Vince Gilligan Wept Writing ‘Breaking Bad’ Finale

Breaking Bad fans, take heart: The finale is apparently really good, gauging by creator Vince Gilligan’s reaction while writing it.

“I actually cried writing the end -– ‘The end’ on the last episode. I haven’t since then,” Gilligan admitted in a recent interview.

At a recent panel to benefit 826LA at Largo in Los Angeles, Gilligan opened up about the process of writing the Breaking Bad finale, and his comments seem to indicate that the series will end in an emotionally satisfying way for its long-suffering fans.

“We sat around in the writer’s room for thousands of man hours playing a game of chess, saying, ‘If we move the character from here to here to here, what happens? What’s the counter-move?'” Gilligan said. “Essentially we said, ‘What are all the possible endings we can come up with?’ And then, ‘What is the ending that satisfies us the most?'”

This alleviates some of my own concern as a Breaking Bad fan, having long wondered whether Gilligan even knew where he was going with the series. Recent comments with USA Todaydidn’t really assuage my fears.

Gilligan said he spent “a lot of sleepless nights” working on the finale, saying that his biggest fear was that he would “wake up one day two years from now or five years from now saying, ‘Oh my god, I just realized how we should have ended it.'”

Doesn’t actually inspire much confidence, does it?

But if there’s one beacon of hope, it’s that the ending of Breaking Bad will be clear-cut and definite rather than vague and frustrating like the infamous ending to The Sopranos.

“There’s not much in the way of ambiguity with this ending,” he said. “People won’t be left scratching their chins and saying, ‘I wonder what’s happening here.’ It doesn’t have to be happy or sad or anywhere in between. What mattered most to us was that the ending satisfy.”

Series star Bryan Cranston has similarly promised that the finale is a “roller coaster ride to hell,” with co-star Bob Odenkirk agreeing that the end will be “so incredible.”

Are you a fan of Breaking Bad?