Vince Gilligan reflects on “the dumbest thing” he did while making Breaking Bad
Gilligan, looking back at the Breaking Bad finale, reveals the worst instance of painting themselves into a corner that the show's writers ever pulled
Aux News Breaking Bad
Most people are in pretty firm agreement that “Felina,” the final episode of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, is a fairly excellent final episode, giving some measure of resolution, and maybe even a touch of reluctant redemption, to the story of broke bad chemistry teacher Walter White. Certainly, it’s one of the most poignant and dramatic television episodes ever produced in which a major plot point hinges entirely on a remote-operated machine gun firing wildly and killing an entire room full of bad guys while our heroes hit the decks.
Now, Vince Gilligan has revealed that he considers the machine gun to be “the dumbest thing” he did in the entire running of the celebrated show—although not necessarily in the way you might assume. (I.e., that the final plot resolution of one of the most bracing character studies of modern television could have been designed by Wile E. Coyote.) No, a recent Variety interview, timed to the 10th anniversary of the finale, reveals that Gilligan actually had that damn thing hanging over his head for an entire season of TV.
The biggest single fear we had was what to do with that damn machine gun. At the beginning of the final run of 16 episodes, we had Walt buy a machine gun in the trunk of a Cadillac. That was the thing I remember freaking us out the most because we did that, I committed to that. One of the dumbest things I’ve ever done in my career was committing to the idea of Walter White buying a machine gun when we did not know what he was going to do with it. We had no clue. There were literally months on end when I was completely freaked out. We’d be in the writers room’ for a full day, and I’d be slowly banging my head against the wall — not enough to hurt myself but just enough to jar the ideas loose. And everybody was kind of worried about me.
We would argue that Gilligan’s eventual solution—trunk-mounted remote-control murder gun—was not, perhaps, the most elegant fix to such a problem. But, as he noted, it did unlock the basic idea that Walt had to win, in the end, somehow—even if only by finding a way to take care of his family, and go out on his own terms.
Elsewhere in the interview, Gilligan—always a great read—also talked through his thoughts on a (very) hypothetical Walt Jr. show, and revealed the basic shape of what he and Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn will be doing together next.
81 Comments
So the going exchange rate is three AV Club articles for one Variety article?
Ironic given that it’s called Variety.
“We would argue that Gilligan’s eventual solution—trunk-mounted remote-control murder gun—was not, perhaps, the most elegant fix to such a problem.”Well, thank Christ you knocked down THAT straw man.
Yeah, that really doesn’t surprise me. I’ve always thought that the machine gun swivel was a bit of a letdown of a solution, in general. I just think that it would have been more thematically and narratively consistent for him to use chemistry to solve the final problem. A swivel isn’t even tangentially all that ingenious or anything. I mean, it was fine. The ending still plays regardless. It’s the downside to the whole never-make-a-plan kind of writing that the show seemed to thrive on for most of it’s run. The real surprise is that they didn’t box themselves in sooner, really.
You say that, but the detail they don’t get into often is that the swivel only worked due to a surplus of valence electrons.
Isn’t that more physics than chemistry, though?Walt used did chemistry to solve the Lydia problem.
No, but they’re often intertwined.
Mechanics. There was no really science involved, which is what made the ending feel a bit off. I’d have loved to see him spike a batch of the Nazis’ meth and get them killed by their buyer when all of their customers die, and he rescues Jesse in the firefight.
Doubt any dealer cares if their customers die (hence all the fentanyl) but maybe spiked meth would have gotten Jack’s gang in trouble with Aryan Brotherhood bosses, or something.
he just science-d the shit of it
Ehhhh… I kinda like that it underlines how straight-up LUCKY Walt got so often. No, it’s not ingenious. But then neither is Walt, honestly. I loved the show but there is a weird sort of anti-hero worship it engendered in some fans.
To be clear, I am not one of those people. By about midway, Walt is a villain, pure and simple. I’m just talking more about leveraging strengths rather than kind of action-movie-ing his way into a slightly redemptive end. Honestly, I prefer Better Call Saul as a better structured show, regardless.
I also prefer BCS overall, it’s more consistent, but I’d say the dramatic highs of BB are slightly higher.
I would say lucky and clever. The chemistry obviously was the key to his “success” but a lot of times he’d come out on top/survive just because he was smart. I also have to laugh at some of Walt’s luck. I loved the show but the bit where cartoonish ax-murdering twins abort a revenge killing at the last possible seconds because they receive a text that says “chickens.” is probably it’s low point.
