The end of Breaking
Bad was all about Walt’s attempts to atone for his crimes. The isolation in
New Hampshire did humble him and give him time to think and so he finally,
finally admits to Skyler that he went into the meth business not for the sake
of the family but for himself. “I liked it. I was good at it,” he tells his
estranged wife as she copes with her new circumstances, forced from her home
and facing charges. Finally Walt faces up to the devil in the mirror and admits
that his ego was driving him.
Walt knows he is a dead man, either from the cancer that is
eating his lungs or from his incipient revenge scheme, so with an almost
Zen-like calm, he gets his house in order. As a parting gift, Walt grants some
closure to both Skyler and Marie. In disclosing the location of Hank’s body,
Marie can perhaps grieve and then start to move on. Maybe Skyler will
successfully trade the information for some kind of plea bargain. Walt’s acts
are a gesture of kindness but the Lambert sisters have still suffered so much
and may never be whole and in the end, it’s because of the choices he made. One
last sad look at Holly and Flynn (from a distance) and he is out of their
lives.
Now we see that Walt’s reaction to seeing Gretchen and
Elliott on TV at the bar last episode was not rage but a light bulb going off
and so he uses Gray Matter to funnel his remaining millions to his son. The
tragedy is that Flynn will never know it was his father who gave him the trust
fund. For Walt, it must sting, knowing that it will appear that his former
partners are supporting the family, something he tried to avoid in the first
place. He also goes to his grave knowing that his son hates him. After last
week’s brutal disowning, I’m sure it will take a very long time for him to
forgive his father.
I would like to have learned a little more about what drove
Walt from the company (and what made him the person he became because I think
Heisenberg was always lurking inside him) but maybe these details were better
left to the imagination. It was hilarious to see Badger and Skinny Pete as
Walt’s “hit men,” with laser pointers as their weapons. I appreciated the comic
relief in that scene but the interaction with Jesse’s friends set up an
important development: the two drug dealers tip him off to the fact that blue
meth is still circulating.
Then we see that atonement is not all that Walt is doing
before he dies. It’s his ego, not altruism, that spurs him to want to kill
those neo-Nazis and Jesse. He wants to ensure that his patented blue meth
recipe dies with him.
So why does Walt save Jesse from the hail of bullets from
that badass machine gun contraption? I have no idea. It was clearly a
split-second decision to push him to the floor because if Walt wanted to spare
Jesse from the massacre, he would not have had the Aryans bring him out from
the lab in the first place.
Maybe it was some kind of atonement on Walt’s part to offer
Jesse a chance at killing him. Jesse’s response, “Do it yourself,” was
perfectly satisfying. If he’d shot Mr. White, he would just be obeying his
manipulative teacher’s commands one final time, and that was a cycle he needed
to break free from.
I admit I choked up when Jesse sped through the gate in a
howl of triumph and catharsis. It’s a testament to Aaron Paul’s abilities that
so many viewers were so nervous about his character’s fate. A lesser actor
might have left us to hate this person or write him off as a junkie. But the
performance was so strong that I leave the series hoping that Jesse gets to go
to his woodshop and work on his little box.
Watching Jesse strangle Todd was so satisfying that my
enjoyment bordered on inappropriate. Society is better off without a psychopath
like him. It was also satisfying to see Lydia sweeten her chamomile tea with a
little ricin. Todd and Lydia are horrible people, completely morally bankrupt,
and got what was coming to them.
Walt’s final demise was fitting and poetic. He died a victim
of his own bullet that ricocheted around the room. This was a reminder that
with the decisions he made, Walt caused a chaos that killed many innocent
people. Characters like Andrea and Jane and the people on the planes that
crashed did not have to die but did because they got caught in Walt’s
machinations. Now Walt is fatally caught in his own chaos.
Did Walt’s atonement at the end redeem him? It’s not for me
to say but I cannot forget that he caused more trouble for his family in trying
to save them. The tragedy of Breaking Bad
is, of course, that none of this had to happen. The cancer was catching up to
Walt and would have killed him anyway. If he hadn’t made the decisions he did,
Walt would have been able to die in his own home surrounded by a family that
still loved him, instead of on the floor of a dirty meth lab.
I was a little surprised by “Felina” because I was expecting
the series to end with a little more pathos than it did. I guess I was
expecting as many shocks and tears as we had the last few episodes. But the
approach here does make sense now. “Ozymandias” was the climax of all the
action that had come before (and, I think, the dizzying height of the entire
series) and the last two episodes were the falling action and final resolution.
It was impressive to see how many loose ends the last episode tied up. I’m
happy nobody pulled any bullshit on this finale and we didn’t discover they
were all trapped in a snow globe the whole time or there was some asinine twist
like Flynn was the real mastermind.
Thinking of the series as a whole, I can say now that Breaking Bad is my favorite TV show of
all time. It was impressive to see the series get better than ever in the fifth
season. What a beautiful, terrible thing Vince Gilligan and those actors
created. What a masterpiece. I can’t wait to watch the whole thing again.
No comments:
Post a Comment