Does The Breaking Bad Finale Shootout Scene Pass The Mythbusters Test?
Walter White’s evil genius goes under the microscope.
We all wanted to believe that Walter White MacGyvered his way out of a very bad situation (well, one, anyway) in the series finale of Breaking Bad, but were we driven by blind faith?
The Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters team of Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage put Vince Gilligan and the legendary machine gun trunk in the hot seat in a recent episode, their second to test the science and mechanics of the AMC series’ over-the-top plotlines.
Gilligan did not rise to the Mythbusters challenge the last time the show took on Breaking Bad: Turns out, hydroflouric acid would not dissolve and entire human body and burn through a ceiling and a bathtub, and mercury fulminate would not have resulted in the same type of explosion it caused in Tuco’s office.
But even with higher stakes,Breaking Bad fared better this time. Savage and Hyneman created a replica of the self-shooting machine: mounting a booby-trapped M60 machine gun, loaded with 200 live rounds of ammo, in the trunk of a vintage car. After setting it off, the Mythbusters hosts were a little skeptical that the bullets would have pierced the wall the bad guys were behind. But a closer examination showed that cardboard cutout targets all had fatal gunshot wounds.
Conclusion? “Plausible.”
As for other potential ‘holes’ in Breaking Bad, we’ll forever be holding out hope that Mike Ehrmantraut isn’t really dead. We never did find out what they did with his body, right?
Watch the Mythbusters segment here:
Photos by AMC
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