Warning: If you haven’t watched the end of Breaking Bad, don’t read this. The entire post is concerned exclusively with its final moments.
In the final episode of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, Walter White allows himself to be captured by skinhead drug dealers in order to save Jesse Pinkman. But Walt has a plan: An M60 machine gun — the kind of heavy-duty monster of a machine gun that gets mounted on armored vehicles — is rigged to a rotating machine in the trunk of his car. It goes off, launching a torrent of bullets into the skinheads’ hideout while Walt hits the floor, out of harm’s way. The gun tears apart the bad guys while Walt survives. For a while.
The show is widely considered one of the best ever, but the finale did earn some puzzled reactions. Not that Breaking Bad was ever a realistic show, but the machine-gun-in-the-car-trunk thing seemed a little … silly? Well, MythBusters took Walt’s ploy to task, re-creating the setup with the help of Vince Gilligan. MythBusters has tackled Breaking Bad before (that awesome scene where the melting body falls through the bathtub — not realistic), and the show has so far gone oh-for-two. Watch the video below and see if Walt’s plan could have actually worked.