The Crossing does not rely heavily on depicting the future from which the time travelers fled, a storytelling strategy that was applauded on our Sci Fi Fidelity podcast here at Den of Geek. “I listened to the last podcast that you did about The Crossing,” says Dworkin, “and you had theorized after the pilot that we most likely were not going to show much if any of the future because Reece clearly asserts herself as someone with powers who’s an Apex, and we’ve proven that the future is real and we don’t need to show it. And interestingly, that was our original idea, too. When this came out of the box, we thought we were going to tell this whole story from the point of view of this time and just sell the future through what people were saying.”

Once they introduced the Apex and specifically Reece (played by Natalie Martinez of Under the Dome) who fled to the past with a common child in her care, some glimpses of her past — in the future — were needed. “In deciding how much of the future to show, that really revolves around character because Reece had this rich back story, and her back story was the future,” says Beattie. “But we wanted to explore her character because the audience investment in your character is really important, especially in a show that’s so expansive like our show and has such as a huge cast of characters in many arenas of story to explore. So it was out of a desire to explore her character that we got into the future.”

Reece is unique among Apex because of her love for Leah, a common child who has Mantle’s disease and who can only be kept alive through regular infusions of her adoptive mother’s Apex blood. “We’re operating on this notion that you can engineer people to do certain things and you can acculturate them to think certain ways, but on some level in some people there’s still going to be things you can’t engineer out of them,” explains Dworkin. “And in the case of Reece it’s the love for a child.”

Not everyone has come back to the “long peace” to escape, however, and one of the key mysteries of The Crossing surrounds an earlier migration by travelers with a secret mission that is yet to be revealed. “You’ll definitely be finding out more about the agenda of the earlier migration in the next episode,” promises Dworkin. “They’re looking to change something, but the second migration — the people in the camp — those people for the most part are just here to seek peace and a more hopeful way of life… most of them.”

Since the earlier migration presumably is made up only of normal humans, the question arises: don’t the Apex have access to time travel? “Without spoiling what’s to come, I don’t think we can talk too much about the time travel itself and how it was invented and how many people have access to it, but I would just say that the answer is no, the Apex can’t time travel as easily as the normal humans,” answers Beattie, teasing a reveal to come.