Cranston has remained in the odd position of both author and consumer of Breaking Bad. He’s an unusually involved actor, directing three episodes himself (including this summer’s premiere) and acting as a producer since season four. His fellow actors say they have come to rely on his almost coachlike leadership, by both example and fiat: Before each season, he would send out a group e-mail exhorting the ensemble to get ready to do their best work. His overall message to his fellow actors, says Dean Norris, who plays Hank, delivered by example day after day, is clear: “That every second in front of the camera is the most important second you have.” Leadership, on a show as frequently grim as Breaking Bad, has also meant knowing when it’s necessary to lighten the mood—particularly with the use of prosthetic phalluses, of which the show’s prop department apparently had a disproportionate supply for a basic-cable production.

“Remember, I spent six years seeing the man in his underwear. Sometimes less than his underwear,” says Anna Gunn, who plays Walt’s wife, Skyler. “He would constantly try to appear with various…things on his…situation.”

“There’s nothing better than a good penis for a laugh,” the man himself says.

At the same time, Cranston has followed Walter White much like the rest of us, in single-episode increments. He refused to see scripts, at least those he’s not directing, until four or five days before shooting—a policy that continued right up until the end: “I was enjoying it too much. Asking how it ends would have been like saying, ’All right, tell me what you got me for my birthday and then I’ll open it.’”

That left him with the same questions, speculations, and excited expectations as any viewer.

“I had notions,” he says, of The End. “Like, ‘What if he created this toxic world around him and, because of his actions, everybody he loved died and he had to stay alive?’ But then I’d think, ‘He’s wrought so much, he has to die. Doesn’t he?’ But if he dies, what does he die of? Maybe he dies of cancer. After all this other danger! But my true answer of how I wanted it to end, my honest answer, is this: however Vince Gilligan wants it to end.”

The offices of Breaking Bad have, for the past six years, been located in an almost aggressively nondescript building on a bright and barren corner of Burbank, across from a 7-Eleven. There, among the dentists and private investigators listed on the lobby directory, you will find a suite assigned to Delphi Information Sciences Corp. It was the name of the previous tenant, but sufficiently oblique and ominous to retain for the show’s use. It may be the power of association, but everything in the building has a way of taking on a surreal, Breaking Bad–like cast: The elevator doors open on a nervous-looking man hauling a box of documents; a work crew silently paints the hallway trim as though cleaning up after a terrible crime.

Behind the door for Delphi Information Sciences Corp., the Breaking Bad offices are in the process of being emptied. The corkboards in the writers’ room, once fluttering with index cards carefully printed with each twist and turn of Walter White’s descent, are empty. Elsewhere on the wall there are a few remnants: a large map of Albuquerque; detailed plans for Walt’s meth “super lab”; an adoring fan letter from Henry Winkler, the Fonz himself—the circuit of TV history closing in an electric sizzle of cool. On a bookshelf sits a very specialized reference library—Money Laundering, Methland, Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture—as well as a Play-Doh model of one of season two’s most indelible images: a tortoise carrying a severed mustachioed head. One floor up, in an editing suite, a single tantalizing frame of the show’s final episode is frozen on the monitors.

For a man responsible for some of the grisliest moments to ever appear on TV, Vince Gilligan is startlingly genteel. Even after six years of the considerable burdens of showrunning, his face remains poised at some pivot point between Virginia gentleman and freshman film student with a huge backpack strapped on both shoulders. If there’s a feel here of the carnival being packed up, there’s also a current of excitement—a distinct, promising sense of having nailed it.

“Maybe I’m too close to it, but I think these final eight episodes have a real chance of satisfying…not everybody—there’s no way to satisfy every last viewer—but the bulk of our viewers,” Gilligan says. “I certainly hope so. They satisfy me, and that’s saying a lot.”

The Breaking Bad writers’ room was known as one of the more collaborative in television. (“The worst thing the French ever gave us was the auteur theory,” Gilligan said. “It’s horseshit.”) That spirit applied even to crafting The End, the exact nature of which was undecided for longer than you might expect. “A lot was still in play. You’d be surprised at how much,” he says. “There were moments that we thought would be very provocative and evocative and interesting, but we didn’t know their exact full meaning yet. We figured we’d make it up later.”

As had happened several times over the course of seasons, the group had set themselves a destination—in the first episode of season five, a flash-forward, we see Walt far from home, with a full head of hair, on his fifty-second birthday—without a clear sense of how they were going to get there. Think of it as Chekhov, with his imprecation about guns appearing in the first act needing to be fired by the third, as hair-raising hedge against writer’s block. In this case, the gun was entirely literal: an M60 assault weapon in Walt’s trunk.

Endings have been among the most contentious aspects of this golden age of cable drama: from the open-ended (The Sopranos) to the generally disappointing (season five of The Wire) to the shows that have not been allowed an ending at all (Deadwood). For Breaking Bad, which always had the tightest narrative intent of all these shows, getting it right may even be more important. The result, not to put too fine a point on it, will determine where the show ultimately ranks in the discussion of the best ever on TV.