How Vince Gilligan And Breaking Bad's Writers Cooked Up A Perfect Final Season [Exclusive Interview]

September 29, 2013. On that Sunday, when the clocks hit 9:00pm ET, over 10 million viewers planted themselves before their television sets, ready to watch a new "Breaking Bad" episode for the last time. One of them was this future writer.

That 10 million strong audience sat awed as story threads — some 62 episodes in the making — were finally tied up in "Felina." Walter White (Bryan Cranston) snatched a pyrrhic victory from the jaws of defeat and made a marginal penance by accepting responsibility for his sins. Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) drove off to an uncertain freedom, ringing out with a primal howl after a series' worth of suffering. 

The reviews were stellar, a flood of Emmys followed, and with "Felina" as the cherry on top to an already beloved season 5, the reputation of "Breaking Bad" as one of television's titans was secured. 10 years on from "Felina," Heisenberg is definitely a name that people remember. 

How was this masterpiece of a final season created? Especially when "Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan has made it clear there was never a grand plan, defying the myth that art must be planned as carefully as architecture or cuisine. 

By speaking with Gilligan, interviewing several of his colleagues, and scouring for every glimpse behind the scenes possible, we're here to tell the story of how the fifth season of "Breaking Bad" was refined to crystal blue purity.

Note: These interviews have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

With the show's future uncertain, the "Breaking Bad" writers and crew had made as spectacular a season 4 finale as possible. "Face Off," destined to air on October 9, 2011, saw Walter White finally triumph over Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), clearing the greatest obstacle in his path as a confrontation almost three seasons in the making boiled over at last. Walt's declaration that "I won," turned from triumphant to horrifying with the revelation he poisoned Brock (Ian Posada), the son of Jesse's girlfriend, and framed Gus to rope in his old student. If Walt hadn't crossed the line into evil before, he sure had with this act.

So, now what? 

That was one of the many questions that needed answering when on November 14, 2011, Gilligan and his writers reassembled: Sam Catlin, Peter Gould, Gennifer Hutchison, George Mastras, Thomas Schnauz, and Moira Walley-Beckett. Huddled inside their house of ideas, a second-floor suite of an ignominious office building in Burbank, California, they all felt "nothing but fear," Gilligan recalled. 

They'd sacrificed their defining villain at the altar of the narrative climax, and in the process, had lost a magnetic performer in Esposito. Gus Fring helped "Breaking Bad" find its voice. Could it survive without him? Since the writers began season 5 with the knowledge that this would be the end, the pressure to land the plane and tie up every thread they could manage was strong. In a double-edged sword of stress, "Breaking Bad" was now more popular than ever before, with even more fans to risk disappointing. 

Netflix binge-watchers made "Breaking Bad" into a sleeper hit just in time for season 5 to take the world by storm. Look at the ratings. Before season 5, the only time the show had cracked two million viewers on first airing was the season 4 premiere, "Box Cutter." Season 5A passed that benchmark every episode — the lowest rated, "Hazard Pay," came in at 2.20 million — and then the Season 5B premiere, "Blood Money," doubled that with 5.92 million viewers. "Felina" would in turn nearly double that figure.

Gilligan is grateful to Netflix, calling them the "third leg of the tripod" of the series' success between AMC and Sony. That said, he feels it was ultimately serendipitous: 

"I think 'Breaking Bad' could have been the same show it was, but it might not have become what it became if the timing had been six months earlier or six months later. It's just that was where the dumb luck comes into play."

Increased interest in the show meant tighter security; only Gilligan himself was allowed to take home (watermarked) copies of episodes. To watch the episodes free of that blemish, editor Kelley Dixon had to use a "seven-inch wide" screen in producer Melissa Bernstein's office before the copies were sealed back in a safe.

