Arguably the best show on television these days (there’s a reason we named it the Best Television Series of the year for the third time in a row last year), Breaking Bad returns this Sunday night for the debut of Season 5. This is the beginning of the end for the show, as Season 5 has been announced as the final one – though it will air in two eight-episode blocks, with the final eight airing next year.

As the series returns, Walter White has scored quite a victory over Gus Fring. But suffice to say, it won’t all be smooth sailing for Walt and Jesse going forward. I spoke to Breaking Bad’s creator, Vince Gilligan, about his outlook on the series and the main characters, as the final season begins. Gilligan is pretty tightlipped when it comes to divulging specific plot points to come, but he did discuss the evolution of these characters and where we find them as Season 5 begins, while giving a couple of hints about where things might lead.Note: Some minor spoilers for the beginning of Season 5 follow.

Good question. The writers and I probably exerted ourselves a little more than usual to devise an ending that could have been an ending for the series as well as the season. Although I will say sometimes you end a season with a cliffhanger - certainly the season before. Season 3 ended with a big cliffhanger of Jesse firing a gun into the audience, essentially. For a couple reasons we thought to ourselves, “Let’s do something a little different here.” First of all, you try not to repeat yourself, and sometimes two cliffhangers in a row might feel in their own way slightly redundant. But also, Season 4 was very much a chess match that lasted the entirety of the season, all 13 episodes. It was a very existential chess match between Walt and Gus Fring. We knew it had to end. We couldn’t just hang fire and let it hang over the end of the season. We knew there had to be a winner, and honestly, we knew it had to be Walt. It is his show after all! All of that to say, it seemed like, structurally, it was the perfect time for a moment of victory, as it were.On top of those two reasons -- as is often the case with many TV shows, let alone Breaking Bad -- the end of any particular season, you just don’t know the future. You don’t know if you’re going to get picked up for a subsequent season. There is always a certain amount of uncertainty at the end of any particular season -- unless you’re doing ER at its height or whatever, you know? A show like that is just going to go on and on and on and on. But in this case, on a show like Breaking Bad, it gets a tiny, tiny fraction of the viewers that big, big hit shows get. You just never know the future. So all of that to say, it’s not a wise way to end things. Having said that, here we are plugging away on our final 16 episodes.That’s a very astute realization. And yes, you talk about everything. First of all, in the writers room, you talk about everything. We literally spend far too many hours trying to figure it out. None of us, my writers, are particularly chess players. There’s one guy who’s actually pretty good at it. But we keep using and reusing this chess analogy, although none of us actually play the game in any great degree. [Laughs] Certainly, I’m terrible at it. Tiddlywinks is more my speed. But I nonetheless try to take those lessons to heart, the idea of an endless number of permutations, possibilities. With every chess move, there subsequently comes into play a hundred or a thousand or millions of possible combinations of moves that could follow. You try to not drive yourself crazy thinking of that, but you think in those terms. We think a lot in terms of that particular analogy of “Walt does this, then what does Gus do next?” Or “If Walt does this, what do the police do next?” Whoever the opponent of the hour is, we think in terms what the possibilities are, laid before us. So we’ve talked through every possibility that we could conceive of. We talked about, “Okay, now is it time to create a character even scarier than Gus?” But you’ve got to say to yourself at that point, “How are we going to top not only Gus Fring, but how are we going to top Giancarlo Esposito?” That’s actually the bigger fear. Are we going to get that lucky twice? Also, like you said, who beat Gus Fring? It was Walter White, and he’s a certified bastard at this point. [Laughs] A very astute observation on your part, and I’ll say no more -- other than what I just said, I guess.