can really actually live in the reality of that. And when you think you might be safe, but you're not sure entirely. And then yes, to have the sort of surprise twist cliffhanger at the end of the season be, oh no, they actually just pissed off the aliens even more.

With that in mind, I have to ask, is there a plan for a number of seasons that you have in your head? And would further seasons introduce different characters and more settings and build out the world moving forward?

KINBERG: Yes, to all of those questions. I definitely went into this with a sense in my mind of how many seasons I wanted, or I thought the story required. And I approached this first season, in some ways, like the first act of a traditional alien invasion movie. You meet the characters, you get the threat. At the very end of the first act, the mega-ship shows up. Oh, shit. Now you're into the second act, and how are we going to handle something that is seemingly insurmountable and a whole lot worse than whatever we dealt with in Act 1?

And the luxury and the reason why I wanted to do it [is] the luxury of television. As opposed to the 30 minutes you get in a movie to tell that Act 1, you have 10 hours to do that. You really get to live with those characters. You really get to live with the reality of being on the ground for that first contact and first attack wave experience.

And in going forward in seasons, as we've talked about it and imagined it, yes, there would be more characters. There would be more primary characters. There'd be a lot more secondary characters that would come into contact with our heroes from Season 1. There would be opportunities for healing, for our characters, real challenges for our characters in terms of their growth beyond season one, breakups, coming togethers, new loves, lost love. There's a lot that I would want to explore in subsequent seasons.

And then there's a lot I want to explore with the aliens in subsequent seasons. I mean, there's not a ton of alien information. There's a lot of mystery and suspense, I suppose, in Season 1. And I think in subsequent seasons, you want to pay off that mystery, build more mystery, but start to really get a sense of the aliens as characters? What do they want? What are they doing here? How do we actually stop them? And that is fodder for some really interesting storytelling, again, filtered through the lens of really emotional characters, dealing with complex psychological stuff. Whether it's guilt, or it's love, or it's remorse, or it's anger or escape, whatever it is, I think the alien story for me is always going to be told through the filter of our characters.

And again, going back to like what X-Men and the X-Men comics and [what] the best of the X-Men movies do really well — or Logan as an example, does extraordinarily well — they tell a story. It's a science fiction story, but through the lens of a very deeply human perspective.

Season 1 of Invasion is currently available to stream on Apple TV+.