Luckily, the show's casting directors, Sharon Bialy and Sherry Thomas, already had a plan in place to prevent leaks from auditioning actors. Actors who sent in audition tapes from home would receive scripts that had been watermarked with their names and heavily rewritten by writers' assistant Gordon Smith to remove the context of "Breaking Bad," let alone any spoilers. Jesse Plemons, when auditioning for Todd Alquist, was given a scene of a soldier being questioned about gunning down hostiles (this can be seen as a special feature on the season 5A DVD set). Apparently, Laura Fraser (who joined the series as Lydia Rodarte-Quayle this season) was so impressed by her fake audition scene that she was baffled that it wasn't the real thing.

As for those real scenes, the writers' room banged their heads away trying to write them in a way that did the series justice. In Gilligan's words, "It was all of us sitting in a room saying, 'What do we have left to do? Well, what's the biggest single thing we have left?'"

For the writers, that biggest hanging thread was Walt's DEA agent brother-in-law, Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), discovering the truth. "We'd be leaving untold drama on the table if we had Hank never figure out that his brother-in-law was Heisenberg," Gilligan said. "We can't do that. We can't do that to the audience. That'd be terrible." As George Mastras told me, a blow-up between Walt and Jesse was also inevitable. So began the work of patiently building to these climaxes.

Vince Gilligan is a big believer in collaborative writing. He once said, "The worst thing the French ever gave us is the auteur theory," and doesn't think that theory should be transposed onto television: "There's a perfectly good medium for directors, and it's called film. TV is a writer's medium. I am chauvinistic toward writing because that's where I came from."

Read or listen to any interview with Gilligan, and he always raves about his writers, actors, and crew; in my research, the feeling is definitely mutual. When I mentioned this "nice guy showrunner" reputation to Gilligan, he assured me that he's "cognizant" of how he can be perceived and that he's not all "aw shucks." For Gilligan, teamwork isn't just about being gracious:

"I'm not the nicest guy in the world, and a lot of that team effort stuff is not about being nice or selfless, it's about getting the best work. It's about having your name, when your name is on something, about it being the best it could be. And everybody does this job differently and there's some folks who do this job who write every episode themselves, who direct every episode. I don't even know how it's humanly possible, but more power to them. But that's not how I get my best work done. I surround myself with smarter people and people who can work harder than I can at this point, and I and my producers get the best we can out of them. And that's a very selfish thing to me."

Selfishly or not, Gilligan fostered an environment where everyone's ideas were heard, not only his own. While he'd long lost sympathy for Walt, he stayed silent about that distaste around Bryan Cranston — he didn't want his own perception of the character to affect Cranston's performance.

The writers' room had a "there are no dumb questions" policy. When devising their story, they worked through every permutation, and the only way to make that work was if everyone felt like they could put forth any idea without blowback. "You've got to start with the bad ideas to get to the good ideas," as Gilligan put it. "If you're really nervous about saying something dumb so that everyone around you was like, 'Oh, that was stupid,' then you are going to have long stretches of silence." Plus, if you work through every possible decision your characters can make as a habit, then pinning down the right choice for them becomes easier in the long run.

Big ideas weren't the only shared responsibility. The nitty gritty work in the "Breaking Bad" writers' room was "breaking" episodes — laying out the story of each episode, beat for beat, divided up into five acts (a teaser and then Acts 1 to 4, divided by commercial breaks). This ensures a strict outline for the eventual scriptwriter and a cohesive season, episode by episode. Their best friend in this process was, again, the index card. Episode beats would be written on these cards with magic markers and then pinned, in sequential order, to cork boards in the writers' room. 

Me & my Board. The cards for the episode I was about to outline then write: #OZYMANDIAS. #BreakingBad @TorScreenConf pic.twitter.com/xjJ7Ldx6qL

— Moira Walley-Beckett (@YoWalleyB) April 30, 2016

Gilligan had learned this process while working on "The X-Files" and carried it over now that he was running his own writers' room. Even the writers themselves often can't pin down who first pitched which ideas, while episode assignments were very much luck of the draw. As Mastras recounted to IndieWire: "For the most part, it's so thoroughly broken in the room that anybody could really write [any] script."

