I kept saying I want to do an episode that's set in the past, how do we do a period episode of Black Mirror? And simultaneously there was another idea we were thinking about and the two things sort of gelled and became San Junipero.

[One of my kids ]is not named after Aldous Huxley. I haven't even read Brave New World!

I'm trying to think overall. Some of our stories [Black Mirror], I think you're right in that they don't tend to have a message.

I mean, sometimes we do do that, The National Anthem was a caustic satire and sometimes that's the way to go with the story rather than me being particularly misanthropic.

While I was thinking about that, the military, I read a book called On Killing, about the obstacles people have to pulling the trigger in combat. So sometimes you just absorb all this stuff without realizing you were doing research.

I could worry that I'm going to bleed to death, you know, from cutting my finger on a sandwich packet, you know, if I sort of open a sandwich.

It's a barrel of laughs, isn't it? It makes The Day After look like friggin'...insert name of cheerful thing here. It was one of the things that made me really worry about worst-case scenarios. There's something impish and probably somewhat therapeutic about thinking about those things.