DANIEL STYLER
<Staff Writer>
Editor’s Note: there are abundant Breaking Bad spoilers below. Do not read them if you do not want to. Any complainants will be mocked at this week’s staff meeting.
As the camera faded out, with Walter White lying dead on the floor, it was hard not to think back to the conversation he had with his wife, Skyler, earlier in the show.
“I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really… I was alive.” It was in that moment that Walt finally revealed the truth to Skyler. The meth operation, the barrels of cash, Heisenberg and his pork pie hat hadn’t all been for his family – they had been for him. None of this should have been surprising, though; after all, Elliott and Gretchen Schwartz – Walt’s former business partners at Gray Matter – offered to give him a job and pay for his cancer treatment well before he had transformed from a small-time meth cook into the Southwest’s most prolific drug producer and distributor. It wasn’t family that pushed him away from that offer and into a life of crime; it was pride. Walt’s confession to Skyler helped to reinforce the notion that it was pride that had kept him there, all the way until his death.
“Felina”, Breaking Bad’s final episode, tidily wrapped up the loose ends that had been strewn about throughout the series’ final eight episodes: Walter died, Jesse lived, and Walter Jr. and Holly appeared to be set for a substantial payday in the near future. Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, provided his viewers with the antithesis to David Chase’s “Made in America”, the masterful and much-discussed finale of The Sopranos. There was no “Don’t Stop Believin’”, no cut to black, and no need to call your friends to ask if their cable had gone out (or, alternatively, to argue with them about who, if anyone, had just died).
Just like “Made in America”, though, “Felina” was brilliant. The episode, though, often tested my ability to remain suspended in disbelief. I found it impossible to believe that Walt – suddenly more of a cat burglar than a man running a meth enterprise – was able to visit Skyler and Holly one more time, particularly given Marie’s assertion that the police were aware of his return to Albuquerque. If nowhere else, the spread-thin police surely would have been watching Skyler’s new home, wouldn’t they? I was also perplexed that Uncle Jack and his gang of Nazis let Walt – the man that they had stolen $70 million from – into their compound, even if it was to kill him. And if they brought him there to kill him, would they really have let him drag his visit out just long enough for him to get them into the perfect position to be shot down (oh, except for the two people that Jesse and Walt wanted to personally kill) by a remote-controlled gun hidden in the trunk of Walt’s car?
Then again, this is the same show that once had Gustavo Fring, a pleasant drug lord and fast food chicken entrepreneur, exit a hospital room following an explosion with his face half gone (looking very much like Harvey Dent) and calmly adjust his tie before collapsing, dead. Breaking Bad, then, may need to be watched with a grain of salt. When it is, though, there are few shows on TV – if any – that can match its remarkable acting and character development, and so-intense-they-make-it-hard-to-breathe plot lines.
The final showdown between Walt and Jesse was both powerful and prodigious. Walt kicked the gun he had used to kill Uncle Jack to Jesse, offering him the revenge that Jesse went to such great heights to exact over the course of the series’ final episodes. Jesse, though, seemed to realize that revenge would have changed nothing. There was no freedom to be gained by killing Walt, or by having Walt tell him what he (Jesse) wants for the umpteenth time. There was freedom, though, in telling Walt that if he wanted to die, he could do it himself. And that is what he did. And as Jesse drove away, tears streaming down his face, it was easy to smile along with him. Jesse was not innocent, not at all; but he was a tragic character, having lost everything he had to a deadly combination of drugs, Walter White, and Stockholm syndrome. Walking away from Walt will never bring back Jane or Andrea, or make Brock any less an orphan. But one can at least hope that it will give Jesse the power to wrestle his life back from the immense shadow left by his former business partner, Heisenberg.
Walter dying on the floor in a meth lab was equivalent to a sailor wanting to have their ashes thrown out to sea; he was able to die, as perplexing as it may be, in the place that made him feel the most alive.