Breaking Bad almost ended with everyone dying

Mastering the final episode of a show watched and adored by millions is no easy feat and the fan revolt after the finales of Dexter and How I Met Your Mother shows just how seriously some take it all.

But Breaking Bad, that show that you were essentially pointless for not watching, ended rather brilliantly with, spoiler, Walt dying and Jesse driving off into the unknowable future.

However, creator Vince Gilligan recently told Entertainment Weekly that it could have been a different story entirely...

"At one point, we talked about killing off every major character," he revealed. "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."

Thankfully, sense took over...

"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."

Gilligan spent a long time mulling over the death of Saul, soon to be seen again in spin-off Better Call Saul, but decided against it.

"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 told EW. "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."

Better Call Saul hits TV later this year

[via EW]