On how Lydia became the ricin target
“The writers and I all subscribe to the dramatic philosophy of playwright Chekhov, who said that if you establish a gun in Act 1, you better have it get fired at somebody by Act 3. We knew that ricin was still out there and we knew it was hidden behind the wall outlet in the old White house bedroom. I guess we could have let it slide, but we thought to ourselves, ‘The audience has been real good to us, they’ve paid very close attention, we want to reward them by not leaving any loose ends here.’ And also, honestly, the actress who plays Lydia [Laura Fraser] is a wonderful, warm, sweet person but the chatacter of Lydia – we were all champing at the bit to see her get her just desserts much more than Todd even. Todd is so likable, you almost have these ambivalent feelings when he’s being choked to death. But Lydia? We were all of one mind when we were saying, ‘Oh man, she’s got to go.’
They almost had Skyler kill herself.
“We talked about a possible version where Skyler and Walt were holed up in some Motel 6 or someplace, and he’s talking to her, she’s in the bathroom and he’s saying to her, ‘It’s going to be alright, it’s gonna be okay, I’ve got a plan. Skyler? Skyler?’ And he forces the door open and she’s in a bloody tub or something like that, having opened up a wrist ... It was very dark.”
Walt Jr. was almost killed in Season 2.
“Walt is so filled with rage [at] the drug dealer who kills Jesse that he’s out for revenge. And he takes it very personally ... Walt gets this guy and chloroforms him or something, and installs him in some basement somewhere” to torture him, with a shotgun and trip wire to give the bad guy the option to kill himself, Gilligan described, before mentioning that this was before he had a writing staff and that everyone who heard this idea was thoroughly horrified. “Walter Jr. was gonna somehow stumble into this place ... and Walt Jr. being a sweet character, was going to try to help him ... and somehow this guy’s eyes flicker open and somehow he realizes it’s Walter’s son, and then and only then does he trip the wire and kill both of them.”
The Machine Gun.
Gilligan said they didn’t know what they were going to do with the M60 machine gun they introduced in beginning of Season 5. The writers debated having Walter go out like Scarface, using it either against the cops or in a prison-break to free Jesse.
“You’re planting your flag at that point ... You plant that gun, you show the gun to the audience in Act 1, you gotta fire it by Act 3 ... We were planting our flag, we were saying, you know what, an M60 machine gun, Rambo’s machine gun, something cool has to happen with that. We’ll figure it out later.”
“Who does he use it on was the first obvious question. And at that point, we didn’t have Uncle Jack yet ... we hadn’t thought of him yet, and Kenny and Todd, we didn’t have any of those guys ... We knew there’d be a bunch of bad guys.
“Our original version was that Walt would use it in somewhat Rambo fashion, handheld, mowing down a bunch of guys. But the closer we got to the end, and we realized Walt’s cancer would resurface and we realized how sick he would be, that felt wrong to go brawns over brain, go out like Rambo. On his best day, Walt was never Rambo. So very late in the game we came up with mounting it in the trunk and using the garage door motor as a way of sweeping it back and forth, and automating the process. Because everyone, including me, loved those moments when Walt was MacGyver-esque.”
At one point, Gilligan and his writers got to thinking that it might be too obvious to have Walt use the gun on a bunch of bad guys, and considered that he might shoot up a police station, or a jail, to set Jesse free.
“We had versions that we talked about, for instance, where the police are coming to get him and he uses it on the police, but we didn’t like that, it that didn’t seem right. We had a version where he goes and breaks Jesse out of jail just as the Nazis are going to knock Jesse off in jail, and he comes in and uses an M60 to lay waste to an entire prison or prison bus ... So we had every version of this. I’m not saying we got far with those, but we would talk them through for hours on end ... But we were like, You know what? As bad as Walt is, we don’t want to see him killing good guys. If he’s gonna use this M60, even if it’s slightly less surprising, let’s see him use it on guys that are worse than he is.”
