We’re all still reeling from Sunday’s Breaking Bad series finale, and in a new interview creator Vince Gilligan clarifies the ending and offers great insight.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Gilligan says that he and his writers came up with several endings for Breaking Bad but determined that Walt dying was the best outcome. “It felt right, but I don’t think it was a necessity for us,” he said. “There was a version we kicked around where Walt is the only one who survives, and he’s standing among the wreckage and his whole family is destroyed. That would be a very powerful ending but very much a kick-in-the-teeth kind of ending for the viewers. We talked about a version where Jesse kills Walt. We talked about a version where Walt more or less gets away with it.”

He added that there was a certain feeling of completion in the writers room when they reached the ending that we saw on television. “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. Walt is never going to redeem himself. He’s just too far down the road to damnation. But at least he takes a few steps along that path. And I think more importantly for him than that is the fact that he accomplishes what he set out to accomplish way back in the first episode: He leaves his family just a ton of money.”

Elsewhere in the interview Gilligan spoke about Jesse’s end. He said that the character has always been an unwillingly participate (Gilligan cited the fact that Walt threatened to turn him into the DEA during the pilot unless he helped Mr. White cook), so he deserved an escape after all these years.

As for what happens to Jesse in the future? “It’s up to the individual viewer to decide what happens next for Jesse. Some people might think, ‘Well, he probably got two miles down the road before the cops nailed him.’ But I prefer to believe that he got away, and he’s got a long road to recovery ahead, in a sense of being held prisoner in a dungeon for the last six months and being beaten to within an inch of his life and watching Andrea be shot. All these terrible things he’s witnessed are going to scar him as well, but the romantic in me wants to believe that he gets away with it and moves to Alaska and has a peaceful life communing with nature.”

Breaking Bad season 5, episode 16 – the series finale – premiered on Sunday to 10.3 million viewers. The high viewership broke all previous records for the show.

Thanks to EW for the quotes.