All Bad things, as the campaign goes, must come to an end.
Sunday night, AMC airs the first of eight final episodes of Breaking Bad (9/8c). Walter White, it would seem, is heading for that big drug bust in the sky.
Leave it to Bryan Cranston, then, to cut the tension at the summer press tour late last month.
“I think everyone will be satisfied with the ending,” he said, “where we hug it out.”
There were some jokes from other cast members about the closing musical number. I’m pretty sure that’s not what happens.
Cranston serious later, suggesting there’s a bit of Walter White in all of us. “I really believe that everybody is capable of good or bad,” he said.
We are all human beings. We are all given this spectrum of emotions, as complex as they are, and depending on your influences and your DNA and your parenting and your education and your social environment, the best of you can come out or the worst of you can come out. I think, if given the right set of circumstances, dire situations, any one of us can become dangerous.
Creator Vince Gilligan was asked if he was affected in any way while writing the series by the many detailed recaps that appear after each episode. Breaking Bad, like Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy and several other “auteur” shows, gets broken down, sliced and diced and analyzed minutes after they air each week. It is the new magic trick that has in many ways replaced TV coverage by columnists.
Gilligan, to his everlasting credit, told reporters he never reads the recaps, and, for his own protection, has never Googled either himself or his show. Sounds as if he’s pretty happy with the way the show ends, however:
I was really nervous about coming up to the end of this thing for a year straight. Hell, for six years straight. You know, everything has to come to an end ‑‑ insert the tag line. So with that in mind, you know, how do you satisfy everybody? The more you listen to everyone vis‑a‑vis the Internet, at least I find that the more fractured your thinking becomes. I realized along the way the best hope we had to come up with something that hopefully most people will like us to satisfy ourselves, the seven of us in the writers’ room and, hopefully, these actors as well and the crew. That’s where we started. I am very proud of the ending. I can’t wait for everyone to see it. I am very cautious in my estimation of, in general, how people will respond to things. I hope I am not wildly wrong in my estimate that I think most folks are going to dig the ending because, I don’t know, it’s ‑‑ I don’t know. See, you be the judge.
 |
| Gilligan (at the podium), Cranston (far left) and the rest of the cast were on hand at the recent Television Critics Association Awards in Beverly Hills to accept their Program of the Year honours |
