‘Breaking Bad’ season 5, episode 16 preview: Vince Gilligan pleased with series finale’s end
We are now just over 24 hours as of this writing until the end of “Breaking Bad,” and it is an ominous / difficult time in order to be Vince Gilligan. If on the odd chance everyone loves your ending, then you suddenly become a TV hero and you have to figure out a way in which to top that. On the other hand, if you make any mistakes along the way you suddenly become a TV pariah, and you have to figure out whether or not viewers will ever forgive you for the past five years. If you want to know how that feels, we’re pretty sure that you can ask some of the people who were working at “Dexter.”
If anything, Gilligan is not carrying with him any regrets about the finale that was made moving into tomorrow. While he still believes that the ending will not be one that everyone likes (mostly because that is an impossible feat), he tells The Huffington Post that he has at least a modest level of confidence going into the end now:
“I’m typically someone who gets stressed out and neurotic pretty easily, and I feel pretty good about this last episode. I hope I’m not sorely mistaken in my estimation of how it will be received.
“We finished the episode six months ago, and I feel like we delivered the ending that the show needed. I think we did right by the series. And therefore having lived with it for as long as we have – the better part of a year – and being kept as wonderfully busy as I have lately doing press all over the world, I really haven’t had much time recently to worry about it.”
We’ve said this a few times throughout the week, and we genuinely mean it that “Breaking Bad” has an opportunity tomorrow night to go down as the greatest TV drama of all time if it hits his ending out of the park. Even if it fails on some level, the overall body of work is still so fantastic that you have to place it alongside such greats as “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” “The Wire,” and “Lost” (yes, we found the ending poignant and profound).
There may not be much left to say about the “Breaking Bad” finale at this point, but we are going to do our best. If you head over to the link here, you can see why we feel that Walt is coming full circle as we enter the final hour of the series.
Photo: AMC