Breaking Bad
It’s been a little over 24 hours since I saw the Breaking Bad finale, “Felina,” and I’ve thought about very little else since. My original plan was to write a review of the episode for the site, but after some thought it felt more appropriate to instead pen a more freeform blog in which I pour out a bunch of my feelings about the episode, and invite you readers to join me in some further discussion in the comments section.

Let me begin by stating that if there’s one word that I feel best sums up the finale, it’s ‘satisfying’. Vince Gilligan signed off by wrapping up almost everything we could have hoped he would, and then tied a big old ribbon around it. So Walter found a way to get what remains of his fortune to Flynn. He has an emotional reconciliation with Skyler, and finally admits that his actions were always motivated by selfishness. Lydia imbibes the ricin. The machine gun takes out the Nazis. Walt gets to personally off Uncle Jack, and Jesse gets to strangle Todd. Walt and Jesse face off for the last time, and Jesse finally makes the choice to free himself from Mr White by saying no to his final request. Heck, we even got to say goodbye to Badger and Skinny Pete. We got all of that and more besides. What more could we possibly ask for?

So yes, I was satisfied, and from the conversations I’ve had with friends since, and from the general reaction on social media it seems that most people were too. But what’s become clear to me the more that I’ve thought about the episode is that as satisfied as I was, I was also a little underwhelmed. I didn’t think the episode was perfect, nor did I think it was a perfect finale. The episode of Breaking Bad that comes closest to deserving that level of praise was “Ozymandias,” and I mean that in terms of both what it achieved as an individual episode, and as a finale of sorts. Of course, it wasn’t a finale, however much it felt like one, but it still made the final two episodes play out more like an epilogue. Even the penultimate episode, “Granite State,” I felt gave me more of the kind of closure I needed. “Felina,” on the other hand, felt like Vince Gilligan giving us all what we wanted, after already having supplied most of what we needed from the show.

It pains me to make the following point after having argued the opposite side during the course of this season, but I also feel like the flash-forwards may have lessened the impact of the finale somewhat. I was railing against those who said it diminished events like Hank arresting Walt in the desert because we knew that wasn’t Walt’s eventual fate – and I still would argue against that, incidentally – but I do feel that they took away from the finale. Fans of the show had spent so much time speculating about who the intended recipients of the machine gun and ricin were, so it was underwhelming for me when our expectations were so precisely met. How much more dramatic would the events of the episode have been if we hadn’t seen the machine gun or the ricin in the flash-forwards? We would have gone into the finale thinking literally anything could happen, and the ricin and M60 would have felt like wild, dramatic elements to introduce. Instead we knew they were there, and their specific uses only added to the pervading sense of neatness.

And although Gilligan may have satisfied us with the neat conclusions that he provided, I felt that the bow he wrapped around it was a bit too tight. He left us very little room for discussion about the nature of the events of the final episode, or even to speculate about what may happen to these characters afterwards. There’s a little bit of ambiguity about what might happen to Jesse now, whether Flynn will actually receive the money, and whether Skyler will still be held to account legally; but even those loose ends don’t feel that loose thanks to the hints dropped within the episode. And again, this is just a personal preference, but I would sorely have liked just a cinch more ambiguity within the actual text of the episode. The way Walt poisoned Lydia really hammered that home for me. Not only do we get an eagle eye shot of the ricin slowly pouring into her tea, but we also get Walt voicing what he’d done to the already visibly sick Lydia, just in case we’d missed it. The only questions we were really left with were ones that stretched the believability of Walt’s plan; like how exactly did Walt get the ricin in the Spevia, how did he get to Skyler without being spotted, how lucky was he that the Nazis were all stood in the same room and in the exact range of the machine gun?

I personally don’t have any problems with those kinds of questions, however, because as far as I’m concerned Breaking Bad is a piece of pulp fiction that has been happy to rely on luck, convenience, and contrivance within its plotting and stretched believability from the start. Yes, this was Walter White/Heisenberg forming a plan that came together so perfectly that he ended up achieving goals he didn’t even plan to, but I was completely willing to accept all of it because that’s the show I’ve been watching for five seasons and my disbelief has been adequately suspended for the majority of it. And going back to those flash forwards, I guess we’d have never have had a finale that even closely resembled this one without them because of to the way Gilligan and his team approach writing the show. For that reason, I’m reluctantly willing to let that complaint slide too.

