I've always said at the beginning of every single season of the show when I was running the show in the writers' room, "This is the last season, so let's smoke 'em if we've got 'em."

We are definitely living in the butterfly effect theory, where any change that is made in the past is going to have a very logical cause-and-effect ramification of the present.

I really am a very research-oriented writer.

I like to tell stories that have beginnings, middles and ends.

When you do 22 episodes of a network show, it's incredibly useful to have a format that gives you a jumping-off point for a story.

I'm kind of a comic book geek, but I'm not really a super hero comic book geek.

I'm not a fan of endless mystery in storytelling - I like to know where the mythology's going; I like to get there in an exciting, fast-paced way - enough that there's a really clear, aggressive direction to where it's going, to pay off mystery and reward the audiences loyalty.