Breaking Bad Season 5 Spoilers: Creator Vince Gilligan Talks Inspiration For Series Finale
AMC’s “Breaking Bad” will be ending next summer at the close of its fifth season. With the last season half over, creator Vince Gilligan discussed plans for the “Breaking Bad” conclusion and his inspirations in an interview with Vulture.
Gilligan was brutally honest about the finale of the show that fans and critics have adored since 2007.
“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 said while laughing at his inconvenient position with fans of the Emmy-winning series. “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.”
The creator and writing staff were working on the third to last episode when the Vulture interview took place last month, and the ending still isn’t complete, according to IGN.
“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,” Gilligan admitted. “It has evolved in the last five years and probably has some evolving left to do.”
Specifics weren’t given, but Gillian did note some endings he thought were “perfect,” as in “Casablanca.” “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.”
The saga of Walter White and his start-up drug empire will close in controversy, because as Gilligan notes, people have different perspectives on the right and wrong of the show: Should Bryan Cranston’s character get away with his crimes? But Gilligan says he's not conflicted on the matter.
“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,” he said.
Gilligan added that he doesn’t “feel any real pressure to pay off the characters, morally speaking,” noting references the show has made to “The Godfather,” and continuing “In the finale, we may give even a more overt tip of the hat.”
The entire series starts with Walter White finding himself facing his own death, but the cancer that threatened his life has since subsided. Even though medically Walt is alright, Saul is the only character who is sure to survive.
“I like to think of Saul as a cockroach in the best possible way,” explains Gilligan. “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.”
One thing that is certain in the series is that the ending will be final.
“Our story from the beginning has been designed to be close-ended,” Gilligan explains. “It’s very much designed to have a beginning, middle, and end and then to exist no more.”
The 46-year-old “Breaking Bad” creator is also a writer, director and producer of the acclaimed show. He was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for the series’ pilot episode.
Though no specific date has been confirmed, the second half of the fifth and final season of “Breaking Bad” returns to the air in the summer of 2013.
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