I'm used to something where you have to create an entire world, and I do like that process. I like getting the audience to believe that outside of the frame of your television set, there's a whole real world that exists, that is different from your day-to-day reality.

And your typical TV series, you've got your police station, your apartment, the hospital, the starship, or whatever it is, and you're constantly going back to those sets and shooting, which saves you a lot of money and time. You can do that faster because you become really familiar with it and you become really good at it.

Now I know that if I'm in a fight or a big argument with executives or the studio or whoever, and it's getting to a point where it's starting to get bad, I don't have to have the fear of, "Am I strong enough to see this through? Would I really make a stand here? Would I really quit over this issue?" And I know in my heart that there is a place where I would walk away. I don't have to make it about my ego. I don't have to make it about whether I'm being strong enough or tough enough.

When I finally got my break in TV, as a staff writer, I always wanted to be at the top of that pyramid. I always wanted to make the decisions. I always wanted to be the one that was saying, "This is what the show is, and this is what the show is not. This is where we're going. It's going to be this kind of series." It was just something I always had my eye on, when I started in the business.

The flower inside the fruit that is both its parent and its child. Decadent as ancestors. The portal and that which passes. Nuclear devices activated, and the machine keeps pushing time through the cogs, like paste into strings into paste again, and only the machine keeps using time to make time to make time. And when the machine stops, time was an illusion that we created free will.

I grew up as a fan of the original Star Trek series. When I was in middle school, I think in the 6th grade, I remember going to a book fair and finding a book called The Making of Star Trek, by Stephen Whitfield, and I grabbed it and took and home and just devoured it, over and over again. It was a really influential book. It was very nuts and bolts.

When Kirk dies it was very emotional and very strange, in the moment and all the way through the process. I'd read it in the script and I'd always be struck by what I'd just done and what we were doing, and that this was my childhood hero and I was writing his death.