I want to talk about two things here - Breaking Bad's finale and the show's overall legacy.
First, the finale. A lot of Internet chatter back in September - not the majority of it, but still plenty to notice - suggested that perhaps the show had given Walter White too much moral redemption and had allowed him too happy an ending in what had always been a show about, you know, "breaking bad." I understand this criticism; while avoiding moral absolutes, the show had absolutely pushed its main character into increasingly darker places throughout its run, so to end things with Walt going out on his own terms was a bit of an eleventh hour tonal shift. Still, let's review what Walt accomplished.
Yes, it's true that Walt ended up accomplishing these things that he had set out to do:
- Died before being taken to prison
- Left a sizable amount of money behind for his family
- Created a lasting legacy for himself
And it's true that he also did the following noble or otherwise decent things on his final day:
- Took out a murderous gang of Nazi drugrunners
- Freed Jesse Pinkman, an on-and-off son figure, from slavery as a meth cook
- Killed Lydia
- Confessed to his wife that it was his ego, more than his family's wellbeing, that kept him cooking meth for as long as he did
But he also:
- Did get caught, if not arrested
- Ended up utterly despised by his son and wife
- Caused extreme financial and emotional hardships for his family
- Indirectly got his brother-in-law killed
- Spent several months dying of lung cancer, alone, in a New Hampshire cabin
- Lost the vast majority of his drug money fortune
- Bled out in a meth lab
I don't think the Walter White of Season 1, were he to watch the series finale, would think that anything really went according to plan. Walt only "went out on his own terms" insofar as he had hit absolute rock bottom in the third-to-last and second-to-last episodes. I'm curious how the "that was too tidy and happy" camp wanted to see the show end. With the Nazis prospering? With Jesse dead? With Skyler and Flynn just completely broke and forever ruined? With Walt having learned nothing at all during his his horribly depressing stint in New Hampshire? Make no mistake - Breaking Bad did not give Walter White a happy ending; it gave him a sliver of redemption after chipping away at his code of ethics for six solid years.It gave him no more than what he deserved, or what he had earned. After all, at the end of the day, Walt was still the show's protagonist and main character, and no matter how obvious it was that we were meant to root against Walt by the end, if not much sooner, we'd be lying to ourselves if we pretended not to love his ability to think on his feet, to improvise, and to essentially MacGyver his way out of so many drastic situations.
All I'm saying is, it was okay to root for Walt in the finale, since Walt had repented and suffered to such severe degrees. Maybe the biggest problem with the final season is how rushed the ending is; we see Walt at his absolute lowest in the gripping "Ozymandias," we see him soften up a great deal in "Granite State" as some six months or so come to pass, and then we see just about everything go right for him, one last time, in "Felina." "Granite State" was the least memorable of those three episodes, but perhaps it could have and should have been stretched out even longer. I understand the show not wanting to drag out its ending, but as viewers I don't think we fully come to appreciate just how much time Walt has spent in self-imposed solitude, disowned by his family and unable to contact another living person. It's that lengthy sentence, after all, that transforms him from the angry, stewing asshole he was in "Ozymandias" into the tired, broken, and sort-of remorseful guy he was in "Felina." For me, this off-screen time lapse is essential to appreciating the ending of Breaking Bad. The show could have ended pretty easily with "Ozymandias" or even a modified "Granite State" if it wanted to be about one man's absolute fall from grace. Instead, they gave us "Felina," intentionally ending the story of Walter White with a glimmer of redemption... while still avoiding any semblance of a happy ending at all. (Where does Jesse go now that he's a known and wanted felon? How will Marie and Skyler ever mend their bridges given what one's husband did to the other's? Is Skyler really still safe from persecution, given her total complicity in Walt's money laundering? What the hell is in store for Brock going forward? What kind of daddy issues will Holly grow up with?)
I said I wanted to talk about the show's legacy, but I've run long here already, and frankly, I don't have much to say beyond heaping praise on the show, and praise for Breaking Bad is abundant here on the Internet, so why bother? I'll say that whether or not Breaking Bad was the greatest show ever, it made for an absolutely beautiful eulogy to the "angry white man" antihero genre that's been so in vogue for fifteen years now. I mean, how do you try to follow this act, Low Winter Sun? What more can you bring to the table, Ray Donovan?
I've probably seen about a hundred TV shows from start to finish. I'll miss this one dearly.
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