Vince Gilligan Almost Dumped the Best Scene in Breaking Bad Finale
The ending of Breaking Bad could have been way more different.
Breaking Bad is undoubtedly one of the most acclaimed TV shows of our time. But even this well-crafted and well thought out show had its moments that had the show’s creator Vince Gilligan racking his brains.
In particular, one of the show’s most iconic moments really got Vince Gilligan sweating.
In the fifth season of Breaking Bad, there's a scene where Walter White goes out and buys a huge machine gun. This scene set the stage for what was to come, but Vince Gilligan and his team of writers had no idea how they were going to use it.
As Gilligan recalled in an interview with UPROXX, they introduced the gun with 16 episodes to go, thinking they had plenty of time to sort it out. But as the episodes dwindled down, the pressure mounted. Gilligan even thought about scrapping the whole machine gun idea, but his team insisted on giving it a shot.
The Breaking Bad team brainstormed various scenarios for the machine gun. According to Insider, one idea was for Walt to use it to rescue Jesse from jail, mowing down innocent people in the process. Another had Walt shooting up a prison bus in the same fashion.
The writers even thought about giving us a darker ending where major characters die in a bloodbath. But in the end, none of those options felt like the right fit.
In the end, the writers came up with the ending where Walt uses the machine gun to take out a room full of the Nazis, led by Uncle Jack. It felt like the most natural way to wrap things up.
But the machine gun scene was not just organic, it was also realistic. The scene later caught the attention of the Mythbusters team. In a special episode, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage recreated the scene to test its feasibility.
They set up a mock scenario, complete with wooden cut-outs representing the characters. As it turned out, the machine gun setup from Breaking Bad was absolutely plausible. The bullets could penetrate walls, and the setup could realistically take out a room full of people.