It doesn’t, however, stop me from wishing that Walt’s plan hadn’t been so perfect, that he hadn’t succeeded quite so easily (relatively, anyway), and that the character that I’ve grown to see as much more of a villain than a hero (or even antihero) was allowed to go out with a win. I’d argue that by allowing Walt to die following the events of the “Felina,” rather than the events of “Granite State,” he gets the happiest ending of almost all the major characters that have ever featured in Breaking Bad. That bothers me a little, and perhaps that’s why I feel so drawn towards a theory put forward by Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker. While admitting that there’s nothing in the episode’s text to support it, she describes how she “became fixated on the idea that what we were watching must be a dying fantasy on the part of Walter White, not something that was actually happening.”

It’s a fascinating article, and one that I highly recommend you read, and it really stuck with me. I agree that the episode doesn’t do anything to suggest that this reading is a valid one, but it’s still one I feel some comfort clinging onto in a ‘death of the author-y’ kind of way. I think that’s the kind of ending that I needed, the one that would have made the most sense to me. I desperately wanted a happy ending for Jesse, but I’m not sure that I ever believed he would get one, the same way I believed that Walt didn’t deserve one. I liked Hank an awful lot too, and as much as it wrecked me emotionally watching his final scenes play out in the desert, it still felt narratively right that he’d meet his end there and then. That felt real, whereas Walt’s actions in the finale did seem as eerie and magical as Nussbaum describes. You’ll all be completely justified if you feel it’s a theory you can dismiss immediately, but I really want to accept it as a possible version of events.

I won’t dwell on that any further, though, because I imagine it’s beginning to sound a lot like I’m extremely dissatisfied with an episode that I’ve already claimed I felt satisfied by. I did, I truly did, but because we’re discussing a show as good as Breaking Bad I think I’m just searching for a little bit more than just satisfaction. Let me conclude, instead, by focusing on another interpretation that may equally allow me to view this as the perfect send off that so many of you seem to think it is.

Back in the very first episode of Breaking Bad, Walter White said the following while addressing his high school class: “Chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change…. It is growth, then decay, then transformation.” There’s a lot of subtext in the opening act of that opening episode that laid out what was to come in both in pilot episode itself, and the series going forward. In re-watching that pilot episode, though, it was that particular line that stuck with me, and that I felt best reflected the show in its final run. We have followed a protagonist who is able to channel two very different personas over five seasons of Breaking Bad. There’s Walter White the family man, and Heisenberg the meth kingpin. With the events of the finale I feel more strongly than ever that this final season hasn’t depicted the battle between Walt and Uncle Jack, or Walt and Hank, or Walt and Jesse. It’s been the battle between Walter White and Heisenberg for supremacy, and that quote from the pilot sums it how I feel that battle played out perfectly.

In the first eight episodes of Season 5 we saw the growth of both Walter White and Heisenberg. The latter finally built the meth empire that he’d always dreamt of, while the former was also able to turn his back on it all and establish a happy family life, leaving his former criminality behind him. Walt and Heisenberg had both triumphed. Then in the second half of the season, with Hank’s discovery of Gale’s diary serving as the catalyst, we saw the decay. Towards the end of Granite State, we were looking at a protagonist who could no longer summon that ultimate badass Heisenberg, and with that final phone call to Walter Jnr, Walter White had well and truly given up too. The family man and the drug kingpin had both abandoned him, and he was ready to turn himself in.

Then came the transformation. The man we’re following in the finale isn’t pretending to be one or the other any more. The family man and the meth kingpin had blended together and transformed into someone new. That’s why Walt was finally able to face Skyler and make his admission of guilt to her, whilst simultaneously planning mass murder. That’s why he was able to look at Jesse and so quickly make the decision not to kill him. This is a different man, a transformed individual, and one who perhaps is capable of executing such an elaborate plan. He’s able to go out on his own terms because he’s finally reconciled the person that he truly was all along, after spending so long pretending and projecting one version or another. If that’s the case, then how could the story conclude in any other way?

Again that’s just one reading, one theory, and another one that you’d be completely justified in dismissing out of hand should you please. Whatever we each felt about the finale, I can only presume that we all got there because we loved Breaking Bad as a whole, and we should absolutely spend the next few weeks talking about exactly why we liked it so much while it’s still fresh in our minds and dominating the zeitgeist. Then I guess it will be time to try and find a new obsession to fill the void. Better Call Saul, anyone?

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