“Breaking Bad” is widely regarded as one of the greatest TV dramas of all time and its thrilling fifth and final season packed quite the climactic punch. However, series creator Vince Gilligan once admitted that he didn’t always know what he was doing while writing it.
In the Season 5 premiere, “Live Free or Die,” an increasingly desperate and despotic Walter White (Bryan Cranston) purchases an M60 machine gun. That purchase doesn’t pay off until the series finale when he builds a remote-controlled turret for the gun, puts it in the trunk of his car, and uses it to free Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) from the clutches of Jack Welker’s (Michael Bowen) neo-Nazi gang while mowing them down.
In a 2013 in-depth interview with Variety, Gilligan explained that one of the most shocking moments in the finale was completely unplanned after he wrote himself into a corner. But while the moment seemed perfectly planned in context, he had no idea what to do with the machine gun after writing the scene where Walter buys it, and the uncertainty scared him for quite some time.
“One of the dumbest things I’ve ever done in my career was committing to the idea of Walter White buying a machine gun when we did not know what he was going to do with it,” Gilligan explained. “We had no clue. There were literally months on end when I was completely freaked out. We’d be in the writers’ room for a full day, and I’d be slowly banging my head against the wall — not enough to hurt myself but just enough to jar the ideas loose. And everybody was kind of worried about me.”
In the end, the machine gun did pay off
While Vince Gilligan might have struggled with Walter White’s machine gun, he acknowledged figuring out the trunk turret for the “Breaking Bad” finale ultimately helped him unlock the rest of that celebrated ending. In the series finale, “Felina,” Walter goes on one final rampage, getting revenge on enemies before finally dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. After making sure money for his family is placed in a secret trust, he poisons Lydia Rodarte-Quayle (Laura Fraser) with ricin — another payoff to an old plot point — before admitting his wrongdoings to Skyler White (Anna Gunn). Then, he heads to Jack’s compound and frees Jesse Pinkman.
According to Gilligan, all of it came to him after deciding what to do with the machine gun. “Once we figured out this machine gun, that was when the dam broke and things started slowly to click together. 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. He’s at least got to deliver that money to his family.”
Even though the machine gun mystery box drove Gilligan up the wall, it provided one last opportunity for Walter to show off his engineering genius. Moreover, being killed by his own bullet drove home the message that, all along, Walter was his own worst enemy.
