It’s been a while since Breaking Bad left our screens, but we’re just really not over the fact that Walt and Jesse are not with us on an almost weekly basis anymore.
Of course, poor Vince Gilligan is still answering questions about THAT finale and probably will be for the rest of his entire life.
However, that ending wasn’t exactly as clear cut as you may have imagined it to be. Gilligan told Entertainment Weekly in an interview that there were all kinds of possibilities.
“We had so many versions of the ending, and we really had boxed ourselves into a certain number of corners well in advance of the ending. Out of cockiness or stupidity, 16 episodes from the end, we had Walter White show up in a beard, long hair, and a new set of glasses, buying an M60 machine gun in a Denny’s parking lot. We didn’t really know how we were going to get to that story point — we didn’t even know what that meant or what Walt was going to use that machine gun for. So that was kind of ill-advised.”
Surprisingly, one of the main characters at one stage could have possibly been killed off: “In those final months and weeks of breaking the end of the Breaking Bad story, anything and everything was fair game and open for discussion. We talked a great many times about killing off Saul and we were open to it. We would have done whatever it took to come up with the best, most satisfying ending to Breaking Bad, including killing off Saul. But the more we talked about it, the more we thought, “You know, we don’t necessarily want the end of this series to be a bloodbath.”
“At one point, we talked about killing off every major character, and one particularly dark week along the way we talked about killing everybody — having some sort of Wild Bunch bloodbath of an ending. But you live with those ideas for a while and you think, “What do we need to kill all these characters for?”
However, Gilligan and crew were really careful about how they wanted to end the series: “All of my writers had a slightly different opinion — we had seven writers in a room and like eight opinions about when the show should end. Some people thought sooner, other people thought later, and we all had to keep in mind the idea that we didn’t want the show to end.
“Finding yourself on a show that’s appreciated by its intended audience is a very rare and lucky thing, so when you win the lottery like that, you don’t want to rush its conclusion; you want to keep it going as long as you can. But the thing that scared me more than anything was the idea of shooting past Breaking Bad’s expiration date, so to speak, and having people say, “Man, that show used to be good but it jumped the shark and hit its peak a long, long time ago.” That would have been the worst thing for me.”
Thankfully, he seems pretty happy with the ending, as pretty much everyone else seems to be: “I feel very fortunate to be able to say, “No, I don’t think I would change anything.” And listen, if you catch me again a year from now, maybe I’ll have awakened in the middle of the night and said, “Oh my god, I realized we missed a trick there!” But so far so good. I feel pretty good about it.”
Quotes via Entertainment Weekly.
