That’s an interesting thing to start writing to, and I became increasingly more interested in the idea of radicalization inside nascent religions. There’s a passivity to the Guilty Remnant that was very difficult to write. I myself as a writer was asking, “Why are they so passive?” Meg basically became the voice of that, and I think a lot of it was a byproduct of all the questions Liv was asking as an actress: “Why am I smoking? Why am I not talking?”

Between Seasons 1 and 2, when it came time to tell Liv what her arc was, I was like, “I would like you to just read the script for episode three, which is going to be the first episode Meg appears in. I want you to see what she does and how she behaves, and then we’ll talk.” And she was like, “O.K., cool.” That’s kind of the way we managed it. She knew we wouldn’t see Meg again until toward the very end of the season, bolstered by an episode that would be wall-to-wall Meg, really explaining a lot of these missing pieces. And she embraced all that stuff and completely and totally went with it, in my opinion, to incredible effect.

I’ve noticed that, while Kevin is still the closest the show has to a main character, the show’s women really became dominant this season. Was this a conscious choice or did it happen organically as part of the story you wanted to tell? What are you trying to explore with the show in terms of gender roles and the family? — Angela, Vienna, Va.

It wasn’t a conscious choice in the sense of, we all came into the writers’ room and we said we’re going to explore gender roles and the family and we’re really going to get into them. I’m oversimplifying it by saying that there’s a Mars/Venus to the show, in terms of, we talk a lot about the way men, in general, would handle living in a post-departure world, and the way women, in general, would handle the post-departure world. Again, I’m oversimplifying but men, for the most part, are going to say, “Well, that happened. That sucked. Let’s get on with it. And if I can go and break stuff and hit things, that will probably help me move through this.” Whereas women are more likely to say, “I’m processing this thing emotionally on a level that is much more intense,” and we’re going to dramatize it that way. But the more that we talked about that, the more that it felt like we were selling both genders short, and wouldn’t it be interesting to bleed one thing into the other.

I’ve always had a lot of difficulty writing women, because my experience has been as a man and I’m nervous that I’m going to [mess] things up or offend someone or, most importantly, present a female character in an inauthentic way. To that sense, we’ve got an amazingly powerful female presence in the room, personified first and foremost by [the writers] Jacqui Hoyt who was on both seasons; Kath Lingenfelter, who was on the show in its first year; and then Monica Beletsky, who was a “Friday Night Lights” writer, who was also on the staff this year. But then most fundamentally by [the executive producer and frequent director] Mimi Leder, who is another show runner in many ways, in addition to myself and Perrotta. And the actors. That’s really what it boils down to. I look to them to really give me guidance as to how I design those characters.

I just feel like, for some reason, because of what the subject matter of this show is, the women are really interesting to me in terms of the way they process this world and deal with it.