That's not to say that each writer didn't have or know their own strengths. Mastras (who'd been with the show since season 1) considered himself one of the show's action/set piece experts, going back to his debut "Crazy Handful of Nothin'" (when Walt blows up kingpin Tuco Salamanca's den with fulminated mercury). That experience came in handy for his job this season.

Before settling on the train, the writers considered other methods of robbery. One of their more pie-in-the-sky ideas was to have Walt and co. rent a helicopter to raid a railyard, sucking up the methylamine in a freight car with a long hose. Gilligan actually asked executive producer Michelle MacLaren to run this idea through logistics; she consulted with pilot Steve Stafford before they dropped this idea. 

For a while, a trailer truck robbery was the most seriously considered option. Then, it was discovered that this option wouldn't be that much cheaper than staging a train robbery. So, to Mastras' delight, the team decided they might as well be ambitious. 

The train line used was the Santa Fe Southern Railway; the train itself was the railway's own SFR 07 locomotive, and the filming location was halfway between Santa Fe and Lamy. Part of this same stretch of land had been used to film a train robbery sequence in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," so the "Breaking Bad" crew was treading the path of past filmmakers. 

Shooting a "Breaking Bad" episode usually took seven to eight days, but this one was scheduled for 10 and a half, with four days blocked out for the train sequence. As shooting grew nearer, Mastras' fear grew alongside his palpable excitement. He told me that he scouted the shooting location well ahead of time to familiarize himself, allowing him to envision how he'd film the area and incorporate those ideas into his script.

Mastras rose to the occasion, but he also had a dream team of support. Gilligan himself was present for all four days of the train shoot. Michael Slovis, the show's usual cinematographer (and occasional director), was the DP. Nina Jack, a first AD (assistant director) since season 3, again filled that role.

MacLaren, one of the show's most prolific and dynamic directors (she'd helmed the Mastras-scripted "IFT" and "Thirty-Eight Snub"), shot the second-unit footage of "Dead Freight." For shots of Mike looking at the train from a distance, MacLaren's team used a long lens to emulate the view of his binoculars. This meant two views of the same events could be shot simultaneously by both units.

As for the main unit, they needed the maximum amount of possible coverage of the train itself. That meant stationing different camera teams around the track and using everything from cranes for high-angle shots to DSLR cameras mounted across the train for extreme close-up POVs. A camera mounted on a Gobo arm by Gilligan was knocked off the train by a brush branch when the train started to move (yet miraculously, still functioned afterward). 

Gilligan admitted that robbing a moving train was beyond the crew's capability, so the writers had invented a reason for the train to stop (Bill Burr's henchman character, Patrick Kuby, parking a truck on the track), which turned an impossible job into a challenging one. 

Practicality and safety were still paramount, especially when filming with a moving train. Communication was also complicated by the train being eight hundred feet long (crews stationed at one end wouldn't notice ones at the other) and that the filming spot actually was in dark territory, a telecom blackout zone name-dropped in the episode. Gilligan may have lost some sleep over safety concerns, but the extra care meant the crew all safely walked away.

Logistical concerns with moving the camera crews around the train are also why it was shot out of sequence; it was miles more efficient to shoot all the shots set at a particular spot in one go than constantly moving camera crews back and forth. Editor Skip MacDonald was left to organize the footage. Editing is where the episodes' only computer enhancements come in, such as rotoscoping to make the train look faster than it really was. 

Aaron Paul also wasn't actually under the train when it moved over Jesse on the tracks — the camera crew had a crane shot looking straight down at the tracks. They filmed a shot of Jesse lying still and a shot of the train moving. The shots were digitally merged in post-production, emulating the old camera trick of a double exposure (locking a camera, running the film, rewinding it, and then running it again so that two images are imprinted on the film and look like one). 

