The TV Watch
Ursula Coyote/AMC, via Associated Press
'Breaking Bad': A Clear and Final Ending:
Alessandra Stanley, a television critic for The New York Times, analyzes
the final episode of “Breaking Bad.” This video contains spoilers.
A Clear Ending to a Mysterious Beginning
The Final Episode of ‘Breaking Bad’ Leaves One Question Unanswered
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 30, 2013
Spoiler alert: this article contains plot twists from the finale.
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Room for Debate
Walter White's Soul, and Yours
Can a television show, where complicated characters stay with you week
after week for years, make you question your own moral judgement?
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
Ursula Coyote/AMC, via Associated Press
Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston, in a scene from the fifth season of "Breaking Bad."
After so many lugubrious turns, “Breaking
Bad” came to an end on Sunday on an almost uplifting note.
Walter White died, of course, but first he
ran the table of revenge, settling score after score with mathematical
precision. He went out with a big finish: his ingeniously rigged machine
gun mowed down the entire Aryan Brotherhood gang in a fantastical
killing spree that was almost like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino
movie. (As bad guys go, the next best thing to a Nazi is a neo-Nazi.)
It was a fitting ending, and predictable in
only some ways. Crime didn’t pay and Walter lost just about everything,
including his life. But it was also, by the show’s bleak, almost
Calvinist standards, a relatively happy ending. It wasn’t, as he so
often feared, all for nothing – he found a way to get his money to his
children. He also saved Jesse, actually taking a bullet for him by
throwing himself on top of the younger man to protect him from the
machine gun fire. He even made up with his wife, Skyler.
It was way too late for contrition, but
there was a confession and even a kind of deathbed conciliation. Walter
for the first time told Skyler the truth about his reason for cooking
meth and becoming a drug lord. “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good
at it,” he said. “And I was really, I was alive.”
After so many layers of lies, that blunt
admission won him at long last the shadow of a loving smile. And that
was almost the same look that Walt exchanged with Jesse as the two
parted for good, a glint of recognition and farewell.
Then again, the episode began with Walter
still alive but already a ghost, walking in and out of secured mansions,
public diners and even Skyler’s house undetected, almost as if
invisible.
Perhaps the best thing about the finale of
“Breaking Bad” is that it actually ended. So many shows, notably “The
Sopranos” and “Lost,” have gone dark without anything approaching
finality. Here, the writers were so determined to not leave unfinished
business that the last episode was called “Felina,” an anagram of
finale. And almost every loose end was tied. In some cases, a little too
tightly, and in others, not quite as much.
The all-important ricin, like Chekhov’s gun,
had to actually be put to use at long last. And it was almost comical
that Lydia, so prissy and exacting, was poisoned with a packet of her
beloved Stevia sweetener.
In a later scene, the writers underscored
the point, showing Lydia in bed, pale and sickly as Walter explains to
her over the telephone that he poisoned her drink at the diner. But that
was almost overkill: when Lydia tapped the sweetener into her camomile
tea, the camera zoomed in on her mug of tea as it clouded up — as
ominous as a glass of milk in a Hitchcock movie.
Even the dreamy scene where Jesse, still in
shackles in a meth lab, fantasizes that he is in a woodworking shop
sanding a beautiful box had a precise antecedent: in an episode when
Jesse was in group therapy, he reminisced about the satisfaction he felt
in high school of making a perfect box from “Peruvian walnut with
inlaid zebrawood.”
When Walt died, it was to the tune of “Baby
Blue” by Badfinger, which begins with the words, “Guess I got what I
deserve.”
The ending was clear enough; it was the beginning that was left ambiguous.
The finale circled back to Gretchen and
Elliott Schwartz, Walt’s former partners at Gray Matter. Walt broke into
their mansion and cleverly blackmailed the couple into providing his
children with the millions he couldn’t give them directly. And it was a
delicious scene: When Elliott fearfully brandished a small blade, Walt
said gently, “Elliott if we’re going to go that way, you’ll need a
bigger knife.”
But the show never fully spelled out why
Walt broke away from Gretchen and Elliott in the first place.
There were hints throughout the series. On
several occasions, Walt accused them of cheating him out of his share;
that bitterness seemingly helped steer him into his life of crime. But
it wasn’t clear that his version was correct — in an episode where they
confront each other at a restaurant, Gretchen said that Walt left her
without any explanation. And the true story never came out.
“Breaking Bad” brilliantly tracked Walt’s
transformation from teacher to criminal mastermind. But it’s still a
mystery why that talented chemist turned his back on fame and fortune
and became a humble high school chemistry teacher.
That is one secret Walter White took to the grave.
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