Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan: 'No bad deed goes unpunished He is a really fascinating character and always will remain so for me, but I found him very sympathetic and very likeable in the pilot episode. I felt sorry for him being mistreated by his students, I knew he wanted his family to be protected, taken care of. But as the episodes have progressed, his constant lying to his family and to himself has worn down the sympathy that I feel towards the man. Interestingly that does not seem to be the case for a great many viewers, who still want to see him succeed, and I don't for a minute say that they are wrong. If I want people to watch it, I have to understand that people have to relate to this character and to what he does. Walt's journey into darkness is lit by his belief that he is doing what he does for his family, but he also discovers in himself an alter ego who assumes a mythical status in drug circles: the inhumanly calculating Heisenberg, a criminal mastermind capable of many things, including murder. I wonder what, for Gilligan, represents Walt's most unforgivable act? "Well he's had a great many of them," he says, laughing, "it's hard to pick just one. The ones that involve violence are easy to point out, but my answer is the moment in episode four of season one when Walt is offered free cancer treatment and a job in their multibillion-dollar corporation by his old friends Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz. He's offered a way out in which he will get all the money he needs for his family. He won't have to be a criminal, he won't have to cook meth, and he refuses. That I think was pretty much unforgivable and really turned the show on its head. It made it clear that this was a very complicated character. It's often said that Breaking Bad is a very moral work. Bob Odenkirk, who plays crooked lawyer Saul Goodman, has said that "no bad deed goes unpunished" in the show. Does Gilligan agree? "I prefer to find structure and morality when I can in my writing," says Gilligan, "So yes, there is a certain moral clockwork to Breaking Bad, partly born of the fact that I've watched a lot of TV in my life and very often in television actions don't have consequences. I've written TV shows, by the way, in which the main character shoots and kills someone in an episode and the next week it's just never mentioned again. That's not the nature of reality. Bob is right, we do often hew to the philosophy that no bad deed goes unpunished, although we also sometimes hew to the philosophy that no good deed goes unpunished as well. The actions everyone takes do have consequences. The "we" that Gilligan speaks of is the team of six writers who, together with Gilligan, sit around a conference table testing every plot point and talking through all the possibilities in minute detail, while an assistant takes notes. Although there is no assigned individual who "understands" how Walt's wife Skyler thinks, or how Jesse would act, in Breaking Bad the expectation is that the story is forged by each character doing exactly what they really would do in the given circumstances. It grounds the series in an emotional reality even as its narrative daring keeps viewers constantly on the edge of surprise. The old rules of "telly" do not apply. Characters wear bruises for episodes at a time, wince at sore ribs, remain traumatised by the pain of emotional warfare. When Walt's DEA agent brother-in-law Hank receives a spinal injury in a confrontation with Mexican assassins in season three, his recovery is slow, painful, expensive and partial. Breaking Bad's writers simply would not have allowed Downton's Matthew Crawley to miraculously walk again after his war injuries. In Breaking Bad, a different standard of truth-telling is applied. I ask Gilligan how he feels when he hears about real-life Walter Whites, who have been "inspired" by Walt's actions to embark on a life of crime. Does it bother him? "Actually it would affect me," he admits. I'm pretty studious about staying away from news of Breaking Bad, although anecdotally I certainly hear a lot of things. I have heard, for instance, that there is real-life blue meth for sale in certain parts of America" - a product that mimics the signature colour of the crystal meth made by White in the series - "and on some level, there is some little twinge of 'Damn, people are actually watching my show" and there's some cockeyed satisfaction in that. But this stuff that we're portraying is real and it destroys people's lives and I don't want to contribute to that, so it's mostly a queasy feeling of recognition and of 'this is not how I set out to change the world."" It's a surprise when you first meet Gilligan to realise that such a bizarre, violent, and blackly funny tale could have sprung from such a gentlemanlike individual. You expect him to be conspicuously cool. He's not. There's a fastidiousness to his appearance that flows into the seriousness and depth of his answers. It becomes clear that depicting Walter White's scientific attention to detail has probably not been a stretch. As the final season has neared its climax, speculation about the ending has grown ever more feverish. The task of shutting down potential leaks, says Gilligan, has been a big operation. Those who have worked on the show and seen the ending (who may by now number in the hundreds) are, he says, very invested in keeping its secrets. But there have also been some "heavy-hitting security people" working behind the scenes. Ensuring that the ending was dramatically satisfying, meanwhile, was a challenge on a different scale. Whereas Gilligan says he wrote the pilot in four to six weeks, with minimal revisions - "There were maybe three or four drafts at the most, just changing a few scenes, a few words here and there" - the pressure to get the ending right, he says, slowed the whole process down. Every idea was on the table as we broke the final 16 episodes; I don't think that it made us more conservative. But when we were about to settle on an idea, we would ask, 'Is there a better idea out there? Luckily we had enough lead time to work through it. Everyone knows that however good the series has been up to this point, a masterpiece with a flawed ending is no longer a masterpiece. I wonder if he has felt the weight of that responsibility. "Oh yeah," he says, sighing. It's weighed on me greatly. The fear of not getting the ending right has kept me awake a great many nights, but I feel good about the ending. It was hard fought. It took a long time and a lot of work to arrive at but I feel very good about it. The final episode of Breaking Bad goes live on netflix.com on Monday about 9am. Every earlier episode is also available