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Vince Gilligan talks about the end of Walter White's story.
Note: Obviously, Breaking Bad’s creator isn’t going to give away anything specific about how his show will end, but if you are hyper-sensitive to him even discussing other endings he likes and potential influences and such… well, then you shouldn’t read this, I suppose!
There is plenty to look forward to on TV this year, but arguably the most important and highly-anticipated scripted TV series event will be the conclusion to Breaking Bad. In a new interview with Vulture, the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, discusses the challenges of coming up with a satisfying ending for the series, which will conclude with eight episodes this summer.
Vulture spoke to Gilligan last month as he and his writing staff were writing the third to last episode and Gilligan laughed, “We’re not gonna please everyone, we’re not gonna please everyone… This is what I keep telling myself so I can sleep at night.” Gilligan – aware of the divisive nature of endings to long-running serialized shows like The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica and Lost – notes, “It’s going to be polarizing no matter how you slice it, but you don’t want 10 percent to say it was great and 90 percent to say it sucked ass. You want those numbers to be reversed.”
Gilligan notes that the ending for the show has not been set in stone, changing in his mind through the years as Walter and the show has evolved. “I look back at the life of the series and realize I cycled through so many possible endings, it would be disingenuous to say I had always had it figured out. It has evolved in the last five years and probably has some evolving left to do.” While he gives no specific hints at how things will play out, he does give the classic film Casablanca as the example of an ending he thinks was “pretty perfect.” “I’m not saying we’re going to approach that or reach in that direction. Our story doesn’t line up [with Casablanca]. But we’re looking for that kind of satisfaction.”
While fans may debate what the “right” ending for Walter White is and whether he should get away with his crimes or not, Gilligan says he isn’t having that kind of back and forth. “I’m very cornball in my own view of the world. It just makes sense to me that bad people should get punished and good people should be rewarded. I know it doesn’t work like that in real life, but there’s always that yearning.” That being said, Gilligan notes that when it comes to Breaking Bad, “Oddly enough, I don’t feel any real pressure to pay off the characters, morally speaking.” Gilligan also acknowledges the show’s references to The Godfather – “We crib from them shamelessly” and says, “In the finale, we may give even a more overt tip of the hat.”
While Gilligan was tightlipped on the fates of Walt, Jesse, Skylar, Hank and most of the Breaking Bad characters, he did imply at least one character might make it out (relatively) okay. “I like to think of Saul as a cockroach in the best possible way. This is a guy who’s going to survive while the rest of us have been nuked into annihilation. He’ll be the worst-dressed cockroach in the world.”
Gilligan also says that the final Breaking Bad episode is definitively the end of the story and that there won’t be any notion of a movie or any other continuation ever occurring. “Our story from the beginning has been designed to be close-ended. It’s very much designed to have a beginning, middle, and end and then to exist no more.
