TV Watch: Maybe it's lucky that Vince "Breaking Bad" Gilligan learned typing instead of calculus

I never took chemistry and I feel that’s a shame. I actually wish I had. I was a bit intimidated by math in high school. I signed up for calculus and after about the first day or two I felt that it was so overwhelming that I changed to a typing course and learned how to type, which actually was pretty helpful given my chosen career. But I wish I had not allowed myself to be intimidated out of taking science and math courses.

-- Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan,
from Part I of an AMC-blog Q-and-A

by Ken

This lovely reply comes in response to a question from BB fan Elizabeth: "Since you never took chemistry, I understand, I’m wondering how you knew the subject contained such a wealth of magic plot devices and what the research process was like." Vince goes on to say:

Having said all of that, even though I don't have a proper school understanding of chemistry, I read a lot of Popular Science magazine, and I have a lot of a layman's love for science and chemistry and physics. I knew enough from watching Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye the Science Guy that chemistry was obviously a very fascinating subject. But of course, the science on Breaking Bad sounds so real because of the expert help we received, starting with Dr. Donna Nelson at the University of Oklahoma. She was our technical advisor on the show -- we would come up with some of these ideas and then run them by her and see if they made sense.

Vince in fact goes on to provide a lovely example of how he and the writing staff collaborated with Dr. Nelson, in the matter of the famous Heisenberg blue crystal meth, in response to another fan question (the AMC blog feature after all is called "Breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan Answers Fan Questions -- Part I"), and we'll come back to that. But first let me say that I thought the Breaking Bad finale was just fine, thank you.

In the final installment of Talking Bad, the outstanding after-show that has been tracking Breaking Bad through these final eight episodes, Vince stressed that he and the other writers agonized long and hard seeking the right finale for this show. As regards the obvious contrast with David Chase's famously impenetrable Sopranos finale, in which at the end it's impossible for any viewer to know what they just saw, Vince said he in fact liked that a lot -- but that was the end point for a very different show. For Breaking Bad, he and the team felt, they needed a very concrete conclusion that tied up all the loose ends.

And on those terms, I don't see how they could have done much better. And I include in that the range of decisions by which the team meted out what we might call "producers' justice" to each of the characters. In the clip below (assuming it works; my clips hardly ever do) Vince says that no, he didn't always know how the series would end, but he did always have the feeling that Walt was going to have to die. How smart it was to endow Walt himself with this knowledge, and then to see how inventive they could be in showing how he orchestrates his final days -- with a good many twists and turns, not just for the viewer but for Walt himself.

In the process, the writers did a swell job of their patented misdirecting, leading us to expect an outcome to a sequence of events which comes out completely different. I mean, if there's anyone who claims to have guessed the true purpose of Walt's final visit to his old-time pals-turned-nemeses Gretchen and Elliott, I say bunk. Just as if there's anyone who claims not to have believed that his purpose was, well, you know, I'm extremely dubious. (In the clip, Bryan Cranston offers some thoughts of his on the visit to Gretchen and Elliott.)

While we're on the subject of the ending, in the clip clears up a question I had. It was fascinating in the final episode to finally encounter those "flash forward" scenes we saw at the start of this final episode arc, only now understanding what the heck is going on in them. As it turns out, though, when those scenes were originally written, the writers didn't know what they meant either! They were simply committing themselves to figuring it all out by the time they got back to that point. Vince notes that some of the answers would involve characters who didn't even exist when those scenes were written and filmed.

Still on the subject of the finale, here's another fan question with Vince's answer:

Q: I’m very interested to hear what other possible endings you came up with on the journey, and at what point you realized that the ending you had was the right one. -- Horton Jupiter

A: It took the longest time to come up with that ending, probably the better part of a year. I had a lot of worries along the way that we weren't going to come up with a proper ending. We had this image for the longest time that was more or less the ending that you saw -- except that instead of going to the meth lab, Walt went on and stumbled down the street and collapsed and he died on his own in a hospital hallway without anybody realizing who he was. Or we had a version where Walt actually survived and maybe Skyler or Junior and the whole family were wiped out. Stuff like that we considered but probably didn't think about for too long because our guts told us that was just too dark and too depressing. We wanted the right balance of Walt paying for his sins and yet we wanted some sort of a note of triumph at the end of it all. He got a whole lot of money to his family; trouble is he's destroyed his family in the meantime. Even the pick of the final song of the series reflects that – the Badfinger song has got a tinge of sadness to it and yet the chord structure is almost kind of triumphant.

Now to return to that point about the "science" of Breaking Bad, here's a great question-and-answer. Anyone who tries to shop for some Heisenberg-quality blue crystal meth is doomed to disappointment, and not just because there's no meth-cooking Heisenberg.

Q: I was wondering if you would comment on the origins of the blue color of Heisenberg’s meth? – Brenda Neary

A: We had this instinct that it would be helpful to have something distinctive about Walt's product. And we figured it should be nice and clear and not cloudy that a proper product would be. We thought yellow would be a terrible choice because it would remind people of urine, and we figured green would be an odd color and we thought blue was a good choice because it feels clean. We called up Dr. Donna with our fingers crossed, asked her if she thought it was possible for this product to come out as blue. She looked into it and said not really, and in fact, if you add a color, chemically speaking it would mean the product is probably less pure and been adulterated. And that worried me when I heard that. But she said, you know at the end of the day this is a fictional story and I’ll help you get the chemistry as right as I can. Sometimes technical advisors will be very rigid and say it will never work that way, never in a million years, but she was very good that way.

Once again the writers seem to me to have gotten it exactly write. Of course the color of Walt's super-pure meth is blue. What else could it be?

Vince pretty well disposes of the question of improvisation in Breaking Bad:

Every now and then Bryan Cranston might come up with a different line or two, but on the whole the actors stuck pretty closely to the script. I would say it's not much in the way of improvisation, but the writers and I didn't worry too much if an actor transposed the word "the" with the word "a," or other stuff like that.

But the same question includes "What was the first character you created apart from Walt?," and he answers it:

As far as the second character created, I can't say for sure because I'm not sure I remember 100 percent. I probably started with Walter White and fanned outward from him. I probably thought about who would a guy like that be married to, so most likely Skyler was the second character I created.

Which is fine as far as it goes, but I wish he hadn't taken the question so literally, to cover only the first character after Walter. Probably he's already talked about this somewhere, or if not will eventually (eventually, surely, every imaginable question about the show will have to be answered), but I'd love to hear Vince talk about how the various characters were imagined.

STILL, THE MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING QUESTION . . .

. . . seems to me this one (emphasis added):

Q: You've said that Breaking Bad became a sociological experiment. Are you ready to share the results? -- sonyaraskolnikov

A: I think the results are to be determined by the viewer. The individual fan needs to ask themselves if they rooted for Walt the whole time, or did they lose sympathy the whole way, and how do they feel about him now that it's over. And there is no right answer. What interested me is that I assumed that people would lose sympathy and lose patience with Walt along the way, the more greedy and selfish he became. But lo and behold, it seemed to be the opposite was in fact that case. It seemed to be that people who were fans of the show were sympathetic to Walt no matter what he did, which is I think very interesting. So that to me, was at least part of the sociological experiment; how viewers interacted with Walt and how they felt about him after six years.

In which connection you might want to look back at The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum's discussion of the matter of "bad fans" (see "TV Watch: Lessons from "the" phone call on last week's Breaking Bad").

Now remember, this was just Part I of the fan questions. Stay tuned for Part II.