Breaking Bad Creator Says Starting Final Season With Flash Forward Was "Dumbest Thing I Ever Did"

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."

Gilligan also talked about similar challenges with Breaking Bad's prequel show, Better Call Saul--particularly the character of Lalo and the fact of Saul Goodman's three wives--presented problems. Gilligan recalled, "the Lalo character...turned out beautifully, all credit to Peter Gould and the other writers...Peter said, 'I got a feeling we should show [Lalo] and he should be someone really scary.' I said, 'I don’t think we have to slavishly mention every single thing that we did.' And Peter very politely said, 'I think we do.' He was so right. If we hadn’t done the Lalo thing, we wouldn’t have had Tony Dalton, who was a tremendous asset to the show."

Gilligan also discussed his upcoming show, which is set to star Rhea Seehorn and has resumed pre-production with the end of the writer's strike. It's a drama with a science-fiction core, about a massive change affecting our contemporary world. Although it takes place in New Mexico, the show has no practical or conceptual connections to Breaking Bad. Gilligan did not share any further details, though he claimed the show will likely begin shooting this winter.