“I learned a valuable lesson from that”: Vince Gilligan’s Genius Saved Breaking Bad After One Minor Scene Almost Went Awfully Wrong
As Breaking Bad approached its series finale 10 years ago, creator Vince Gilligan had written himself into a corner trying to figure out how Walter White would use the M60 machine gun glimpsed in the opening scenes. The gun was a Chekhov’s gun that needed to be utilized, but Gilligan found himself literally banging his head against a wall searching for the right storyline.
How Did Vince Gilligan Almost Ruin the Perfect Ending to Breaking Bad?
Vince Gilligan admitted in a recent interview with SlashFilm that,
“There were times I was literally standing in the corner of the writers’ room, slowly banging my head against the wall, trying to make the ideas loose and jar them loose and make them come out of my brain. And I think everybody was a little worried about my sanity at that point.”
The writers considered having Walt break Jesse out of prison with the gun, but that would mean him mowing down cops. While Walt had become a reprehensible character, that seemed a step too far.
How Did the Writers Settle on Killing Nazis for the Finale?
Fortuitously, the fifth season had introduced Uncle Jack’s white supremacist gang. When Gilligan and the writers decided Walt could use the M60 to wipe out the Nazis as a way to save Jesse and redeem himself, Gilligan knew they had found the perfect ending.
“Who doesn’t love seeing a bunch of Nazis getting mowed down with a machine gun?” Gilligan said.
The explosive shootout let Walt go out in a blaze of tragic glory after making things right with Jesse one last time.
What Important Lesson Did Vince Gilligan Learn From the Breaking Bad Finale?
While struggling so intensely to crack the ending taught Gilligan the value of patience, it also made him realize the perils of setting up intriguing mysteries without knowing the payoff.
“That is the essence of inorganic storytelling, and I learned a valuable lesson from that, don’t do that to yourself in the future,” Gilligan reflected.
He cautions writers not to paint themselves into a corner as he did with the machine gun.
By pushing through the struggle instead of abandoning the machine gun thread altogether, Gilligan crafted one of TV’s most legendary endings. But it taught him to carefully plot out storylines from start to finish going forward, rather than setting up eye-catching mysteries without knowing the solutions.
