First off, I want to thank you for being a loyal and valued Netflix customer. You may be wondering about a few of our recent missteps. To be frank, we screwed up. And we owe you, possibly all of humanity, an apology.

It was wrong the way we handled the price increase. Yes, that hardly seems to matter now, but perhaps had we shown some humility at the time, the next series of horrible events might not have occurred.

Many of you are rightly angry at the memos that have been posted, which include such out-of-context statements as, “Let’s make them go to a hundred different websites until the bastards are so irritated that they’ll just suck it up and watch whatever crap we have streaming at the time.” We apologize. This kind of internal discussion should have never been leaked in the first place. And, though we certainly wanted to be free of all those damn red envelopes and to escape the perishing postal service, we certainly did not intend to end the human race as we know it.

Our legal team has reminded us that should the world not in fact end, it would be in our best interest to limit our liability. But considering the bloodshed, the Qwikster death squads and the loss of Montana, we would like to do some explaining. But as shepherds of the company we must balance our responsibilities. With a nod to our hard working lawyers, we will neither confirm nor deny certain rumors.

So it may or may not be true that the idea to create Qwikster came from a sentient Nazi algorithm found in a World War II era IBM by the founders of Netflix right as they were to wage war on the video store chains and eventually cable itself. Said evil algorithm may or may not have had a hand in creating the business model that has put Netflix in almost every household in America. It might, though equally might not, have been this very formula that suggested we split the companies and create Qwikster, which for its part it was happy to run human-free and which in turn made all the humans very happy because the evil equation was creeping them out.

Had we known that the new Qwikster discs would come with a virus that would infect the home networks of our subscribers (allegedly), or that with all your addresses Qwikster could formulate a networked consciousness not unlike the one found in some of the films in your very queue (allegedly), or that with this super-network it could break into secure military databases and put on line robotic factories, which could produce unstoppable killing machines (allegedly), we might have had second thoughts.

We want to thank you again for sticking with us through these trying times. And we are working hard to regain your trust. As we move toward an answer to this Qwikster kerfuffle, please know that we will continue to stream the kind of entertainment that will give you joy through this long dark night of our collective soul. And after all, aren’t we still better than Blockbuster or your local cable provider?

Thank you, and may the Qwikster Predator Drones not find you or your family.