Vince Gilligan Discusses Mistakes He Made In The Writing Of Breaking Bad

There are still plenty of people who haven’t made it to the end of Breaking Bad, so I’m not going to spoil it for you. Suffice to say, it almost turned out VERY differently.

In an interview with EW that was published overnight, the series’ showrunner Vince Gilligan — who’s heading to Australia next month — reveals that he only properly started thinking about the finale in season four. “‘How many more seasons do we have?’ That was a question I began to ask in season four,” he says. “And it was the focus of a great deal of discussion starting in season four, but there was not a great deal of clarity surrounding that discussion. 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.”

With so many versions of the ending in mind, Gilligan concedes he and his writers made a few mistakes — which ended up boxing them in. “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. I wouldn’t recommend to my fellow showrunners doing that unless you really know where it’s all headed. That led to a great many dark nights of the soul, many days in the writer’s room where I was like, ‘We’re never going to get there.’ … We had so many crazy ideas. But the crazier ideas went away bit by bit and step by step as we kept filling in the blanks of each episode.”

In fact, there was one point where they talked about just killing everyone off. “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,” he says. 

“But you live with those ideas for a while and you think, ‘What do we need to kill all these characters for? Just because an ending is dramatic or perhaps overly dramatic does not ensure that it will be satisfying.’ We thought to ourselves, ‘Let’s just go with what feels right to us.’ And there’s no mathematics to this. You just have to feel your way through it blindly and go with your gut, and that’s what we did.

“In the case of Saul, we thought to ourselves, ‘Saul Goodman is kind of like a cockroach, in the sense that he’s probably going to survive all nuclear wars and he’ll still be out there somewhere after mankind has become extinct. He’s a survivor and therefore it’d be weird if he didn’t survive.'”

To read the full interview, which includes many spoilers, click here.