The Cousins (Daniel and Luis Moncada) drove much of the improvisational storytelling on "Breaking Bad" this year.

Credit: AMC

"Breaking Bad" just completed one of the best seasons of a TV drama I've ever had the pleasure to witness. (You can read my review of the finale here.) So just like I did last year, I got on the phone with creator Vince Gilligan to talk about the grand plan that led to this season - only to have Vince explain, over and over, that so much of what made this year great was the complete lack of a plan.

After the jump, Vince and I discuss the many Bob Ross-ian happy accidents of season three, including the Cousins, Gus's expanded role and the return of Heisenberg. Also, Vince provides some clarification on the final scene, and he has a slightly different answer about the show's long-term future than he did a year ago. Enjoy.

Let's start with the Cousins. You come into the season, they get the first big scene, and in these early episodes, it seems very clearly that we're building to some sort of apocalyptic thing with the Cousins. And then Hank deals with them midway through the year and we move onto something else. Was that always your plan? A bit of misdirection?

I'd love to be able to say that everything is pre-figured. I'd love to tell you I'm Bobby Fischer and I'm playing this game 20 moves ahead, but it's just not true. The writers and I, once we created the Cousins and put them into motion, the problem that we saw for ourselves was, "My God, how do we pay this off?" It's the exhilarating thing about this job and it's the terrifying thing about this job: We actively try to paint ourselves into corners at the end of episodes - at the end of seasons, at the end of scenes sometimes - and then we try to extricate ourselves from those corners. So far, so good. But one of these days, we'll probably paint ourselves into a corner we can't escape from.

The Cousins were one of those corners, in a sense. We created these guys, wound them up and set them loose, and then we spent a lot of hours and days in the writers room asking questions of ourselves: "What happens next? How do these guys who are so desperate to kill Walt, what keeps them at bay?" "Well, I guess the only thing that keeps them at bay would be Gus." Then suddenly we're realizing Gus is playing this whole game on a much higher level than we writers even thought in the first place.

We're actively moving these chess pieces around, not so much playing 10 or 15 or 20 moves ahead, but we are kind of running for our lives. It's scary. I don't want it to sound like it's a slapdash operation. It doesn't feel that way when we're doing it. We put a lot of thought into everything, and we try to play the game several moves ahead. But we're only human, and it's tricky sometime. All of this is a long-winded way of saying this was not pre-planned from the get-go. It was kind of a living, breathing thing that took on a life of its own as the season went along.

So in your mind, did you think when you went into the season, "We're all building towards some sort of showdown with the Cousins in episode 13" and it didn't work out that way? Or did you not even have that much of an arc for the season at that point?

There's a couple of different levels we always have to think about. When we first came up with the idea of the Cousins, that was before we had cast them. You have to keep in mind that if you cast the wrong actor in the role, and that actor for whatever reason is not playing it as interestingly as you would have hoped, then you're in trouble, and you don't want to put a huge amount of weight on them. Having said that, Luis and Daniel (Moncada) were 10 times more than I would have hoped for. They were absolutely fantastic. They really were better than my wildest dreams. They were scarier, they were sexier, they had more charisma than I would have ever hoped for. They just crushed those characters. And it was a sad day, believe me, on the set, when their characters were ended, because they're just great guys, too. They were wonderful guys to hang out with, too. The crew loved them. Every crew member wanted their photo taken with the Cousins, and apparently hours were spent doing that.

But you kind of have to wing it. It's like improvisational jazz. You don't know just how great the character is going to be, or maybe the reverse of that. And with the Cousins in particular, they're so scary and such a force of nature, the other issue we had in the writers room, was, how can we honestly hold these guys off as some sort of a tease for the audience for 13 entire episodes? We certainly had no interest in losing the Cousins just for the sake of losing them because the actors who played them turned out to be so great. But on the other hand, what I didn't want to do - pardon my crudity - was jerk the audience off for 13 episodes so we could have a quote-unquote "proper showdown" with them at the end of the season. That's how we try to keep things fresh. Hopefully, just when you think the Cousins are the major players in the season, then we get rid of them. It's not to be chaotic or anarchic, but simply to keep things fresh. I want people guessing like crazy, but I don't ever want the audience knowing what happens next. That would be a major failure on our part if we ever allowed that to happen.

The reason I ask that is because last season had a very clear plan, and you were laying seeds for the plane crash from the very beginning. So this year, you didn't have anything like that in your head going into it?

That is very true. I'm reactive more than active sometimes. I was reacting to last season. Season two, we were very proud of, and I liked that. It appealed to me intellectually, the idea of a circular season where the beginning images are also the end images. But that was miserably hard to figure out. We spent four or five weeks just sitting around with our heads in our hands. That was truly my best attempt ever, in my career, to play chess at the Bobby Fischer level, and I realized then, I'm definitely no Bobby Fischer. But we did have to plan out the bold strokes. But having said that, when we got deeper into season two, we knew it would end with a plane crash and that it would be Jane's dad who would be the air traffic controller, but we didn't know for sure whether he'd do it on purpose, or just how Jane was going to die. We thought maybe she was going to be driving across town with tears in her eyes to have some loving reunion with Jesse and get t-boned by a car or something. We had the bold storkes, but not the details, and as we know, the devil is in the details. So I was running scared all through season two, and it was miserably hard having that bookended shape to that season. So I wasn't eager to try that again. And also, honestly, we had done it once, so I felt if people are expecting it, let's switch it up again.

