Vince Gilligan has promised a ‘conclusive’ ending to Breaking Bad

In an interview with Metro, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan discusses the difficulties he faced in ending the show, the weight of expectation on the finale and Walter White’s never-realised time as an Albuquerque juror.

✓ This article is spoiler free (who would really want the ending spoiled anyway), but you might want to be up to date with season 5.

Endings often feel unnatural because life doesn’t tend to sew up neatly – we saw The Sopranos in a way simply choose to avoid one for instance – do you see finales as a creative challenge and something that is difficult to do well?



Definitely. It’s very difficult but it’s been a blessing knowing exactly when Breaking Bad’s finale was set for as it’s allowed us to work toward a very specific ending for the last 16 episodes in terms of structure and parcelling out story moments, plot points, emotions etc. As you say in real life a lot of things often just peter out but that that’s what I love about storytelling, you can create what is hopefully a much more satisfying ending than you would get in real life. My writers and I worked very hard on these final eight episodes which the world has yet to see and I can tell you for sure it is an ending – people should expect a real, conclusive ending. I thought that the close of the Sopranos was very bold and very intriguing and very creative, but we are not taking the Sopranos route I can tell you that much.


If a happy ending isn’t satisfying? Is a sad one? Or something in the middle? No-one gets everything they want, that kind of thing..

Everything was on the table when we discussed our ending, we debated it for months, maybe even years. We looked at the happiest of happy endings, the saddest of sad endings, the open ending, basically every possibility. We tried to approach it in a way where we had no preconceptions about what it should be. I think it’s implicit when you write a story that you want to write a satisfying ending, but satisfaction is really removed from emotion – in a sense it operates independently from ideas of happy or sad. Some of the most satisfying endings can be very sad indeed or conversely very happy.It was complicated ending the stories of such a great number of characters though because you want to pay them all off. It took a lot of work, there were months on end where I was very fearful and anxious that we were going to end things poorly, that we were going to fail in our mission, but actually I feel pretty good about it right now and I think people are going to enjoy these final eight and indeed be very satisfied.

Did you have a clear sense of where the show was going or was most of the plot thrashed out over the writer’s table?

You would be surprised by how little we had figured out in the early days. It’s not that we always know where we’re going but that we’re driven to look back at the show’s history and mine little moments that we’ve either placed as Easter eggs or that occur by happenstance. We try to go backwards to go forwards. As a matter of fact, I believe it was in season three that we had a television commercial for Los Pollos Hermanos and if you look very closely in tiny little letters at the bottom there is a reference to Madrigal Electromotive GMBH. When we put that on there I had only the most vague idea of a parent company that may or may not wind up being important to the series. I didn’t know where it was going to go exactly but I wanted to include it and it’s one of those things where 99% of the people who watch it will never notice but for the 1% that do my writers and I thought to ourselves ‘OK, maybe we can give them a gift for having noticed this’. That’s how we approach things, we seldom in fact know where we going we just know where we’ve been and that’s what holds us in good stead.



I realise I keep talking about the writer’s room in present tense even though it wrapped in February – it’s behind me now but that makes me sad so I’m going to continue in the present!

More: A Breaking Bad pilgrimage to Twisters, the real Los Pollos Hermanos

Were there a lot of differences in opinion in the writer’s room as to how the show should end?

We have had arguments but they’re usually not particularly heated. They’re argued from a place of humility on the part of the writers, we all want what’s best for the show and the best idea is the one that wins no matter whose it is. What I love about our show is that with some of our greatest ideas I couldn’t even tell you who came up with them. It really is a sort of hive mind that is always throwing out ideas – bad ones mostly!

Willing to tell me any particularly bad ideas you had along the way?

[Laughs] Well we did have an idea for the longest time that saw Walt winding up on a jury for some petty trial in Albuquerque. It was a 12 Angry Men kind of a story where he’s the foreman and is very concerned about getting the law just right, because he still has that upstanding part of his personality despite being this nefarious drug kingpin who is going home every night to cook meth. Actually I don’t know if that would have been a bad idea it might have been a lot of fun!


11 Fairly Calm Men and 1 Extremely Angry and Homicidal Man?

Exactly.

With the show gradually becoming more of a downhill ride and getting darker, has it been harder to interpolate some humour?

We did indeed worry about that as we try to inject humour into Breaking Bad every chance we get. It’s a lesson I learned years ago – even if you’re telling the darkest story you need to level it with a little bit of light. With that in mind we always try to include some humour just so long as it’s not artificial and I’m happy to say we got more into these final eight episodes than I ever would have guessed. But they’re deadly serious at the same time, It’s a very exciting ride and the show does not go out with a whimper.

With regards to the characters you were left with heading into season 5b, did Todd (Walt’s new sous chef) feel at all in the way?

Todd is actually a very intriguing character to us and gets more so as these final eight go forward. He is a little hard to gauge and hard to read and that is on purpose. By all indications he seems to be a pretty good guy. He doesn’t seem to be motivated by anger or greed particularly, he seems fairly pleasant and polite and is the kind of hard worker you’d want to have in your corner, and yet there’s something missing in him that allows him to shoot a little kid off his motorcycle and not even blink. He’s different and hard to pin down and that is what we like about Todd.


I love how you alluded to Saul Goodman as like the last cockroach alive after a nuclear holocaust. I guess it’s in his nature to be able to wriggle out of any situation however perilous?

Saul is one of the revelations for me of this show and we never knew he would become so big when we created him. We just liked the idea of Walt having a consigliere and that this is the kind he would get: a guy who dresses like a circus clown and has this ridiculous office in a shopping centre with the constitution painted on the walls. I love Saul, he was an absolute pleasure to write for and Bob Odenkirk who plays him is a marvellous actor who only gets better with every episode produced. He’s a joy to work with, a truly funny individual and someone who deeply cares about the job he does. Saul is definitely someone that I could see a spin-off series being built around.

I’m glad you won’t be doing a film that’s nearly always a horrible idea for a TV series, but you wouldn’t rule out a spin-off then?

Not at all , I would love to see it happen provided we did it right. Peter Gould, who was one of my six writers on the show, created Saul Goodman and he understands the character as well as anyone alive. I could definitely see a spin-off series happening with Peter and seeing where it takes us. It would have to be a bit lighter than Breaking Bad, although I think there would be moments of drama and seriousness and darkness in a Saul Goodman show as well. You’ve got to have both in a Breaking Bad universe.

One last thing heading into s5 – Hank’s allegiances, do they lie with his family or with his job?

Therein lies a great deal of potential drama; the push and pull between family and duty. Hank has a great allegiance to his family and a great allegiance to the law and I definitely have an answer to that but I have to be a bit coy. All I’ll say is you’re asking the right questions.

Breaking Bad season 5 concludes in August will be available only on Netflix in the UK.