The 9 Biggest Revelations About ‘Breaking Bad’ We Learned From Vince Gilligan Interviews This Week

So Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has just been running around all over the place talking about the show like a Chatty Patty, which is perfectly fine with us Breaking Bad obsessives. Naturally, we’ve devoured every interview he’s done we could find that’s been published this week and rounded up the nuggets we thought were the most interesting to share with you. You’re welcome!

— They did not consider working Leaves of Grass back into the storyline when Gale originally introduced the book in season three. From an interview with Hitfix:

Way back when, when Gale gave Walt the book, it is there, in that episode where Gale talks to Walt about Walt Whitman, he recites the poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” and the next scene we see after their first cook together is Walt reading that very book. To be honest, at the time we came up with that episode two seasons back, we were not thinking about that book playing in the very important way that it plays. But having said that, it seems to fit right in. It was always in our mind that that was a gift from Gale, so we figured why wouldn’t he have written something like that?

— Walt really DID get out of the meth operation. Probably. From Rolling Stone:

We are oddly still working that out. In my mind, Walt is out, but the exact specifics of how he extricated himself – basically, the boss coming in one day in to the boardroom, so to speak, and saying to his inner circle, “Well, this is it for me. I’m retiring.” The specifics of that, so to speak, are something that’s still a bit of a work in progress, and six writers and myself are back now in the room working out the final eight episodes. That is one of the things that I hate to even admit how many hours we spent talking about, just dozens of hours already talking about how Walt extricates himself. At the point of the end of that last episode, it’s already happened, but we’re talking about, “In the final eight – do we need to show that moment of him quitting? Do we not?” I don’t feel like I’m giving anything away to say that we still don’t know ourselves. We’re still talking all that through.

— We can expect to see the Neo Nazi gang again. Again, from Rolling Stone:

Well, not to give too much away, but yeah, you know. Once you see a Nazi [laughs] you figure you may well see that Nazi again, especially when the head Nazi is played by an actor as wonderful as Michael Bowen.

— The writers have NOT nailed down the flash-forward (and thus the ending) yet. Once more, from Rolling Stone:

We’ve got thoughts on that subject, but we surprisingly don’t have that nailed down as much as you might expect. We go back and forth about that all the time. So we are really in a state of flux right now. We are in a decidedly undecided state … Our prime directive here – our mandate – is to make the ending as satisfying and as dramatic as possible. To that end, we’ve got a lot of good ideas, I feel, but any minute that a better idea comes along, we’ll jettison the good idea for the better idea, no matter where it may take us. So could go either way. Could wind up being exactly that, or could be something different.