Br Ba S5 E14: Ozymandias

The official summary of last week’s Breaking Bad was a tad understated: “Everyone copes with radically changed circumstances.” If we were actually to make an accurate summary of everything that happened, it would go something like, “The Aryans kill Hank and Gomez in the desert. Jesse gives up information to the Aryans and they enslave him to cook meth for them. Marie, under the impression that Hank has arrested Walt, forces Skyler to reveal to her son Walt’s drug dealing. Walt tries to get the White family to leave with him but Skyler refuses and stabs him. Walt Jr. calls the police and Walt leaves with Holly, whom he drops at a fire station before leaving the family for a relocation program.”

Did I miss anything?

Holy mother of God, that was the best, tensest, most emotionally devastating episode of Breaking Bad ever. I spent it gasping like a cartoon character at every twist and turn and could barely speak by the time it was over. The final two episodes are set up now and it’s becoming clearer to me that the Aryans will raid the White house looking for the tape or evidence or whatever, while Walt eventually returns to New Mexico with a machine gun to take care of unfinished business.

It was especially sick to hear Walt rant to Skyler that she was a bitch who should have done what she was told and even sicker to hear Skyler say, “I’m sorry.” But I’m guessing that Walt’s awful diatribe on the phone to Skyler was him putting up a front; his way of cutting ties with the family before he goes into hiding. In his sick way, Walt did the last thing available to him to save the family.

In that confrontation in the desert, Walt did seem to delineate who is family and who is not. Hank is the true family he tried to save at the end and Jesse is not family and his life was expendable at the end. Walt left Jesse to his fate but not before the cruelest twist of his knife: Confessing that he watched Jane die; that he could have saved her and walked away. That was the final crime that Walt needed to admit.  

I have given up trying to predict where this show is headed so I certainly did not expect a knife fight to break out in the White living room. That was a true nightmare and I was afraid someone, perhaps the baby, was going to get stabbed. Good for Flynn for doing the right thing and simply calling 911. That whole horrible spectacle, with Walt grabbing Holly and forcibly backing out of the driveway with Skyler in the street screaming, was just awful to watch and stands out even in a season of awful moments.

I have to mention the wonderful/horrifying bookends to the episode. The way relatively happy memories of Walt and Skyler discussing baby names faded into the current scene of carnage in the desert really highlighted what a profound tragedy Breaking Bad has become. Then the ending, with baby Holly in the fire engine, really twisted the knife and my heart just melted out of me.

Walt has truly become the Ozymandias of the Shelley poem. The once fearsome meth dealer, who had warned his enemies to look on his works and despair, has become just a man dragging a barrel of money through the desert. He’s lost everything.

These people have all lost everything. Hank is dead and buried in an unmarked grave. Jesse is beaten to a pulp and chained like an animal. Marie has lost a husband and sister. Skyler has lost a husband and will be haunted by her complicity in what he did. Walt Jr. lost a father and an uncle he admired. It’s becoming almost unbearable to watch what’s happening to these people.