Vince Gilligan Tackles Four ‘Breaking Bad’ Myths (Video)

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The Internet was full of Breaking Bad theories as the AMC hit entered its final year. Some were brainy (Does that ominous camera angle mean a character is marked for death?) and some were silly (Was the series actually a prequel to Malcolm in the Middle?)

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Creator Vince Gilligan addressed four of those rumors during his cover shoot for The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

1. The finale was a dream.

False! Saturday Night Live alum Norm MacDonald tweeted up a storm after the finale, saying it must have been a fantasy in Walt’s head. Things just worked out too well for him, MacDonald reasoned. But Gilligan says it was all real.

“No — because Walt would therefore have to be dreaming about things he would otherwise have no knowledge of,” Gilligan says. For example, Walt didn’t know Jesse was still alive and being held by the Aryan gang.”

2. Walt takes on the characteristics of the people he kills.

True! Krazy-8 (Max Arciniega) liked his sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and after murdering Krazy-8, so did Walt. There are other examples of this floating around online, and Gilligan says at least some of them were intentional.

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“There are probably examples of it we were not consciously aware of. But at a certain point we have Walt vomiting and he puts down a hand towel to kneel on. That is an exact visual echo of something Gus Fring did when he was vomiting to get the poison out of his system [after poisoning Don Eladio and his capos in the season-four episode ‘Salud’].”

3. The car company Kuby rents Walt’s van from (to transport his money) was the one routinely used by Mulder and Scully in The X-Files.

True! “That was an X-Files shout-out. Lariat Car Rentals,” Gilligan says. It turns out the Breaking Bad team needed to use a fictional rental company for legal reasons.

4. Baby Holly was the only character the writers never considered killing.

False! “Everybody was on the table,” Gilligan says. “We had some pretty dark days in the writers room, where we talked about a great many awful potential storylines. Nobody was safe in the writers room. Not even baby Holly.”

Gilligan graces the cover of the Oct. 25 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine, in which he also discusses the pressures of following up Breaking Bad. Read the complete story here.

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