While filming was a triumph for the crew, Mastras had felt that it couldn't be a total victory for our thieves themselves. Hence the infamous ending, when Todd shoots a young boy named Drew Sharp (Samuel Webb) who witnessed the robbery. Todd had previously been conceived of as a "quiet crazy guy," and this moment was the writers' first organic opportunity to show that. After breaking the episode, they looped back around to the beginning and planted the seed for this shock ending with a teaser introducing Sharp. Mastras recounted to me:

"The shooting of Drew Sharp was something that I really advocated for, because for me, I didn't just want to do a successful heist. I feel like there always used to be consequences to the crime to bring it back to reality." 

Mastras, as a former criminal investigator and youth counselor, brought particular awareness to the writers' room of how crime hurts children. 

"Gliding Over All" (written by Walley-Beckett, directed by MacLaren) features Walt on top of the world, or at least as close as he ever gets. He loses Jesse but solidifies his empire with new distribution, courtesy of Lydia and fellow meth kingpin Declan (Louis Ferreira), and gets a replacement apprentice in Todd. Two montage sequences spell out his reign. The first shows him orchestrating the murder of Mike's imprisoned men, carried out by Aryan Brotherhood comrades of Todd's Uncle Jack (Michael Bowen).

This scene was shot in a shuttered prison in downtown Albuquerque, described by Walley-Beckett on the "Insider" podcast covering "Gliding Over All" as "one of the most heinous places I've ever been in my life," and recalling that it smelled of "death and feet." Writing the episode, she was vague in describing the deaths, imagining them as "simpler" and "imagistic." But when MacLaren got the assignment of directing, "she really wanted to see some active murders." So the murders became full-fledged stunts, requiring more prep time. The final murder, when one of the men is locked in his cell and burned alive? While shooting that, Walley-Beckett felt "the palpitations of being responsible for somebody's life."

A second montage, set to Tommy James and the Shondells' "Crystal Blue Persuasion," shows the inner mechanics of Heisenberg's operation. Skyler eventually takes Walt to the storage unit housing his pile of drug money; the stack reaches up past their knees and stretches as wide as any of the corpses Walt has put in the ground. The sight alone hammers in Skyler's question: "How much is enough?"

For Gilligan, this was the logical endpoint of Walt's time as the king. Heisenberg had to ask himself the same question the writers had at the outset: After he's won, what then? That they tied it together with the season's other running thread, Skyler's disgust with what her husband has become, made it all the more organic.

As for creating the pile, it was "one of the toughest props our prop department ever had to put together," Gilligan recounted. It was composed of fake money rented from a California prop house, with a box hidden underneath to make it look even larger. Once shooting was over, the prop department had to go through the pile and account for every single bill. 

While Skyler "has no earthly idea" of the amount, Gilligan had prop master Mark Hansen estimate it; his $80 million figure was eventually quoted in the series. Regardless, the sight of the pile and Skyler's cutting questions get Walt to quit. Gilligan told me the closing moments of "Gliding Over All" are meant to fool the audience into thinking it is "some kind of happy ending." Until the very last scene, in which Hank discovers Walt is Heisenberg. 

Walley-Beckett drew on her season 4 episode, "Bullet Points," where Walt and Hank observe a copy of "Leaves of Grass" belonging to late meth cook Gale Boetticher (David Costabile) and addressed to "W.W." Hank finds another copy of "Leaves of Grass" addressed to Gale's other favorite W.W. in the White family bathroom. The episode cuts in flashbacks to that moment to underscore itself; for Gilligan, that exposition was worth it just to hear Bryan Cranston's faux-innocent, hands-up delivery of "You got me" one more time.

This ending of "Gliding Over All" shows how the strength of the "Breaking Bad" writers' room was building on the past. As Peter Gould recounted to Vulture:

"One of the things that Vince really instilled in us was to, instead of constantly introducing new things, look back at all the elements that we already have on the shelf. What can we mine from the things that we've already established? It's one of the things that helps the show have a feeling of unity."

This is why "Breaking Bad" hangs together despite there being no master plan. This skill at weaving old threads was especially useful now that the chickens were coming home to roost.

