It's been nearly six years since "The Sopranos" series finale aired on HBO, and viewers still can't agree on whether it was a brilliant ending or one of the most frustrating cheats in TV history.

Fans of "Breaking Bad," which begins airing the final eight episodes of its five-season run on August 11, need not worry about such a confusing conclusion, because the series' creator, Vince Gilligan, and his writing crew have cooked up a closer that will leave us completely clued in to what's to become of chemistry teacher-turned-drug king Walter White.

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"Breaking Bad: The Fifth Season," the new Blu-ray and DVD boxed set from Sony Home Entertainment, contains the first eight episodes of the show's final season, along with a wealth of bonus materials like cast and crew commentaries on every episode, deleted scenes, outtakes, "Inside Breaking Bad" Web episodes, featurettes on Season 5's train heist scene and Jonathan Banks's Mike Ehrmantraut, an episode of "Chris Hardwick's All-Star Celebrity Bowling" with the "Breaking Bad" cast, and "Chicks 'N' Guns," a new supplemental scene shot just for the Blu-ray and DVD release.

And Gilligan talked to Yahoo! TV about what lies ahead with the last eight episodes, teasing, "We've got some stuff coming up we're very much looking forward to people seeing."

Most "Breaking Bad" fans are probably looking at these next eight episodes with a mixture of "I can't wait!" and dread, because then the series is finished. How are you feeling about the last eight episodes?

You know what? You described it very well. I am looking forward to the end, and I'm very excited for people to see it, and part of me wants them to have seen it already, but then part of me wants to savor it and wants it to last for a long time, which is actually going to be the case because the damn thing doesn't go on the air for, it feels like, another year or so. (Laughs.)

I'm sad for it to be over, but I feel like we ended it at the right time. I don't feel like we made a mistake, which I'm happy to be able to report.

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Where do the episodes stand right now? Are you editing, or are they completely finished?

We're editing, we're sound mixing, and we are color timing the episodes. I think two or three of them are already completely done. I think four of them … I lose track. We're about halfway through all of them, and with each one that we finish, I get a little sadder. It becomes a little more real to me. I'm sitting here in my office doing this interview, and I'm looking around, and I'm thinking, "Jesus, I've got to box everything up pretty soon, because we're going to be losing these offices by the end of the month," or the end of June, I guess. It's really starting to become real to me, and I'm getting pretty sad about it.

But as I said before, the one saving grace to it is that as sad as I am that it's ending, it feels right that it's ending now. If we had artificially tried to come up with another, I don't know, season or two, of stories, I really think we would have hit a point where we would start treading water creatively. I just don't want to do that to the characters, and I don't want to do that to the fans. I like stories, be they movies or TV shows or books. I like stories that know when to wrap it up, and it means a lot to me and to the writers of the show and to all the other folks who work on it to end this thing as properly as we can and in as satisfying a manner that we can. That's very important to us.

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You've said before that things have changed along the way — most famously, Jesse wasn't supposed to live past the first handful of episodes — and that the series ending has been a work in progress. At what point did you decide how the series would end? Not necessarily what would happen in the meantime, but, definitively, what would be the fate of Walt and Jesse and everyone in their lives?

You'd be surprised how late in the game we came up with the actual ending. We were still trying to figure out how the show was going to end, gosh, probably back in November or December of last year, and we started shooting these episodes in January. Actually, no, I'm sorry, we started in December. We started a couple weeks before the Christmas holiday. We were trying to figure out the ending right up to the very end, practically, right up to the beginning and the middle of production.