Anger is not a real feeling. Every time in my life I've ever been angry, it's because I was scared, or because I was sad and I didn't know it. Anger doesn't just come out of a vacuum.

Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world.

At some point, you can't take a risk just to take a risk because that's a betrayal, in and of itself.

You can't just come out and do the same moves that you always do because someone just basically came into the center of the ring and spun around on their head and did a back flip.

But I do think that, when you slow the conveyor belt down, the quality control tends to go up. You have a lot more time between seasons to talk about what worked and what didn't work, and plan for the future. And the pacing of the storytelling, particularly for on-going serialized dramas, means that you don't need to do non-essential episodes, just because you have to fill this pre-existing schedule.

I think that we, as writers, get excited by risk. When we are feeling comfortable and familiar, I wouldn't say that we get bored, but the energy in the room gets flat. When we're most excited and when the show is the most fun, it's when we're duking things out.

Hindsight is 20/20, but the moral of the writing for me is that when you're feeling very scared and nervous about something and you're fairly convinced that it could be a massive disaster, that's exactly the idea that you should do.