When the room resumed, the writers once more worked through every outcome and its consequences. In doing so, they kept no character death off the table. Peter Gould confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that even though a spin-off about lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) was already on their minds, Saul was no safer than anyone else. In the end, though, they decided that it fit for Saul to be "the cockroach that survives the atomic apocalypse." If they'd taken another path, we might never have met Jimmy McGill, the man behind the mask.

As for the elephant they'd left in the bathroom, how would Hank react to his discovery? Would he immediately confront Walt with their family in view? Would he let it go? The last one they quickly decided against — it would be out of character and dramatically unsatisfying — but they had to walk through everything, especially as they plotted out Hank and Walt's climactic chess match.

One thing the writers quickly switched gears on, though, was Walt's cancer. When Walt visits his doctor in "Gliding Over All," the scene, as scripted, was him being told his cancer is still in remission. However, the finished episode was more ambiguous. This left the writers with the room to change plans, so the mid-season premiere "Blood Money" revealed Walt was back in chemotherapy. This totally recontextualized the previous episode, added urgency to Walt's decisions, and brought the series full circle.

Walt's resurgent cancer led them to one of the most important pieces on the table: Skyler. Would she take her husband's side or her brother-in-law's? Gilligan recounted that this was "one of the hardest decisions" the writers' room ever faced, but they settled on the former. In Schnauz's words, "sometimes you just have to go with the more dramatic decision." But that doesn't mean they forewent the cardinal question of, "Where is this character's head at?"

As Sam Catlin told Vulture, the writers ultimately decided that "the fallacy of sunk costs" would drive Skyler this season; she'd fallen too far into Walt's corruption to back out. Anna Gunn analyzed her character on the "Insider" podcast episode covering "Buried," saying: "The cancer is both awful for [Skyler] but relieving [...] She feels that instead of giving it over and going through that s***storm, as it were, why don't we just let time take care of it?'"

Hank wouldn't be totally alone in his quest, though.

The first scene of season 5, way back in "Live Free or Die," featured a haggard-looking Walt purchasing an M60 machine gun on his 52nd birthday. The writers conceived of this without any clue of why Walt was buying the gun and without a final villain for it to kill. Answering that mystery was the most painful part of writing the season for Gilligan. As he told me, "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."

At times, a desperate Gilligan even suggested just forgetting about the machine gun, but his writers wouldn't let him, asking: "'Okay, but why? Because we did the thing with the machine gun and you have to pay it off.' It's the old Chekhov thing."

One of the ideas considered was that Walt would use the gun to free an imprisoned Jesse, but as the writers walked through this, they found this too distasteful an ending. Schnauz told me the writers asked themselves: "Do we want to see Walt break into a jail and shoot down a bunch of cops? Probably not."

Thankfully, they'd given themselves machine gun-worthy villains in 5A: Todd, Uncle Jack, and the rest of the Nazi gang. "Who doesn't love seeing a bunch of Nazis getting mowed down with a machine gun?" Gilligan rhetorically asked me.

Committing to the Nazis as the villains meant a bit of a board clearing, hence Declan and his crew's abrupt demise at Jack and company's hands in 5.10, "Buried." Schnauz, who wrote that episode, told me:

"Between Jack and his gang and Todd and then Declan and his group, it felt like there were too many, not loose ends, but just too many antagonists around [...] Actually we started coming up with Jack's gang getting rid of Declan's gang in the previous episode, 5.09, which became too packed full of stuff, and it shifted into 5.10, which happened to be the one I was writing. So I think Peter was originally excited about writing that scene, and then it got taken away from him."

As for how Walt uses the gun — the original plan was for him to simply wield it handheld. However, realizing that a sickly man could never pull off such an attack, they changed it to him improvising a garage door opener into a trunk-mounted auto-gun. Walter White was always more Angus MacGyver than John Rambo.

As usual, the "Breaking Bad" writers' room managed to weave a satisfying whole together from bits they'd established in previous episodes. That doesn't mean it was a fun process, though, and Gilligan left me with this warning about trapping yourself as a writer:

"We always endeavor to tell [the story] organically, but the most inorganic thing we ever did, and I take full responsibility for it, was this inorganic bit of business with the machine gun not knowing how that paid off. That is the essence of inorganic storytelling, and I learned a valuable lesson from that. Don't do that to yourself in the future."

