Breaking Bad Creator Says Starting Final Season With Flash Forward Was "Dumbest Thing I Ever Did"
Grace Benfell
10/5/2023
Breaking Bad's final season opens with a flash forward, depicting Walter White purchasing a machine gun. Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan claimed that he and the rest of the writing team did not know why White bought the gun until frighteningly close to the finale. The opening flash forward was "was the dumbest thing I ever did," said Gilligan.In an interview with Variety, Vince Gilligan discussed writing the show up to the season finale. He wanted to open the final season "with a bang," but ending up creating a big plotting problem. He said, "It’s astounding how little we knew. There was a little bit of hubris on my part thinking we would figure it out. 'We’ve got 16 episodes until the end. We’ll get there!' We were still six or seven episodes away from the end and we still hadn’t figured out where we were going with the machine gun. I got really scared, but my writers kept me honest. They held my feet to the fire and said we needed to deal with the machine gun. But we made it up as we went."Once the team figured out where the machine gun came from, the finale began to click into place and when the finale beats of Walter White's fate took shape. Gilligan said, "It was after that point that we figured he’s got to win. He’s lost everything because of his hubris and his pride and his ego. He’s lost his family, he’s lost his soul. But he’s got to win on some level...when we figured out that Gretchen and Elliott could be the mechanism by which Walt wins and gets that money to his family, that was a good day."Continue Reading at GameSpot...
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