Nominating the unknown “other” in our universe as its entry point, Spielbergian science fiction continues to explore the vessels of fatherhood, unlikely heroes and human nature from a multiplicity of angles. Roy Neary’s discovery of life outside Earth renders him an obsessive, disconnected from his wife and children as he plays with his mashed potatoes in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. In WAR OF THE WORLDS, divorced, absentee dad Ray Ferrier flails to keep his son and daughter afloat, gunning his van down the highway in the throes of hostile invasion. Beginning June 19, alongside Steven Spielberg, co-executive producer and writer Mark Verheiden expands this familiar notion in TNT’s new series FALLING SKIES. As he tells Fango, the journey starts after the smoke clears.

Verheiden—whose early work at Dark Horse comics rendered the likes of Aliens, Predators and Ash into full-bore extensions of their respective franchises—was approached by Spielberg, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN scripter Robert Rodat and TNT’s Michael Wright with alien invasion on their minds, some three years ago before SKIES came to fruition. “Robert wrote the pilot, they made [it] two years ago. Things take a while to happen in television,” says Verheiden, who also wrote TIME COP, MY NAME IS BRUCE and has THE DARK TOWER movies/series up next. “[Then] last spring, in 2010, they were staffing up to make the rest of the series, another nine hours. Graham Yost, who does the show JUSTIFIED, was there at that point, but he was going back to JUSTIFIED, so he needed somebody to come in and take it over when he left. I was shown the pilot, my jaw promptly hit the floor, and I said, ‘Where do I sign?’ ”

SKIES’ meshing of Spielberg’s signatory take on the unknown with that of some ongoing postapocalyptic and revisionist history trends in series of late (à la THE WALKING DEAD or TRUE BLOOD) presented Verheiden a tangible narrative structure with which to play off of, his writing background informing his producing instincts. “When I watched the pilot, it was like ‘Where can we go from here?’ There were so many avenues to explore,” he says. “What you have is a human culture that has been essentially stripped of all of the trappings of civilization. There’s no electricity, there’s no Internet, there’s no communications, our armies have been wiped out. So you’re left with people, whom, essentially the veneer of civilization has been stripped away. Politics don’t really matter anymore. Now it’s about survival: How those people gather, the decisions they make when they gather, how they deal with the threat that’s out there, the aliens. And also how they deal with themselves.

“At its core, FALLING SKIES is about a father trying to protect his three sons. Beyond that it’s about the decisions you make as a human being,” Verheiden continues. “What are we surviving to do? What is survival about? Is this just about hanging on with our fingernails and trying to shoot a couple aliens, or is this about making a world that our kids can be in while trying to figure out how we can kick those aliens off our planet?”

The show’s survivalist thrills then, Verheiden stresses, had to be met with a certain sense of optimism; SKIES’ sense of community and spirituality is a far cry from the dog-eat-dog angry mob that booted WAR OF THE WORLDS’ Ray and his children to the curb in the midst of mankind’s systematic breakdown. “Those were the struggles and the issues that were on the table when I walked into it,” he says. “How do we take those stories and make a show that’s not bleak? It’s a show about people caring for each other. Given the bleak circumstance, the challenge was to make sure you got the sense that these people aren’t giving up. At the core of this is a group that said, ‘We’re gonna fight back,’ but the dichotomy of the character Weaver [FOURTH KIND’s Will Patton] and Tom Mason [ER’s Noah Wyle] is that they have a different operating principle on how to proceed. One of them really feels that we should be devoted 100 percent to trying to fight the aliens, because fighting them is the only way to stop the attacks from coming. Whereas Noah, his character is like, ‘Yes, we need to fight back, but we also need to protect the very finite resource of humanity that’s left; 80 percent of it has been wiped out.’ There’s a fundamental difference of opinion there that gets explored in the [early] shows [and] in later episodes.”

Mason and Weaver’s ongoing debate of militarism vs. knowledge of the enemy remains steadfast throughout FALLING SKIES, tangling emotion and strategy along the way. Any room for diplomacy for these creatures, though, is scarce, if to be had at all. “One of the conceits from the pilot and what Steven Spielberg really wanted, was aliens that are alien,” he laughs. “You don’t feel like you can walk up to these guys and say, ‘Hey, let’s sit at a round table and talk peace accords or surrenders or treaties…’ There’s no understanding of it first. Except, then, there is; as the show goes on, Tom Mason’s character says, ‘You know, they just did “X,” that’s a very human thing that other people, you know, like the Nazis, have done in the past.’ ”

Such shades of those kinds of dismal chapters in human history certainly provide their subtexts (as is seen further down the line, when Tom’s son Ben [Drew Roy] is outcast following his run-in with the enemy with a hostility reminiscent of racism) and fuse SKIES’ creature elements to recall the civil and global tensions we face, in and out of wartime. “[Tom] makes several observations—which as the series goes on, annoys Captain Weaver to no end,” Verheiden laughs. “Weaver thinks, ‘How do you find a silver lining in this?’ Well, the silver lining he’s finding is intellectual understanding. He’s discovering that you can’t really fight an enemy you absolutely can’t understand. That is one of his missions, as it turns out, to figure out what these things are.”

And just what are they? Verheiden understands the segments of SKIES’ alien species—ground-based “Skitters” and machine biped “Mechs”—as the byproduct of interior design far more practical than whimsical. “Steven Spielberg wanted a completely alien creature, so that was our goal,” Verheiden explains. “Once we got into production, things evolved in terms of how we made the Skitters happen on a week-to-week basis, but the design elements that we run past were always Steven Spielberg. We had the great fortune of having one of the world’s premiere filmmakers sort of venting what we were trying to do and, boy, that was just fantastic.”

For Verheiden, one distinction on his Hollywood collaborator’s vision remains clear; SKIES’ critters are the invaders, not the invited, and won’t be taking any awestruck cues from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS or E.T. “Oh, yeah, I would say it’s [Spielberg’s] darker side,” he laughs.

The nature of FALLING SKIES visitors might not yet be fully unveiled, but we can be sure they haven’t come to play us a song or for a round of Speak & Spell.

Watch for more FALLING SKIES coverage right here in the weeks ahead.

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MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features