“We kinda got ahead of ourselves a little,” Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan says, referencing a knotty Season 2 puzzle that eagle-eyed viewers decoded a couple weeks ago. Just as they did in the second season of Breaking Bad, the writing staff put clues in the Better Call Saul episode titles this year. Gilligan and co-creator Peter Gould were hoping to unveil the mystery “sometime over the summer” but their fans got ahead of them. Yes, they were trying to tell you that Giancarlo Esposito’s Breaking Bad villain, Gus Fring, is coming back. He’s just not here quite yet.

VF Hollywood spoke with Gould and Gilligan on the phone Tuesday morning to clear up Fring’s mysterious almost-appearance in the second-season finale.

VF Hollywood: So were we meant to assume that it was Gus who left that note for Mike [Jonathan Banks] on the windshield in the finale?

Peter Gould: We were hoping it would be more of an open question at this point. We had this—to us—this very bright idea of encoding the words “Fring’s Back” in the episode titles. We worked very hard; more than that, the folks in our office, Jenn Carroll and Ariel Levine, worked very, very hard trying to help us figure that out. And we thought we’d be revealing it maybe sometime over the summer. I guess we really underestimated the genius and hard work of our fans.

Vince Gilligan: And their attention to detail, and God bless them for it.

Gould: It’s hard to complain about people paying attention to every aspect of the show. It certainly reminds us again that we better keep all our i’s dotted and our t’s crossed in every aspect of the show.

Gilligan: So back to your question. In a perfect world, in our mind’s eye, the way this would have worked is people would have said, “Oh, man, who left that note?” And then weeks or months from now Peter would have tweeted out, “Hey, look for a clue,” and people would have said, “Oh, was that Fring?” Having said all of that, that doesn’t mean people should assume Fring put that thing on the windshield with his own hand. As we know from Breaking Bad, Gus Fring is a man of great resources and is very much a long-term planner and he has some very skilled and cold-blooded folks working for him. It could have been through Gus Fring’s agency but not him personally.

And furthermore, just because Fring’s back—technically speaking, if not literally—it doesn’t mean that folks should assume that they’ll see him at the beginning of Season 3. This is a character who is very circumspect. Very cautious. He does not reveal himself easily. He makes people work to get to him as we saw him make Walter White work very hard and jump through a great many hoops to get to face-to-face with him in Breaking Bad.

I don’t think anyone should assume that he’ll move in next door to Mike and borrow a cup of sugar. He’s going to stay Gus Fring, arguably the most brilliant person ever to appear on either show.