AMC's highly successful and Emmy award-winning show has sadly come to an end, and amid fans still buzzing about the finale, creator Vince Gilligan has revealed five alternative endings to "Breaking Bad," The Wrap reports.
Known for their attention to detail, continuity and symbolism, both visually and aurally ("Baby Blue" by Badfinger has found itself renewed as a classic rock hit after it became the show's fanfare song), the writers of "Breaking Bad" gave Walter White his deadly M60 before they were 100 percent sure who he would use it on before deciding on the Neo-Nazis reminiscent of the Aryan Brotherhood.
According to Gilligan, Jack's creepy gang was created in part to give the showrunners a villian to kill off, as former arch-nemesis of Walter, the superhuman Gus Fring, had died in the season 4 finale.
Having thrown his life away and made himself an extremely wanted man, a dying Walter White left the safeguard of his New Hampshire hide-out to tend to some unfinished business, and originally, the writers had five different ideas as to who he would take out and how it would happen.
"Our original version was that Walt would use it somewhat in Rambo fashion," Gilligan told The Wrap. "Hand held. But the closer we got to the end we realized how Walt's cancer would resurface and how sick Walt would be. That felt wrong for Walt to go out brawn over brain, go out like Rambo. Walt on his best day was never Rambo. Very late in the game we came up with mounting it in the trunk and using the garage door motor as a way of sweeping it back and forth and automating the process. Everyone, me included, loved the moments where Walt was MacGyveresque."
Another idea was for Walt to kill a bunch of cops, as the writers worried it would be "too obvious" if he went out killing a bunch of bad guys, but they decided it just wasn't right for Walter to murder more innocents.
In another version of the ending, Walt would have gone and broken Jesse Pinkman out of jail just before the Nazis were going to kill his former partner off, and then and murder the entire prison with his M60.
"I'm not saying we got far with those [ideas], but we would talk them through for hours on end," Gilligan said. "We were like, you know what? as bad as Walt is we don't want to see him killing good guys. If he's going to use this M60, even if it's slightly less surprising, let's see him use it on guys even worse than he is."
Another ending the writers considered was having Walt's wife, Skyler, kill herself, though ultimately they decided it was "a bridge too far" to cross.
"We could almost kinda sorta see where Skyler would go if she was sort of like zombified. But we could never figure out how to get Jr. to go along," said Gilligan. "There's no bringing Jr. if Jr. doesn't want to go. We talked about a possible version where Skyler and Walt are tied up at a Motel 6 kind of place and he's talking to her in a bathroom saying, 'It's going to be alright... I've got a plan. Skyler? Skyler?' And he finally forces the door open and she's in a bloody tub or something like that."
And in the final scrapped version of the finale, Jesse and Walt Jr. would have met their untimely end while Walt lived on. Jesse's death was an idea that Gilligan had kicked around since season 1, as he was a character that was initiall supposed to be killed off at the end of the first season finale by a ruthless drug dealer whom Walt would seek revenge on.
In this very dark version of the ending, Jesse would have been killed first, and Walt would have shackled the killer in his basement and rigged a shotgun so the killer could commit suicide by pulling the trigger while torturing them to in rather grostesque ways, like lopping off fingers and burning them with a blowtorch. When Walt. Jr. came downstairs to ask his dad if he wanted water, weeks later, the dealer would have tripped the wire and ended up killing both himself and Walt Jr.
Talk about a gruesome ending! The real ending nicely tied up the loose ends of "Breaking Bad" while leaving enough ambiguity and intrigue to keep fans arguing for years.
Do you like any of these alternative endings, or were you satisfied with the one we got?
