Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan offers his perspective on the burning questions that followed last Sunday’s explosive fourth season finale.
On the final shot of Lily Of The Valley plants and the reveal that Walt poisened Brock:
Walt has come a long way in 46 episodes, that is for sure. But he had a reason for doing it. As bad as it is, my personal take on it is that it was not about murdering a child. It was about making a child very sick but making it seem, more importantly, to Jesse that a child who was very close to him had been poisoned with Ricin. To our way of thinking, it was a very cold-blooded and yet pragmatic way of getting Jesse back in Walt’s sphere of influence. It was a very big gamble that Walt was taking, to essentially make Jesse think he had poisoned this child, so Jesse would come to him, ostensibly to kill him, but then to ultimately hear him out and get back on Walt’s side. It was a very big gamble that could have ended in Walt getting his head blown off by Jesse, but also a very, very dark secret that goes pretty much hat in hand with the secret that Walt keeps from Jesse about Jane – his guilt about Jane’s death. Walt’s a pretty bad guy these days, but as usual, everything he does, he does for a very specific reason, cold-blooded though it may be.
On the sequence of events involving the ricin cigarette:
I think Jesse [originally] had the right idea. I think it was lifted off him by Huell. When he comes to Walt in the previous episode, and Walt asks how on earth would he could have done it, and Jesse says, “The big man mountain security guard of Saul’s just had to see me, and he pats me down. You got him to get it off of me.” So having done that, he could’ve just flushed it in the toilet, because as we find out, the child wasn’t poisoned with ricin, he was poisoned with something else.
On the logistics of Walt getting the berries to Brock:
Yeah. That part’s probably the trickiest part. I can’t remember the specifics, but we worked it out in the writer’s room. He technically had enough hours to do it. How he found his way over there unseen is probably a little improbable, perhaps, but not impossible, is the way we figured it.
On the famous ‘Spidey-sense’ scene in the season’s penultimate episode:
I think with that, [Gus] finds out in the previous scene in the chapel, he knows his lynchpin remaining meth cook is acting up, and hears this child’s in the hospital, figures he has to go talk to the kid, get him right with Jesus, get him cooking, despite what’s going on in his personal life. I think his Spidey-sense is all about the way Jesse looks at him in the chapel when he says the little boy’s not sick, he was poisoned. That in and of itself sounds strange and sounds too coincidental not to be somehow involved with Walter White. I think his Spidey-sense keys off of Jesse’s strange behavior in this hospital chapel.
At the time, if you believe that Gus did indeed poison the little boy, then what you’d assume if you were Gus, when you get this kid alone and he says the little boy has been poisoned – then Gus is too smart to say, “Who do you think poisoned him?” But he’s assuming Jesse will say, “I think Mr. White did it.” But because Jesse never says who did it, or who he thinks, that’s another reason for Gus’s Spidey-sense, as it were, to tingle.
On how far in advance they plan overarching plot elements:
The one with the rug, not so very hard, because it was all contained within one episode. But the Ricin cigarette, for instance – the short answer is, we try whenever we possibly can, we prefer the long set-up versus the short one. It pleases us. It satisfies us as writers when we can play a very deep game, and play it as many moves ahead as possible. To that end, setting up Tio as Gus’s nemesis, that we didn’t realize how deep their enmity towards each other was, we started that in earnest this season with episode 8. That was a pretty good lead time, five episodes ahead. But some part of me wishes it had been deeper still, maybe another season before that. Although you kind of get hints the very first time Tio meets Gus along with the Cousins, that the old bastard does not care for Gus.
I loved the idea of Tio dinging that bell and blowing up Gus. I think we talked about that at the very beginning of the season, and then we shelved it for a while, and then we came back to it.
Other Bits
- Mike is very much still in play. Expect to see him next season.
- The book is also open for both Gus and Tio to return in some guise, most likely through flashbacks.
- The final 16 episodes will probably be split over two seasons consisting of eight episodes each.
Check out the entire interview at Hitfix.
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