Johnson had directed Walley-Beckett and Catlin's season 3 bottle episode, "Fly" and she requested him to direct her last episode this season. By chance, they lucked into the most important assignment. Both Gilligan and Walley-Beckett are poetry fans; the latter chose to title the episode "Ozymandias" after Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet about the time-ravaged legacy of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II. She told The Ringer:

"When we started breaking the season, [the poem] flashed so powerfully in my mind as a theme for Walt, and Vince was super keen on that."

The episode's opening scenes, still in the New Mexico desert, came with extra complications. The sun was still setting around 4 p.m., which meant starting bright and early. Since they were picking up from a chaotic cliffhanger, Hank and Jack's cars all had be to carefully marked up with damage and photographed for continuity.

However, Johnson is a precise director; Gilligan admitted on the "Insider" episode about "Ozymandias" that while he tends to shoot more safety coverage, Johnson always knows what he wants with his camera. Rendering Walt's grief-fueled collapse with a dolly zoom was his idea, as was placing a "jig-saw" like contraption beneath the sand for Walt's head to land on. When he collapsed, dust rose like the ground was cracking beneath him.

The furiously grieving Walt sentences Jesse to what he thinks is execution, but turns out to be enslavement. The writers were conscious of letting Jesse off easily — his good heart couldn't shield him from consequences. Since this was their last chance to reveal the truth of Jane's death to Jesse, they took it and twisted the knife even further.

The rest of the episode remained emotionally taxing to shoot, particularly Walt and Skyler's carefully rehearsed confrontation. Skyler wielding a knife against her husband isn't a matter of simple practicality; Walley-Beckett told Entertainment Weekly that it is her trying to cut out the cancer in her family that Walt has grown into.

Not everything could be planned for, though. Some unexpected happenings impeded the episode (like a surprise hailstorm that briefly postponed shooting), but at least one benefitted it: The infant playing kidnapped baby Holly White "ad-libbed" a cry for her mother when Walt was staring at her. "That's one of those pure lightning strikes of luck that you probably don't get twice in a lifetime," Johnson said.

The last day of shooting "Ozymandias" was the final shoot of the whole series. The teaser, set during Walt and Jesse's first meth cook back in the pilot, meant Walt couldn't have his shaved head or goatee. Since Cranston grew back his hair for the last two episodes anyway, the crew decided to wait rather than go through complicated makeup procedures. The episode irrevocably ends the Whites' marriage, so Walley-Beckett wanted to open the episode by showing Walt's first lie to Skyler (that he's working late and can't come home yet). While most of the cast and crew felt bittersweet nostalgia (Gilligan himself got to call the final cut), Johnson admitted shooting the scene felt like "being at somebody else's wedding."

The policy on "Breaking Bad" was that scenes should work without music. Composer Dave Porter and the editors didn't even use temp music tracks. If you've seen the show, though, you probably know that music is part of its soul. On top of Porter's original score, a team led by music supervisor Thomas Golubić was in charge of sampling and licensing existing songs.

Despite his vast musical knowledge, Golubić saw his job as finding music that fit diegetically, whether with a character or setting. When he first got the job, he traveled to Albuquerque, perusing everything from restaurants and hardware stores to observe what kinds of music the people there listened to. In his recollection, ABQ music is "very out of time. It didn't feel contemporary or nostalgic."

However, Golubić's team had another member: Vince Gilligan's SiriusXM subscription. Gilligan remembers hearing "Baby Blue" by Badfinger while driving to work one day as the season was wrapping up. He was familiar with the song but absorbing it now felt uncanny:

"I'm listening to the words, because half the time I'm not really listening to the words, I'm just listening to the melody, and I'm listening to the words and I said, 'Holy s***. Oh my God, this would be perfect."