All of that is to say this season was kind of a different deal in a lot of ways. One sense was, as a reaction to the pre-ordained feeling of season two, we wanted this season to feel as if it was being lived in in the moment for us writers. Therefore, we kind of winged it. We tried to be as true to the characters as we could, we tried to let them tell us where they were headed, and we tried not to oversteer them into scenes we thought would be fun scenes. Rather, we tried to listen to the characters and see what they wanted to do and where they were headed. That's really the approach we had to season three, and it had its positives and it had its negatives, too for us. It was a different way for doing it. Going forward into season four, if there's yet a third way of structuring a season, maybe we'll try to find it just to keep things fresh and interesting.

Well, when you say you like to write yourselves into corners and then find a way out, that sounds very much like the way Walt and Jesse have been conducting business since they went into business together.

Yes. Kind of half-assed.

And there's a lot of stuff, especially in this last episode, of them having to dig deep and find some way out of a situation that seems to have found no way out of it. And Walt seems to have come up with it.

That was one of the big breakthtroughs we had. And the idea of Walt, very much this season, was passive, at least for a large portion of the season. He was passive and having things done to him, and was unaware of bigger machinations going on around him. He was behind the eight ball, a day late and a dollar short, and the audience knew more than he did. And that, frankly, scared the hell out of me as a showrunner, but we realized we had to play the hand we had been dealt. But if we had to play it out long enough to the end of the Cousins' story, we could have Walt realize what had been going on and then show him having that conversation with Gus where he explains that he knows what's going on, then we could jump him ahead to where he's not behind the audience, but even a half-step ahead of the audience, telling the audience why Gus might do this, for instance. It was a tricky dance we were doing, plot-wise. It was probably the scariest thing for me of last season: having our main character, who is known to be so smart and so cunning, be a day late and a dollar short.

Gus is also, obviously, very smart and cunning and meticulous. And when we met him last year, he didn't initially want to work with Walt because he viewed Walt, correctly, as reckless. And yet here this season he not only does the three-month deal with him, he then opts to continue working with him and builds his entire breaking from the cartel strategy around Walt. Why would Gus do this? 

Gus is very smart, but he is not perfect. I think Walt's gambit of going to him in episode 9 - as most of our best moments are, it's borrowed from "The Godfather," the concept of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" - his gambit of saying, "I know what's going on and let there be no misunderstanding between us. I know you were responsible for my brother in law getting shot, and I know why you did it, and I think it was a great play, and I would have done it myself" and saying he was basically fine with it, I think in that moment, Gus felt he had a real partner, a real equal, potentially. I think he's a very cautious man, very careful, but he is not infallible. I think that moment kind of did what Walt intended for it to do, which was to relax Gus a little bit, and make him think he's got a very worthy partner, or at least a worthy underling. That bought Walt some time. And, as we were speaking about a minute ago, that was the moment in the season where Walt went from being a day late and a dollar short to ahead of the audience - and even in that moment, ahead of Gus. That was the intention of that scene.

We've talked in the past about your idea that you see this as a four-season show. Given where we've come by the end of this season, do you still feel that way?

Boy, I tell ya. This is the tough question of all time. It's the question I think about every day. Philosophically, I truly believe it's better to leave the party too early rather than too late. I'd rather leave people wanting more. I want to satisfy the audience as much as I humanly can. But I think it would be more satisfying for people to say, "Jesus, I wish they ran a little longer" than for them to say, "Man, that show used to be good, and then I just lost all interest because it became the same old thing, week in and week out." Of those two possibilities, I'd prefer the first.

Having said that, this show continues to surprise me, and I think it surprises my writers, day in and day out that, knock on wood, we continue to be interested in these characters ourselves. I think that's the root reason the show remains interesting: we, the people creating it, remain interested in the characters we're writing about and the stories we're telling. We continue to be confounded and fascinated by Walter White and why he does the things he does, and is there any good left in him? All these kind of questions continue to fill our days. They continue to consume us.

All of this is to say, four seasons feels pretty good to me, and I have said that in several interviews, but I can't say it with absolute certainty. At the end of every season, we try to end with a big enough bang, in a fashion such that if the whole series ended right then and there, it'd be somewhat satisfying, or at least end with a big enough bang. So if for instance we didn't get a season four, it'd be a bummer of an ending, but it'd be a big ending nonetheless, and it could work as a series ender. Having said all of that, season four might be a good place to end it, possibly we could go to season five. Can't picture anything beyond season five. I don't have a definitive answer for you, because the character continues to be interesting to me, and I'm not that Bobby Fischer player where I had the whole thing figured out in my head. I don't know exactly where Walt's going to wind up. I have the vaguest of ideas of how the series should end in a satisfying, at least to me, manner. But having said that, I don't know how long it'll take to get from the point we're at to that point, and I don't know how long we'll have. Because as with most TV shows, the structure of the business is such that if a show is doing well, you don't think about ending it, you only think about continuing it. We don't have any other business paradigm than any other show has in that regard. There's no real talk of ending things.

I don't have a definitive end date in mind. I kinda wish though that someone would say, "Okay, it's gonna end on this date exactly X number of episodes from now. So write to that wisely." That's how you have at least half a chance of ending a show in a truly satisfying manner, is to know how many days you have left. But in the absence of anyone telling me that, and I don't think anybody's gonna tell me anytime soon, we just have to continue parceling out the story as best we can and kind of hope to keep things interesting.

I certainly don't want the show to go away anytime soon.

I really do believe it's better to end too early than too late. I learned that on "The X-Files." It's one of those things where it'd be a sad outcome for any show that people dug at one point or another, is for them to say, "Jesus, is that thing still on the air?" That's like the worst thing you can hear. So hopefully that won't happen.

Click here for Dan Fienberg's interview with "Breaking Bad" star Bryan Cranston.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com