With Mad Men on hiatus, AMC fan speculation turns to presuming Walt’s certain demise on Breaking Bad

Throughout Mad Men’s sixth season, speculation ran wild about whether Megan Draper was dead the whole time, or whether Ginsberg had schizophrenia, or Bob Benson was a corporate spy, a federal agent, or something more sinister. Now that one AMC cornerstone show has ended for the year—with none of the crackpot theories coming true—the speculation has moved on to Breaking Bad. Uproxx has a theory going that a bunch of circumstantial evidence—Walt wearing a wire the whole time in the fifth season premiere cold open, Walt contemplates suicide before surrendering in the pilot—adds up to Mr. Chips-turned-Scarface not surviving the show’s finale. There’s also the matter of similar framing to suggest the return of Walt’s cancer, unimpeachable repetition of green shirts in different shades, and other details that must form proper bookends to the pilot and clearly mean that Walt will die because of Vince Gilligan’s impeccable genius. This kind of detail examination and plot guesswork does call to mind Donna Bowman’s examination of ways to analyze the show, but if picking apart the subtlest, possibly unintentional clues is your thing, well, here’s another theory to tide you over until Sunday.