The “Breaking Bad” finale ranks as one of the best finales of all time, but the ending might have seemed a bit familiar to some viewers. Series creator Vince Gilligan says part of the climactic ending was actually lifted from one of his favorite movies, “The Searchers.”
“The Searchers” stars John Wayne as a Confederate veteran who, along with his adopted nephew (Jeffery Hunter), spends years looking for his niece (Natalie Wood) who’s been kidnapped by Native Americans. Wayne says he’d rather see her dead than live as a Native American, while Hunter wants to save her. Gilligan said that conflict made the film a classic. “You know for the whole movie that this is the major drama between these two characters,” Gilligan told Entertainment Weekly. “And then at the end of the movie, on impulse, you think he’s riding toward her to shoot her, and instead he sweeps her up off her feet and he carries her away and he says, ‘Let’s go home.'”
Gilligan said he could think of no better way to end “Breaking Bad” then by letting Walter save Jesse the same way John Wayne saved Natalie Wood. “[T]he ending of that movie just chokes you up, it’s wonderful,” Gilligan said in the same interview. “In the writers’ room we said, ‘Hey, what about the ‘Searchers’ ending?’ So, it’s always a matter of stealing from the best.”
Gilligan says everyone got the ending they deserved
It wasn’t easy for Vince Gilligan to figure out a way for every character to have a satisfying ending in “Breaking Bad,” despite putting together one of the best final seasons of all time. But he said borrowing an ending from a movie like “The Searchers” worked for Walt. “We were thinking [Walt] is gonna kill Jesse the whole time, we think that’s his intent,” Gilligan told The Guardian. “[T]hen he sees him and sees what terrible shape he’s in, and instinct takes over, that fondness he’s felt for him — although he hasn’t shown it very well over the years, I have to admit.”
Gilligan, who’s currently earning rave reviews again for his new show “Pluribus,” said the writers toyed with several different endings, including one where Jesse kills Walt, and another where everyone dies except Walt. In the end, however, what ended up in the episode is what he said felt right. “There’s no right or wrong way to do this job. It’s just a matter of: You get as many smart people around you as possible in the writers’ room, and I was very lucky to have that,” Gilligan told Entertainment Weekly. “And when our gut told us we had it, we wrote it, and I guess our gut told us that it would feel satisfying for Walt to at least begin to make amends for his life and for all the sadness and misery wrought upon his family and his friends.”