Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan talks about the series finale, plus the premiere date for the final episodes

Don’t you hate it when a show that is awesome for years and year completely craps the bed when it comes to the series finale? There are so many shows that had the potential to go down in history as having a consistent run of success only to screw it up with the ending. Something tells me that BREAKING BAD will not be one of those shows.

Series creator Vince Gilligan gave an insightful interview to Vulture in which he laid out a list of things he needs to make sure that happen in the final episodes of the series. Here are some highlights. Obviously if you have not watch through the midpoint of the final season, this will contain spoilers, so proceed at your own risk!

On whether he knew how the show would end from the beginning: “I had this strange confidence in the beginning that I had an idea [for the ending] that was sound,” he said of Walt’s fate. “But I look back at the life of the series and realize I cycled through so many possible endings, it would be disingenuous to say I had always had it figured out. It has evolved in the last five years and probably has some evolving left to do.”

On returning to moments from the pilot: “Are there echoes of the beginning that we should have in the end? There’s a certain kind of circularity that might be pleasing,” Gilligan said. “We think a lot about that, in fact.”

On whether Walt will be caught/killed in the end: “I’m very cornball in my own view of the world. It just makes sense to me that bad people should get punished and good people should be rewarded. I know it doesn’t work like that in real life, but there’s always that yearning.” But that desire for comeuppance doesn’t apply to the made-up world he’s created, even though justice may in fact be inevitable. “Oddly enough, I don’t feel any real pressure to pay off the characters, morally speaking.”

Will the series end or be left ambiguous? “Rightly or wrongly, there will be a conclusive ending,” he told me. “Our story from the beginning has been designed to be close-ended. It’s very much designed to have a beginning, middle, and end and then to exist no more.”

I will miss the adventures of Walt and Jesse when the show finally ends. Speaking of which, series star Aaron Paul tweeted to the world that the final eight episodes of BREAKING BAD will begin airing on AMC on July 14, 2013. That means six months until the countdown truly begins.