Breaking Bad Grand Finale: A Proper Goodbye

Warning: this is a recap of Breaking Bad‘s final episode, ‘Felina’. That means spoilers.

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To prepare for the finale, I re-watched the very first episode of Breaking Bad with friends. What a wacky wonder we thought we were getting ourselves into, way back in 2008. Walter is a goofball! Jesse is very homophobic! When Walt turns all Heisenberg for the very first time, kicking down a jockish bully who’s cruelly mocking his son, he calls the kid “chief” — and his first occasion to “break bad” is accompanied by some extremely rousing panpipes. Imagine if every time Heisenberg adjusted his porkpie hat we were treated to Ron Burgundy’s jazz flute solo. Who’da thunk we’d end up mired in this black morass of existential death and torture?

BREAKING BAD: WALT AND THE SCHWARTZES

Here’s a link to a lovely article. It explains how a young, terminally ill fan of the show asked creator Vince Gilligan about the Schwartzes enough times that he and the writers decided to include the pair in the finale. It doesn’t explain why the professional writers of this show hadn’t thought to revisit the original source of Walter’s bashed ego until some kid slipped them an envelope marked “Satisfying Emotional Arc For Series and Character”… Anyway, Walt drops in on Gretchen and Elliot, and thus begins this episode of A Very Heisenberg Haunting.

In his final days on earth, Walt conserves energy like a lizard. He drifts effortlessly from one location to another — in and out of houses — as a dusty, empty shell, but with the entire weight of the Granite State (and the ruined lives of his friends and family) upon him. He is Ebenezer cloaked in Marley’s ghostly chains. He visits his past with the Schwartzes, and enacts a plan so particularly perfect that it takes a while for you to realise that Walt has threatened two nice people, on pain of death, to illegally give drug money to his family — all of whom want nothing to do with him. Good one, Breaking Bad; we’re still rooting for the bad guy.

Before they’re tasked with laundering Walt’s ill-gotten gains, Gretchen and Elliott have a perfectly upper class argument about food. There should be pizza, and there should be Thai, says Elliott, and never the twain shall meet. In his last little trudge through life’s high and low points, Walt seems to have achieved what Elliott’s thin-crust satay special could not. He’s reached a place of perfect fusion, a chemical balance, wherein Walter and Heisenberg no longer compete. With his reputation preceding him, and his cover story moot, Walt can just be himself: dry, kind, remote, arrogant. I liked Walt for the first time in a long time as he built a car trunk contraption of death, singing to himself, instead of only lying.

BREAKING GOOD: WALT AND SKYLER

Did you know that Skyler is more than a decade younger than Walt? I’d completely forgotten that until I rewatched the pilot. I don’t know what it adds or takes away from this messy, meandering character and her relationship with her horrible husband, but the greying, nicotine-soaked woman, hazily reflected in her new cheap microwave, is in this scene all-victim. What a bubbly, hopeful, caring life wasted.

This ‘alive’ness that Walt admits to chasing, at the cost of all else, is represented in the pilot by the characters of Skyler and Hank. Hank humming the ‘Ride of the Valkryes’ as his S.W.A.T. team gathers sure comes across as douchey, but the guy works hard at a job he loves. Walt’s similar effervescence — as he injects some fireworks into his classroom patter — is quickly squandered, as one loafing student curdles his enthusiasm. What a tough life this Walter White led, where not every student was thrilled with his two-minute reverie to the power of chemicals.

Do I want Flynn and Skyler to inherent millions of dirty dollars to revive their flat-lined lives? Yes. Do I care that, in them inheriting it, Walt is just getting what he wanted? I guess not. Walt’s admitting to this whole circus of tragedy being a three-ringed ego affair is probably as close to an apology as we were ever going to get. I hope Skyler and Marie make up.

BREAKING EVEN: WALT, TODD AND LYDIA

Thank goodness we finally rejected “family” as an excuse to do wrong. Here’s another reminder: Lydia has a daughter. That never excused her mercenary zeal for profit at all costs. Jack probably does a lot of what he does (killing, nazi-ing) to support his family, too. In what way were they ever so different from Walt?

Unfortunately, this bizarre love duo is doomed. Goodbye psycho Todd. I’ll think of you whenever anyone remorselessly shoots a child. Goodbye Lydia. I’ll think of you the next time it is really obvious how someone is going to die. And goodbye to all the Nazis, hanging out on their Nazi base, going up and down in massage chairs and shot to shit in seconds. Walt ticks off ‘revenge’ with his most Macguvery trick of all time, and he even scores some compliments on his thick mane along the way. Kudos to you, murderer.

BREAKING OUT: JESSE

Jesse’s evolution — from loud mouth to quiet person with pain behind his beautiful eyes — completes itself in this final episode. Jesse’s been trapped in the Nazi meth dungeon for six months, with little attention paid to proper hair care. But in his mind? In his mind he lacquers with the angels. Witness Jesse The Carpenter, or, alternatively, The Pinkman of the Christ:

Did Walt Whitman write a poem about making a box? Feels like he should have, maybe rhyming “precision” with “decision”. While bathed in the peaceful honeyed glow of not-reality, Jesse sands and planes and makes the box he wants to make, not the meth he must. Now there’s an applicable metaphor for us all. The final moments of the show, ignoring Walt’s extremely gloat-filled conversation with a dying Lydia and that on-the-nose music cue, comes when Jesse refuses to kill Walt, and instead drives away from it all. Jesse made a choice. And it is nice to feel that it wasn’t one that was manipulated by Walt, or an instinctive reaction he’ll come to regret. If Walt made too many choices — good and bad, gambles and long shots and terrible grim certainties — then Jesse maybe made too few, instead buffeted along by the winds of circumstance.

Breaking Bad is a show of our times. The plot would not exist if it weren’t for America’s non-existent healthcare system, its poor pay for teachers, a tragic drug epidemic; it would not exist if it weren’t for this strange period where a straight white male, who squandered all of his skills and opportunities and took everything he did have for granted, can still feel big-time owed by the whole world.

But it’s a show that will hardly age at all, because, for better or worse, it was simply about choices and their repercussions all along. I don’t think anyone ‘deserves’ to die, and I don’t think the show did either, even as it set up its confrontations and weighted audience’s allegiances. Instead, it simply laid out its hypothesis, and we watched Walt react to the variables around him, until the inevitable occurred and we never cooked meth again.

The End.

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Matt Roden helps kids tell stories by day at the Sydney Story Factory, and by night helps adults admit to stupidity by co-running Confession Booth and TOD Talks. He is 2SER’s resident TV critic — each Tuesday morning at 8.20am — and his illustration and design work can be seen here. 

Trawl through the rest of his Breaking Bad recaps here.