Watching CNN’s coverage of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Vince Gilligan thought “Wait a minute. We wrote this.”
Fox had aired his pilot on March 4, 2001, roughly 6 months earlier. The show was The Lone Gunmen, an X-Files spin-off, and Gilligan’s co-writers were Chris Carter, John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz. More than 13 million people watched the episode.
Its plot centered on a Boeing 727 carrying passengers, with rogue elements inside the U.S. government taking control of the aircraft remotely. They intended to hit the Twin Towers, pin the attack on foreign terrorists and trigger a war that would profit the arms industry.
The fictional passengers survived: the main characters regained control just in time to prevent the crash.
Gilligan hadn’t yet created Breaking Bad. The Lone Gunmen struggled with ratings, and Fox canceled it after a 13-episode run that ended in June 2001, before the September attacks.