Golubić believes they'd floated using the song before; it was included on a sample mix tape they'd created of blue-themed songs, one that also featured "Crystal Blue Persuasion." He wasn't totally sold on Gilligan's suggestion of "Baby Blue," though, so he and his team went to work finding alternatives (with Gilligan's approval). None felt quite right, though, so Badfinger it was.

Despite the choice being relatively last-minute and the band's history (most of the members died young), there wasn't much issue with securing the rights to "Baby Blue." The publishing rights were cleared with Universal Music (via Amy Matusek) and the master rights with BMG Chrysalis (via Rob Christensen). The one tiny hurdle was that, for security/spoiler concerns, they couldn't disclose any information about the scene, beyond a promise it wouldn't be graphic. Golubić believes the rights holders didn't realize "Baby Blue" would be used as such a pivotal moment (nor predict the subsequent explosion in popularity after the episode aired): "I think in a sense they were like, 'Okay, well we'll clear that song [...] We're probably one of 50 different ideas."

As for Golubić, he remembers watching a "Felina" rough cut and finally understanding why Gilligan wanted a love song to close out the show.

"The truth is, of all the ideas that we'd thrown around, and some of them had blue titles, some of them were more thematic, some of them were more about his comeuppance, that was the scripted component to it. But honestly, I don't think any of them were better than ['Baby Blue']."

Shortly after the series concluded, Gilligan quoted his old "X-Files" director/producer pal Rob Bowman about the journey: "The pain fades but the glory remains." To be sure, the glory was soon to come at the 66th Primetime Emmys. "Breaking Bad" swept almost all the dramatic categories, and it was even competing with itself in the Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series category. For the record, Moira Walley-Beckett won for "Ozymandias" over Gilligan for "Felina." If anyone was clapping harder than him, I'd be surprised, and when Walley-Beckett claimed her prize, she declared, "Vince Gilligan, this is your fault!"

When I asked Gilligan if he wished he'd been more personally involved in any episodes, he said no. He's satisfied with thinking of himself as just one part of a team effort, breaking it down like this:

"If you were there from the beginning all the way through to the end building the Brooklyn Bridge, yeah, I would imagine the folks who built that bridge, for the rest of their lives, they would take their grandkids to see it and say, 'I had a hand in building that thing.'"

It wasn't long before Gilligan dove back into the world he created with "Better Call Saul" and "El Camino" — and many of his writers and actors went back with him. His feelings on "Breaking Bad" aren't all simple pride, though. Over time, he's grown less sympathetic to Walter White. He admitted at the 2018 writers' reunion that, "I, too, feel like Walter White gets a bit of a pass, more than I would personally give him."

He later told The New Yorker in 2022, "If [Walt] had been a better human being, he would've swallowed his pride and taken the opportunity to treat his cancer with the money his former friends offered him. He goes out on his own terms, but he leaves a trail of destruction behind him. I focus on that more than I used to." It sounds like the Vince Gilligan of today might not have written the same ending that his 2013 self did. 

Netflix's success with "Breaking Bad" helped spur the company's entrance into TV production and the "binge-model," releasing whole seasons at once. Gilligan told me that he isn't in love with this change to his industry; the idea of dumping whole TV seasons on streaming platforms reminds him of the ending of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

"I much prefer the old system where you have an episode a week for 13 weeks or 22 weeks [...] You unfold it gradually and it's not some weird race on a Friday night somewhere where people try to speed scan through 13 episodes so that they can tell everybody on social media how the thing ends."

While plenty of Netflix originals might be digitally buried like the Ark of the Covenant, "Breaking Bad" endures. Gilligan tells me that the show's cultural dominance can be both burdensome and comforting, precisely because he doesn't know if he can surpass it. 

"When I get to worrying too much about that, I say to myself, 'Well s***, man. What are you complaining about? You had 'Breaking Bad.' That's what's going on. You already know what's going on your tombstone, so you should just relax and take the rest of it as gravy."

All seasons of "Breaking Bad" are available on Netflix.