I highly recommend everyone read this article. It sheds some light on Bryan Cranston, the character of Walt, and also has information about Vince Gilligan and the end of the series.
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201308/bryan-cranston-walter-white-breaking-bad-season-6
Maybe I'm too close to it, but I think these final eight episodes have a real chance of satisfying...not everybody—there's no way to satisfy every last viewer—but the bulk of our viewers," Gilligan says. "I certainly hope so. They satisfy me, and that's saying a lot."
The Breaking Bad writers' room was known as one of the more collaborative in television. ("The worst thing the French ever gave us was the auteur theory," Gilligan said. "It's horseshit.") That spirit applied even to crafting The End, the exact nature of which was undecided for longer than you might expect. "A lot was still in play. You'd be surprised at how much," he says. "There were moments that we thought would be very provocative and evocative and interesting, but we didn't know their exact full meaning yet. We figured we'd make it up later."
As had happened several times over the course of seasons, the group had set themselves a destination—in the first episode of season five, a flash-forward, we see Walt far from home, with a full head of hair, on his fifty-second birthday—without a clear sense of how they were going to get there. Think of it as Chekhov, with his imprecation about guns appearing in the first act needing to be fired by the third, as hair-raising hedge against writer's block. In this case, the gun was entirely literal: an M60 assault weapon in Walt's trunk.
Endings have been among the most contentious aspects of this golden age of cable drama: from the open-ended (The Sopranos) to the generally disappointing (season five of The Wire) to the shows that have not been allowed an ending at all (Deadwood). For Breaking Bad, which always had the tightest narrative intent of all these shows, getting it right may even be more important. The result, not to put too fine a point on it, will determine where the show ultimately ranks in the discussion of the best ever on TV.
"People have been asking me if I'm nervous," Cranston says. "I say, 'No, I'm fine. But go see Vince—he's tearing his hair out.'"
"We sat around this table talking about every possible kind of ending," Gilligan says. "Sometimes you start talking really macro. Like, 'What kind of responsibility do we have to find a moral in all this?' 'Is this a just universe that he lives in, or is it a chaotic universe which is more in keeping with the one we seem to live in?' 'Is there really karma in the world? Or is it just that the mechanisms, the clockwork, of the universe is so huge and subtle in its operation that we don't see karma happening?' We talk about all that stuff, and then, at a certain point, you stop and say, 'Let's just tell a good story.'"
The writers spent hours discussing the endings of other series, of movies, of books. Surprise or innovation wasn't necessarily the criteria. "I keep coming back to M*A*S*H," Gilligan continues. "From the first episode, these people sit around and say, 'All I want to do is go home.' So of course they all get to go home in the final episode. Sometimes the best moment in a TV show is an unpredictable moment, but sometimes it's actually being predictable."
By that measure, for those obsessed with guessing ahead, it may be worthwhile to remember Breaking Bad's first principles, the nature of the project—charting a man's free fall into the hell of his own worst impulses. And to count the number of endings free falls usually have.
