Vince Gilligan was not yet the creator of Breaking Bad when he co-wrote a television episode about a hijacked passenger plane flying straight toward the World Trade Center.
It premiered six months before September 11, 2001. In the plot, a secret group within the U.S. government remotely took control of a Boeing 727 full of passengers. The plan was to crash it into the Twin Towers, blame foreign terrorists, and start a profitable war. More than 13 million people watched it. The series was canceled a few months later, and almost everyone forgot it ever existed.
On September 11, Gilligan watched the attacks on CNN, just like the rest of the world. As smoke poured from the towers, a thought struck him: “Wait. We wrote this”.
