He was right about now-former British Prime Minister David Cameron (allegedly) engaging in intimate relations with a member of the Suidae family of even-toed ungulates, but let’s hope that Black Mirror series creator Charlie Brooker’s newest prediction is less prescient. In a new interview with The Daily Beast, Brooker was asked about his thoughts on the upcoming American presidential election. He is—perhaps unsurprisingly, given his resume—less than optimistic:
“I find it fucking terrifying, because I think Trump’s going to win. I’m working on whether I need to build a bunker or not,” he says. “Hello, we just went through Brexit! Of course Trump’s going to win. I’m having to imagine he’s already won and that he can’t quite achieve all of the fucking horrible things that he wants to do.”
He’s got reason to be worried, too, considering that he’s got some projects coming up in the U.S.—including an American version of Black Mirror—that will require him to spend more time here. Not that things are much better back at home in the U.K., where the recent Brexit vote has stirred up similar anti-immigration sentiments among disenfranchised conservatives as Trump’s campaign has in the U.S.
Lending further credence to the idea that “Black Mirror did it” is the new, dystopian “Simpsons did it,” Brooker further expresses his dismay at seeing the events of the Black Mirror episode ‘The Waldo Moment,” about a depressed comedian who mounts a crude campaign for office as a joke only to find his nihilistic viewpoints quite popular, seemingly unfolding before his very eyes. “At the time I thought that was one I didn’t nail, I didn’t get the stakes right,” he says. “ And then you look at it now and go, ‘Fuck me—that’s Trump.’”
At the time, The A.V. Club found the episode unrealistic, saying, “There’s just not enough there to suggest that Waldo’s moment would last much longer than 15 minutes.” Here’s hoping we were right, and Brooker is wrong—for once.