...talking about. I know the consensus opinion of the BB finale is that it was successful - and there's an extent to which consensus opinion is the best way to measure the kind of success we're talking about. But it's not like BB started with a clear road map in S1 such that Vince Gilligan always knew where he was heading. Jesse was originally going to die in S1, for example, and then he ended up being the primary protagonist of the show. There's also a pretty valid criticism that they did the Skylar character no favors whatsoever in the final couple of seasons, basically turning her into a passive bystander whose primary purpose was to fear and scold Walt.

But even more to the point, they started out the first episode of the first half of the final season (which was split over two years) with that flash forward scene where Walt is all haggardly and has the weaponry in the back of his car, and Vince Gilligan has said repeatedly that they weren't sure when they wrote that how they were going to get to that point or what was necessarily going on there...they just thought it was a cool way to kick off the final season and wanted to challenge themselves to write toward that ending. And if you liked the way they got there that's great (and, again, that seems to be the consensus opinion) and obviously the people running that show are vastly more gifted writers than the guys running Game of Thrones. No argument about any of that.

But, to me, during those final two half seasons of BB, I could definitely feel that awkward weight of them trying to bring the story back to that scene. And I will always feel like the true "stick the landing" moment of that show came not in the finale but in the two proceeding episodes. The finale has always felt like an awkwardly tacked on coda to me and it's because they gambled on expanding the universe of the story at the outset of the final season.

But let me make a concession here: if there's anyone in the TV business I would trust with ending a long-running serialized story, it's Vince Gilligan (despite the fact that I'm not a gigantic fan of the BB finale). As a huge fan of Better Call Saul, I feel comfortable investing in the framing device they employ on that show (where a couple of times a season we drop in on future Saul, after the events of BB, for a few minutes at a time). I have confidence that even if they didn't know exactly what they were going to do with that when they started out the series, that they will pay it off smartly in the end. If it was anybody other than Vince Gilligan, though, I'd assume they were going to screw it up.