You probably don’t need a reminder if you’re interested, but Breaking Bad‘s season 4 finale is this Sunday. When last we left Walter White, he was crumpled on a roof, having found himself in a kill-or-be-killed situation with Gustavo Fring and having failed, at the last second, to end up on the “kill” side of that alternative. Monday morning, I’ll have a review of the finale and a postmortem interview with creator Vince Gilligan posted here.
After the jump, a snippet from that Q&A, in which I asked Gilligan whether—since Breaking Bad’s future fate at AMC was undecided while the season was in progress—he aimed for a season finale that could serve as a series finale. It’s not spoilery in terms of plot, but obviously if you don’t want to read anything alluding in any way to the finale before you watch it, don’t click:
I tend to — I’m pretty neurotic and somewhat negative as a personality type and I — while most of the time I don’t think it helps me in my day-to-day life, I think one area where I benefit from that is, when I think in terms of how much longer will the television show go on and, just in case season four is the last season we ever do, should I give the audience as much of a proper ending as possible? And the answer is always yes. At the end of every season the answer to that question is always yes. Let’s try to have as satisfying a season-ender as possible because you never know. In television, it may serve as the series-ender. Season four was no exception to that. Conversely, though, I knew that everyone involved, the studio and the network, wanted to find a way to make it all work out for an additional season or seasons. And to that end I didn’t want to do too much with a season-ender and therefore hobble myself and preclude later possibilities.
What does it all mean? Tune in Sunday night and find out. In the meantime, what are you hoping for/fearing?