Warning: Breaking Bad finale spoilers ahead
It has been over a decade since Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad first hit our screens, and now the man himself is looking back at what he would do differently.
Over 62 episodes of cooking blue meth and wearing Y-Fronts, Breaking Bad bowed out with one of the best season finales ever in 2013. However, even a show as well-received as Breaking Bad wasn’t without its problems. Now, Gilligan reveals he has only one regret from the show’s impressive run on our screens, and no, it wasn’t deciding to kill off Bryan Cranston’s Walt.
Gilligan had previously told us his only regret was to do with the canon of Saul Goodman, but he appears to have changed his mind when speaking to Digital Spy. The creator revealed that if he could (now) change one thing, it would be Jesse Pinkman’s teeth. That’s right, they’re just too perfect:
Aaron Paul played the de facto second lead to Cranston’s White, and often found himself being beaten up and pummelled by various gangsters and even Walt himself. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Jesse probably wouldn’t have many teeth left in his head, and Gilligan has since regretted not showing this in a more accurate way. While it is likely a piece of continuity that hardly anyone noticed, it shows Gilligan’s loyalty to his craft of making the best show possible.
“I’m really sorry Jesse’s teeth were so perfect. Aaron Paul’s teeth are so perfect, rather – Jesse Pinkman, the character, would get the living hell beaten out of him every week. And then he smoked a lot of meth, which is rough on your teeth! Little details like that… If I stopped to think about it, I would change them. I would say to myself, ‘I wish we’d gotten that right.’”
Over Breaking Bad’s five seasons, there were amazingly shocking twists and turns. From that first acid bath to Gus Fring’s explosive retirement home exit, the show refused to compromise on its shocking demises for some of its biggest characters. However, perhaps the biggest controversy came in season 5’s ‘Ozymandias’ when Dean Norris’ Hank Schrader kicked the bucket. Heralded as the very best of Breaking Bad, Gilligan thankfully said he would keep deaths like these exactly as they were when we first watched them:
At least the show can look back on most of its big moments with a sense of pride that they worked out as well as Gilligan could’ve hoped for. Given that the whole show was built around Cranston’s Walter White heading toward the grave, it might not have seemed too shocking to kill the lead off, however, the way in which Gilligan sent Walt down in a hail of bullets was a masterpiece of 21st Century TV.
“In terms of broad strokes of the story, in terms of, ‘Should this character have been killed off?’ or ‘Should that character have lived?’ or whatever… nothing like that keeps me awake at night, thank goodness.”
As for Jesse’s teeth, let’s call it a relatively minor drop in the ocean in the grand scheme of things when looking at how well Breaking Bad has aged over the past 10 years. Only recently, Gilligan said he would love to return to the character of Jesse - possibly for his own sequel show - so who knows, maybe he could explain Pinkman’s amazing dentistry work then? In the meantime, it looks like Jesse’s perfect pearly whites are something that we’re all going to have to learn to live with.
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Source: Digital Spy
