Warning: Spoilers for all of Calls Season 1 follow. There are a lot of mysterious things that happen in Apple TV+'s Calls, including, but not limited to: everything. From Episode 1, if you weren't asking "WTF just happened?" then you're either a physicist studying multidimensional communication, or completely delusional thinking you have any grasp of the concept.

And while we got answers on Calls, there were still a few mysteries left unresolved. For example, who is "them" in Calls Episode 9, the "they/them" referenced to by a young Dr. Robert Wheating? (Reminder of the quote: "What about them. You know what they're capable of. What they'll do to our family if I shut this thing down.") You may not need to look to the stars for that answer — even if you wanted to believe it was aliens, I'm sorry to say I don't think it is — and instead look at the history books.

First things first: There is a multiverse. Period. That's just a fact we need to accept from Dr. Rachel Wheating if we are to move on with the rest of this. What is a multiverse? According to Rachel, it's another dimension that is exactly the same as this one, except for one distinct difference: time. (My Doctor Strange and Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse viewings prepared me for this.)

So let's just accept that science lesson and move on to the history portion of this piece. After brushing up on my Cold War knowledge, one "them" young Robert could have been referring to would be the Soviets. If we know that Robert was working for the government in 1978, and doing espionage projects for them through multidimensional communications... bada bing, bada boom, we're looking at the KGB intelligence. (Espionage existed on all sides of the war, with everyone trying to develop new, innovative, and even technological ways to best the other side.)

Of course, there's always the chance that Robert felt a more internal threat when speaking with his future self. As he tells himself, "You know what they're capable of. What they'll do to our family if I shut this thing down." While it's totally possible that young Robert was referring to the pain, destruction, and casualties the war would cause, what if he was referring to the government he worked for. If he shut down a machine that was helping the U.S. government during the war, they would know, right? And they could potentially come after him for not helping further any multidimensional espionage? (Remember, Rachel said she believed the government was behind the glitch at the beginning of Episode 9.)

With all of that said, I think we can rule out aliens though, right? At first I was expecting the little green guys to come down and suck up all the humans. But after nine episodes of a physics experiment gone wrong, and nary a mention of aliens, that's one thing we I am confident we can scratch off our list.

Images: Apple TV+