Q: You opted to kill Walt, definitively closing the door on his story. But you left it open for Saul by letting him live. At the time, you knew there was going to be a Saul spin-off. When you guys were deciding the fates of Saul and others, were you thinking about the spin-off?
A - Vince: That’s a good question, and on the face of it, it would certainly read like we were being strategic in our thinking, if not mercenary, to ensure that Saul Goodman stayed alive because we had already talked publicly about our desire to do a Better Call Saul spin-off. Having said that, in those final months and weeks of breaking the end of the Breaking Bad story, anything and everything was fair game and open for discussion. We talked a great many times about killing off Saul and we were open to it. We would have done whatever it took to come up with the best, most satisfying ending to Breaking Bad, including killing off Saul. But the more we talked about it, the more we thought, “You know, we don’t necessarily want the end of this series to be a bloodbath.” At one point, we talked about killing off every major character, and one particularly dark week along the way we talked about killing everybody — having some sort of Wild Bunch bloodbath of an ending. But you live with those ideas for a while and you think, “What do we need to kill all these characters for?” Just because an ending is dramatic or perhaps overly dramatic does not ensure that it will be satisfying.” We thought to ourselves, “Let’s just go with what feels right to us.” And there’s no mathematics to this. You just have to feel your way through it blindly and go with your gut, and that’s what we did. And in the case of Saul, we thought to ourselves, “Saul Goodman is kind of like a cockroach, in the sense that he’s probably going to survive all nuclear wars and he’ll still be out there somewhere after mankind has become extinct. He’s a survivor and therefore it’d be weird if he didn’t survive. Walter White, on the other hand, got a death sentence in the first act of the very first episode. It would be less than satisfying perhaps if he didn’t die at the end of the whole thing.”

62 Thing you didn’t know about BrBa (one for each episode)
45 - End Times Ep 4x12
Jesse is put through the emotional ringer — even more than usual — in this episode, as a poisoned Brock goes into the hospital, Jesse has all kinds of suspicions about his culpability in that matter, he frets about the ricin vial, and finally, he allows Walt to convince him that they have to kill Gus because Gus is the one responsible for Brock’s near-death. It was this episode, in fact, that earned Aaron Paul his second (consecutive) Emmy as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.

bleeding out // a walt/jesse fanmix (as told by jesse)
01. imagine dragons :: bleeding out | 02. arthur walwin:: wrecking ball
03. daughter :: landfill | 04. ms mr :: hurricane
05. panic! at the disco :: collar full |06. shakira :: can’t remember to forget you (feat. rihanna)
07. godsmack :: i fucking hate you | 08. gotye :: somebody that i used to know
09. arctic monkeys :: do i wanna know? | 10. le toya luckett :: torn
11. zedd :: clarity

62 Thing you didn’t know about BrBa (one for each episode)
Pilot.
And thus began America’s love affair with Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in his tighty-whities. Oh, we’ll get this view many more times in the next 61 episodes (Jezebel thoughtfully compiled a video of Walt in his drawers), but the most surprising thing about Walt in his undies: Cranston was given the option to wear sweatpants instead, and he not only opted to go sans pants, but he also chose the tighty-whities. “You’ve got to hope it’s going to be one of those iconic images that sums up the show … this kind of ‘Every Man’ character in his suede Wallabee shoes and his underpants,” series creator Vince Gilligan said. P.S. That very pair of undies is now up for auction at ScreenBid.com — how much are Walt’s grungy undies worth to you?

62 Thing you didn’t know about BrBa (one for each episode)02 - Cat’s in the Bag… Ep 1x02
The bathtub scene, where hydrofluoric acid and drug dealer Emilio Koyama create a big mess that eats through the tub and Jesse’s floor/ceiling? Great scene but not realistic, at least not according to “MythBusters.” You can watch the entire episode, which also tackled the validity of other “Bad” stunts, at Discovery.com, but the gist is your bathtub can most likely survive attempts to dissolve things in acid in it. But, if you should ever need to…

62 Thing you didn’t know about BrBa (one for each episode)
03 - …And the Bag’s in the River Ep 1x03
While Walt cleans up the body-and-acid-in-bathtub scene of his and Jesse’s crime, he flashes back to his early chemistry lab days, when he and former partner Gretchen (Jessica Hecht) were figuring out the chemical composition of the human body: hydrogen, 63%; oxygen, 26%; carbon, 9%; nitrogen, 1.25%; calcium, 0.25%; chlorine, 0.2%; phosphorous, 0.19%; sodium, 0.04%; sulfur, 0.050002%; and iron, 0.00004%. Don’t worry, we’ve done the math. They add up to 99.888042 percent, or .111958 shy of 100 percent. “There’s got to be more to a human being than that,” flashback Walt says, while we watch him in the present flushing the goo formerly known as Emilio down Jesse’s toilet.

62 Thing you didn’t know about BrBa (one for each episode)
04 - Cancer Man Ep 1x04

During a backyard dinner with the family, Walt tells Walt Jr., Hank, and Marie, for the first time, that he has lung cancer. “It’s bad,” he tells them. The title of the episode has a double meaning, though; it’s also an ode to “the Smoking Man,” aka “the Cigarette-Smoking Man,” aka “CSM,” aka “C-Man,” aka “Cancer Man,” a villain on “The X-Files,” the Fox drama on which Gilligan was a writer and producer. That show was where Gilligan first worked with Bryan Cranston, an “X-Files” guest star, and vowed to work with him again.

62 Thing you didn’t know about BrBa (one for each episode)
05 - Gray Matter Ep 1x05

Walt is offered a solution to his immediate financial problems: His former Gray Matter business partners Gretchen and Elliott, who became billionaires after Walt left the company, offer to pay for his cancer treatment. But Walt declines. Gilligan says this was a pivotal moment for the writers in understanding this character they’d created, because Walt made a defining choice: He’d rather become a drug kingpin than accept what he considered charity.

62 Thing you didn’t know about BrBa (one for each episode)
06 - Crazy Handful of Nothin’
Having agreed to get treatment for his cancer, Walt shaves his head after beginning chemo in this episode. It also signaled the beginning of his transformation into Heisenberg, as he tossed fulminated mercury — “with a tweak of chemistry” — in Tuco’s office, to get the drug dealer to agree to work with him on his terms. That mercury explosion? Created not with mercury but with primer cord, or explosive rope.

62 Thing you didn’t know about BrBa (one for each episode)
07 - A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal Ep 1x07

Hat’s on! Walt’s iconic black porkpie topper makes its debut signifying he is in full-on Heisenberg persona now. The decision to outfit him with a hat wasn’t made to aid his character development. Instead, Cranston needed a hat to help keep his shaved head covered in the New Mexico sun and warm during the cold desert shoots.