I spent the last 5 minutes trying to figure out an Amish Roadkill joke here before I remembered that like *maybe* a handful of 90s ECW fans will even get the fucking thing.Time is a flat circle.DORING AND ROADKILL WITH THE BUGGY BANG!!!! OH MY GOD!!!!!!!
Justice for the Angry Amish Chicken Plucker! Brazos!
One of my proudest accomplishments in the digital world was creating an Amish Roadkill for WWE 2k22 that got downloaded about a dozen times.Followed closely by that time I made a Grizzly Redwood for WWE 2k19…. I like goofy wrestling.
Balls Mahoney and Axl Rotten would have taken them
They’d have to get past the Gangstas first.NEW JACK WITH A NINTENDO TO THE SKULL OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!
The twins were one of my least favorite plot points, and the fact that they got taken out in a way that didn’t even affect Walt was a) funny, and b) annoying that we had to deal with their story.
Yeah, it wasn’t the story that bothered me it was their background and presentation. Replace comically silent “lets introduce them with a weird death cult crawl that goes on forever” twins with like, two actors bouncing off each other during that whole plotline and the show goes up a letter grade.
So long as the brothers aren’t AI generated I guess, then it would wash out.
Walt was a straight up genius, but the amount he accomplished through sheer dumb luck, especially in the early seasons, was amazing!
I thought it was sick though.
it was sick.
watching in real time, episode to episode, it ticked every box. Walt dies in a lab and Jesse is screaming free. Felt good at the time.
The more cerebral ending would’ve been to just sort of imply the machine gun was in the trunk and then fade to black and just assume that obviously Walter died and Jessie lived or whatever.But Gilligan wimped out cause TV viewers are philistines who hate an ambiguous ending.
The better ending would’ve been Walt, in his Y-fronts, cammed- and oiled-up like Arnie in Commando, hosing down Meth Damon’s gang and tossing off one-liners.
Weird Al, as usual, ahead of his time in 1989
Ambiguous endings are for cowards who don’t know how to properly stick the landing.
lol Jesus you’re pretentious
I think the OP was being sarcastic and shitting on the end of the Sopranos
in their defense Sopranos’ cut to black was famously abrupt, people thought the cable went out.so “fade to black” wasn’t the right phrasing for a Sopranos joke.
And you’re a loser who’s obsessed with trans porn.
It was supposed to sound pretentious. That was supposed to be the joke.It was meant to make fun of the Sopranos ending.Zero stars. Not my best work.
Lol sorry, my bad.
Nah. If nobody gets a joke, that’s not on you, it’s me.
This reply is too mature and well-reasoned for the internet.
Someone could at least call someone else a cuck, for crying out loud.
There’s still time!(I laughed at this comment for a significant duration btw)
Pretentious doesn’t mean wrong, though.
“cerebral”“just sort of”“or whatever”What’s so cerebral about being too lazy and/or cowardly to make a narrative choice? The way you’re describing this makes it evident that there’s no great intellectual achievement in being needlessly ambiguous, it’s just a dumb trick to make your show seem deeper than it ever was.
…Wait, the post wasn’t a joke about the ending of The Sopranos?
Oh, I get it now. Wasn’t quite specific enough for me (I thought it could refer to the end of Inception).
I was making fun of the Sopranos ending.I thought about spelling that out, but I hoped it was obvious.
Zero stars. Not my best work.
Nah dude – you nailed the joke. People who replied to you either never watched Sopranos or totally whiffed.
That’s the dumbest fucking ending I’ve ever heard suggested lmao. Thank God you won’t be making any TV shows.
Also, the finale makes a big deal out of Walt leaving the watch Jesse gave him for his birthday on a pay phone, for no apparent reason, because he hadn’t been wearing it in the machine gun flashforward. And honestly, who the hell would have cared if they hadn’t gone out of their way to point it out?
Kudos for that scene because that watch is expensive (from their site $7,800.00) and for Walt to leave it on the payphone was his way of showing he doesn’t care about Jesse.
At the time, a lot of people would have cared. When the show was airing, there were people paying attention to every minor detail, and analyzing what they might mean. Often on this very site! So it’s likely that people were theorizing about the missing watch as soon as that scene aired.
If only the show had actually ended with the finale of the first half, where Walt gets in the van and disappears forever… That ending would’ve required massive cojones…
No one wants an ending where Neo Nazis appear to win.
cue to Doom Generation
Nice deep cut there.
Or if he’d just slowly wasted away in the cabin. For a minute I thought they might actually do that.
