If you're distressed about the Greatest Show On TV (or, in this case, Netflix) coming to an end, spare a thought for Vince Gilligan. This summer, the 46-year-old, Virginia-born creator of Breaking Bad is tasked not only with delivering the most-anticipated ending to a TV show since The Sopranos, but also the daunting task of satisfying the hordes of obsessive fans. With the series two episodes in, GQ sat down with him in London this week to talk colour details, why Skyler didn't go to the police and why the best ending isn't necessarily the happy one.

**GQ: This week's episode, "Buried", as it struck me as a great example of the way you use colours and the visual detail that goes into the show. How much do you obsess over those details?

** Vince Gilligan: Good question. I obsess a great deal more than I should over those details. I sweat the small stuff. I have a lot of help in that in that my production designer - a man named Mark Freeborn, and before him we had a previous production designer named Robb Wilson King - has always spent a lot of time on

Breaking Bad thinking about these details as well. We would talk a lot with our costume designer - first a woman named Kathleen Detoro and now a woman named Jennifer Bryan - about colour, specifically the use of colour. At the beginning of every series we would have a meeting in which I would discuss with the production designer and the costume designer about the specific palettes we would use for any given character throughout the course of the year.

We did this in microcosm in the pilot episode: for instance in the pilot, it was intentional that Walt start off very beige and khaki-ish, very milquetoast, and he would progress through that one hour of television to green and thus show his process of evolution as a character. We started to do that in macrocosm throughout particular series: we'd start Walt for example one year in red and take him to black. The one character we did not do that with was Marie, who stayed very consistent in her colour palette: she would always wear purple, to the extent of being quite monomaniacal about it. But there's quite a number of man hours spent discussing colour usage, and assigning colours to different characters and thinking in those terms.

**A lot of people fave obsessed over this in remarkable detail.

** You know, I feel so lucky that there is such an attention to detail with regards to the show. I feel humbled when I hear a great many of the theories and observations that the fans come up with. I feel undeserving because half the time some of the observations about the show speak to a level of attention to detail that we were never able to give those moments - we get a lot of credit for levels of brilliance that were unintentional at best! At best some of those moments were most likely subconscious or just dumb luck on our part.

**How does that affect you as a writer? Are you ever tempted to play on those expectations?

** In general, as much as I love the fans, as much as I appreciate them, I tend to stay away from fan reactions - particularly on the internet - because I feel that I would either consciously or unconsciously be swayed by their reactions. I feel that our best way of doing business, so to speak, throughout the life of the series, was for the writers and I to stay somewhat sequestered in our little writers' room and let ourselves be the first fans of the series - to tell the story to satisfy ourselves and not to be swayed too much by outside influences.

**What's been the hardest scene to write over five series?

** Well, there's a great expression that I learnt when I was working on The X-Files, from one of our producer-directors there: he would always say "the pain fades, but the glory remains."

My point in saying that is that a lot of the pain of coming up with these scenes in Breaking Bad are like the pains of childbirth; they tend to fade from one's memory.

Consistently one of the hardest things we were faced with as writers on the show was figuring out Skyler, Walt's wife - particularly figuring out why she would continue to stick around.

We wanted her front and centre on the show but we knew that there was a very good possibility that she would not stick around for Walt's misbehaviour, and would most likely call the police. We had a great deal of headaches in the writers' room trying to ensure that she would believably not call the police on Walt. That was a bit of "inorganic storytelling". In a perfect world, you let your characters organically tell you their wants and needs and desires and you try to write accordingly - you try not to bang square pegs into round holes, creatively speaking. But every now and then - for instance, if the character of Skyler is telling you, the writer, that she really wants to call the cops and end this madness, and you know as a writer that if she does that, your series will quickly come to an end - you have to be a bit inorganic, unfortunately. Those were some of the hardest moments: not having her bring the series to a quick and violent end.

**How do you hope people feel when they see these final episodes?

** My fondest hope for how the ending will be received is: people watch it, they think about it, they're silent for a moment, they turn the TV off, they sit there and they ponder it and they say, "I guess that's the right ending. I guess that's the way it had to be." We worked very hard toward creating an ending that was satisfying and fitting for the show, and one that felt right to us.

You know, a satisfying ending - which we strived for - is not necessarily a happy ending or a sad ending. It may contain elements of both. Satisfaction is a deeper and more profound emotion, and I'm hoping very much that people perceive this ending to be just that.

*The Final Season of Breaking Bad is available every Monday on Netflix UK. Seasons 1-5 are available on Blu-ray, DVD and Netflix UK now. *