Vince Gilligan, creator of "Breaking Bad," sat down with GQ for its annual Men of the Year issue and revealed all sorts of goodies about the end of AMC's Emmy-winning drama series. The full interview is here, it's a great read.
On what happened to Jesse Pinkman:
"My personal feeling is that he got away. But the most likely thing, as negative as this sounds, is that they're going to find this kid's fingerprints all over this lab and they're going to find him within a day or a week or a month. And he's still going to be on the hook for the murder of two federal agents. But yeah, even though that's the most likely outcome, the way I see it is that he got away and got to Alaska, changed his name, and had a new life. You want that for the kid. He deserves it."
On people rooting for Walter White:
"I've kind of bemusedly scratched my head a bit, over the seasons, at the idea of people still rooting for Walt. But I don't think they're wrong. I just think it's sociologically interesting.
Oddly enough, I think I started to root for Walt a little more in the final couple of episodes. I would argue he did the most nasty, sadistic thing he had ever done in our third-from-final episode, where he says to Jesse, "I watched Jane die." But in that same episode, he also did a couple of the kindest and most selfless things he had ever done. That episode really encompassed the duality of this character. He could be good, and he could be bad."
On bringing back Gretchen and Elliot, which was all because of a teenage cancer patient:
"I thought for the last couple of seasons that we were probably done with them. Not because I didn't want them back in the story, but I just couldn't figure out how they would be germane to the proceedings.
But then I met this young fan named Kevin Cordasco. He was this very sweet young guy, 16 years old, and he had had cancer since he was 9. This poor kid; half his life he'd had cancer. And he had two wishes. One of them was that he wanted to go see the Yankees play, and the other was that he wanted to meet some of the actors from his favorite TV show. So I got to meet him, and he was a wonderful guy. This was back in October of 2012, and he looked like he was probably not long for this world. I remember asking him, 'Do you want me to tell you how it ends? As long as you keep it secret?'
And he said, 'No, I want to watch it.' So I said, 'What would you want to see?' -- certainly not promising anything but just making conversation. He thought about it for a minute and he said, 'I'm wondering about Gretchen and Elliott. I'd like to know more about them. Do you think we'll ever see them again?' It got me thinking. And I went back to the writers' room and told them about it, and it got them thinking, too. So Gretchen and Elliott came back in very large part because of Kevin.
The crime, the sadness of it, is that he never lived to see the ending. He passed away in March."
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