For some time after BrBa ended, a popular interpretation was that Walt was arrested in the car he entered outside the New Hampshire bar, and everything in the series finale after the keys magically fell from the visor was a wish fulfillment fantasy.Of course, this has since been contradicted many times over by both El Camino and the Gene scenes in Better Call Saul, which make it clear that the events of Felina happened exactly as depicted.I like the catharsis of the “machine gunning Nazis” ending, but I still think Walt achieves too much of happy Return of the Jedi ending given how dark everyone else’s fate is within the universe.
I feel like most every major character has an equal fate to Walt. Jesse suffers a ton but ends up free in Alaska with a new start. Saul ends up in jail but gets his soul back and seems at peace. Walt’s family is publicly scorned but he’s found a way to leave them money. No one’s truly well off but they’re also not all in hell.
Yeah, I remember hearing that theory.I agree overall. Walt is able to provide some relief to his family and to Jesse. I think that’s good for those characters, but I also think it gives him more of a victory than he deserved. The alternative was probably just too bleak for a TV show though.
Nah. We got to have our cake and eat it too.
If you wanted the slowly-wasting-away-in-a-cabin ending, we know how that plays out.
It isn’t the ‘canon’ final episode, but… y’know, whatever? We saw it, there was nothing more to add to it.
Where’s the article about all the other shows that had the balls to end with an automated rotating machine gun wasting a bunch of dudes?They don’t exist, because only one show had said balls.
Well, The Sopranos too. It just happens off screen after the black out.
Don’t forget about the alien invasion after the cut to black – oh and when my grandfather was in the merchants back in the 50’s, he was given massive gold stash invested that all into apple and ibm. I mean, that’s my head canon about what happens after the cut to black. No big deal.
Laverne and Shirley ended that way too. People just don’t talk about it much.
Squiggy finally had enough.
Lenny was so traumatized he changed his name to Chuck.
And dedicated the remainder of his life to the law, even if it was mostly corporate stuff.
David St. McGill: “No, we’re not gonna fucking do Sandpiper!”
Explains a lot about Chuck…
“Laverne & Empty Space where Shirley Was”Though I’d been following the well-reported events of Cindy Williams’ departure, I’d stopped watching the show not long after it moved to LA. So I still wasn’t quite prepared not long ago when I finally watched one of the last episodes, and the opening credits still said “Laverne & Shirley” but it was all Laverne, just…doing things alone.
Hey now, Metastasis did it too! (Metastasis being the Columbian copy of Breaking Bad, line for line on the script.)
Aliens had its automated machine gun in the middle of its run, which is even better! And controlled by a Grid Compass laptop (an actual piece of tech from the mid-1980s that looked, and still looks, pretty futuristic in a grim functional way so perfect for the setting).
I would put the shoplifting and geode-collecting way above the machine gun, Vince. The machine gun actually advanced the plot.
I both heartily agree and kinda disagree. As someone who studies and teaches TV writing it goes against everything to have character development go nowhere/lack greater series impact. BUT. Part of me likes character details that don’t “go” anywhere and just form part of the fabric of a characterization. I think the geode thing fits that perfectly. The shoplifting is harder to wave away given the thematic criminal connection and her marriage to a cop.
Part of me likes character details that don’t “go” anywhere and just
form part of the fabric of a characterization. I think the geode thing
fits that perfectly. The shoplifting is harder to wave away given the
thematic criminal connection and her marriage to a cop.
I don’t think including either was terrible, but went on too long and then just petered out. There are only so many scenes of geodes being discussed that we needed.
Only focusing on character traits that advance the plot is how idiots have spent decades turning good Stephen King books into shitty movies.
Although I mostly agree, I would argue that TV has a much greater luxury of time to develop character traits that don’t have immediate impact on plot. You really can’t afford to fuck around on tertiary characterization in a 90 minute movie. (Which is a solid argument for not turning 700 page novels into 90 minute movies, but that’s tangential.)Also, FWIW, try to be a little charitable to writers who adapt novels into movies. I really loathed a lot of the choices in the recent It adaptations so it’s funny for me to advise charity but still, adaptation is challenging work.
I feel like some Russian dude name Anton, can’t remember his last name, had something to say about guns in plays that Gilliam should have considered ahead of time
Pavel. His name was Pavel.
“Da! , the nuclear wessel in first act MUST be used in third!”
I liked the automated machine gun. It was like a bizarre callback to all that “yay, science!” stuff that was such a core part of the series in its first half. Felt like a thing that they could do that a crime series lacking that background could not.
You could always just ignore it. Like anyone would be sitting there after the end of the series thinking “Oh hey, what about that machine gun he bought earlier in the season?”