Remember how, at the start of Breaking Bad, there was an unsettling and sometimes hilarious contrast between the awfulness of Heisenberg's empire and Walter White's milquetoast daily appearance? That contrast eventually went away in favor of Nazi compounds and mysterious machine guns, but it lives on in the face of Vince Gilligan, the Southern-accented, completely amiable creator of the show with a mustache to die for. Gilligan's so likable, and of course brilliant, that he even got Stephen Colbert to essentially break character and geek out during his appearance on The Colbert Report last night. You can watch the first half of it above, and the second part below.
I love the way Gilligan is wearing a jacket that would essentially help him blend like a chameleon into the bland White home, and though he's brought it up elsewhere, his comparison of the end of the series to the end of John Ford's The Searchers really helps understand where Walt's head is when he dives to the ground with Jesse in his arms. And, of course, this has Stephen Colbert singing, and who doesn't need that once in a while?
If you didn't stick around until the show's sign-off, Gilligan wasn't quite done. Stephen Colbert got to do what I'm sure many of us have fantasized about: chaining Vince Gilligan into our personal Nazi basements and forcing him to make more Breaking Bad:
For more on the end of Breaking Bad, we've got plenty of options for you-- there's our official recap, our rundown of the body count, our check-in on our predictions about the finale, some questions about whether that was the right ending for Walt, and a rundown of the ways that Breaking Bad's success might be able to change television. The show may be over, but its influence will last for a long, long time.
