Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan sat down for a very thorough exit interview with Entertainment Weekly, in which he describes the thought process behind last night's series finale—as well as the arc for the entire season. One of my fave parts of last night's episode was how Walt dealt with international meth distributor Lydia, and you can read how Vince and the gang came up with it after the jump! SPOILERS AHOY!

“The writers and I all subscribe to the dramatic philosophy of playwright Chekhov, who said that if you establish a gun in Act 1, you better have it get fired at somebody by Act 3. We knew that ricin was still out there and we knew it was hidden behind the wall outlet in the old White house bedroom. I guess we could have let it slide, but we thought to ourselves, ‘The audience has been real good to us, they’ve paid very close attention, we want to reward them by not leaving any loose ends here.’ And also, honestly, the actress who plays Lydia [Laura Fraser] is a wonderful, warm, sweet person but the chatacter of Lydia — we were all champing at the bit to see her get her just desserts much more than Todd even. Todd is so likable, you almost have these ambivalent feelings when he’s being choked to death. But Lydia? We were all of one mind when we were saying, ‘Oh man, she’s got to go.’

Read the whole thing here.