While most of the loose ends in the season finale of AMC's hit show "Breaking Bad" were tied up nicely, the fate of some characters were left up to the imagination of viewers.
Show creator Vince Gilligan recently spoke to GQ magazine on the fate of Jesse Pinkman, the subject of fans rooting for Walter White, and the decision to bring back Gretchen and Elliot for the big finale.
"My personal feeling is that he got away," Gilligan said of Jesse Pinkman. "But the most likely thing, as negative as this sounds, is that they're going to find this kid's fingerprints all over this lab and they're going to find him within a day or a week or a month. And he's still going to be on the hook for the murder of two federal agents. But yeah, even though that's the most likely outcome, the way I see it is that he got away and got to Alaska, changed his name, and had a new life. You want that for the kid. He deserves it."
If one thing was for certain on "Breaking Bad," it was that no character, not matter how beloved, was safe. Throughout the show's five seasons, some of the biggest and most important characters were killed, including Hank Schrader, who was shockingly murdered in a cruel twist of fate, right before he was about to book his criminal brother-in-law.
But "Breaking Bad" has managed to divide viewers just as much as delight and surprise them, and said criminal Walter White is no exception, having become one of television's most controversial characters.
"I've kind of bemusedly scratched my head a bit, over the seasons, at the idea of people still rooting for Walt," said Gilligan. "But I don't think they're wrong. I just think it's sociologically interesting.Oddly enough, I think I started to root for Walt a little more in the final couple of episodes. I would argue he did the most nasty, sadistic thing he had ever done in our third-from-final episode, where he says to Jesse, 'I watched Jane die.' But in that same episode, he also did a couple of the kindest and most selfless things he had ever done. That episode really encompassed the duality of this character. He could be good, and he could be bad."
As for the decision to bring back Walter White's former business partners Gretchen and Elliot for the finale, Gilligan admitted that he thought for the last couple of seasons he "thought that [the writers] were probably done with them," but ultimately decided to have them make a return at the request of a very special fan, 16-year-old cancer patient Kevin Cordasco, who, sadly, did not live to see the end of the series, having passed way from his cancer in March, though did inspire Gilligan to change the course of the finale's events.
Click here to read GQ's full interview with Vince Gilligan.
