Before I start this, a small preface: in September 2009, whilst playing Halo 3: ODST, the oft-maligned, yet disquieting and occasionally beautiful Halo spin-off, I was introduced to a little show called Breaking Bad by my step-brother. While beating ODST for the first time (which is an experience I won't burden you with, dear reader), I saw the majority of the first season of Breaking Bad, less and less in bits and pieces and more and more directly interfering with my playthrough, which is not something I abide often. Something about it got to me, though. Not the tension, which was palpable. Not the acting, which was grand. Not even the wonderful cinematography and general style, both of which are wholly unique. It was the feeling. The sort of existential dread that permeated every frame of every scene of every episode. It was something I'd only felt watching a show once before, The Sopranos, and that show had entrenched itself in my mind in a way nothing else would or could since. Except Breaking Bad. The feeling I'm describing is less college freshman, angsty existentialism as it is mid-life crisis, standing on the edge of a cliff and not knowing whether to jump or run. A genuine, palpable sense of not knowing where to go or what to do or what's going to happen in the next five minutes.
This show was about many things. In the first season, it was a dark comedy about a milquetoast nobody trying desperately to escape the life he never wanted. Later, it was about how lies seep and fester and destroy everything they're meant to shield. Then it was about power, and absolute corruption. For a little while, in these last episodes, it almost played like a commentary on abusive relationships, with both Jesse and Skyler trapped by someone they couldn't escape from, no matter how they tried.
In the end, this show was about one thing more than any another. It was about the choices we make, or, more importantly, the choices we've already made, and how we use them to construct some sort of meaning or individual agency out of the unknowable muck that is our universe. Every character on this show was bound by how they defined themselves. Walt defined himself as a failure, but not of his own doing. There were people out there who wronged him, who forgot him, and he wanted to be sure that they knew who he was. Jesse defined himself as a loser, as a no one, as a tool to be thrown away, and he spent the entire show searching for someone to accept him. He never found them. Hank defined himself as a cowboy, a lone wolf, and it killed him. Gus defined himself as a professional, beholden to rules of conduct that he himself would break only for the gravest, most important circumstances. Perhaps only Mike (and eventually Skyler) saw past their own definitions into what they really were: whatever they chose to be. Jonathan Banks described Mike on the final Talking Bad as someone who has "already lost his soul, and he knows it," which I feel describes the slight character inconsistencies some saw in this episode perfectly. Walt has finally hit that point. The first few seasons were, at least in plot, about the ascendance of Walter White, drug lord. How thrilling the launch. How breathtaking the apex. Season five was about the fall, about what happens when you try to struggle against force and destiny and end up as something other than another fallen star. If the overarching plot of Breaking Bad was the loss of one man's soul, then the end of "Ozymandias" was the moment where it was finally gone. These last two episodes were merely the epilogue. And a grand epilogue it was.
"I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it, and I was...really. I was alive."- Walter White
Picking up, ostensibly, right after Walt slinked out of that dive bar, we see his face through a car window, snow wiped away to reveal an unlocked door. Scrambling inside, Walt pauses for a moment, and begins searching the glovebox for something, anything, to help him get back to New Mexico. Pushing aside a Marty Robbins cassette (because of course people in rural New Hampshire still have cassettes), he finds a screwdriver, and tries to pry his way inside for some Heisenberg hot-wiring action. He fails. His bones are too sore and too cold. He doesn't have much left. Just then, he hears some police chatter. Motionless, he pleads, out loud, for his wish to get home so he can fix all of this. Slowly, eventually, the flashing lights recede, their passage marked by the sound of snow crunched under tires, and Walt breathes again. Then, he looks up to the sun visor, gradually pulling it down with the screwdriver. Almost as if his prayers were answered, the keys fall into his waiting hand. Vince Gilligan commonly referred to the second season finale as proof of a moral, abiding force in the Breaking Bad universe, punishing Walt for his hubris and for his greed by "raining hellfire" down on his house. You can read this key ex machina however you want, all that matters is the facts. Walt found some keys in an unlocked car. A song called "El Paso" started playing. Even if you find it incredibly silly and coincidental that this would happen, even if you don't believe in some sort of moral, guiding force in this or any other universe, it doesn't matter. Walt does. And now he's going home. To fix things, just as he always said he wanted to.
Back in the Land of Enchantment, Walt pulls up to a gas station. It still looks the same. He doesn't. Popping open his trunk, filled with all the money I presume he got from his barrel, he rifles through a duffle bag, grabs a nearly empty bottle of pills and downs a couple. Then, at the other last payphone in the world, he makes a call, pretending to be from the New York Times, asking who I presume is Gretchen and Elliott Schwartzs' PR rep to schedule a proper photo op and interview. Deftly probing if they still live in the same place, Walt gets his information, says his goodbyes, and takes the watch Jesse bought him a year before off and sets it down. At this point, I'm a little stunned that all those doofy predictions about Walt up and deciding to kill his oldest friends and rivals because he saw them on television are coming true, and sure enough, the next scene picks up with Gretchen and Elliott arriving home, waltzing through their front lawn and politely arguing about pizza and Thai food, unaware of the lurking shadow waiting for them. As they walk inside another set of doors, Gretchen re-arms their security system, while Walt surreptitiously closes the front doors behind them. As they continue to discuss their shared erudite liberal existences off screen, Walt waltzes inside, silently appraising their home and inspecting their photographs. They cannot see him yet. He is a ghost, returned from their shared past, but they cannot see him yet. He waits. Patience is not one of Heisenberg's calling cards, but this is not Heisenberg. So he waits.
Eventually, Gretchen wanders out into the foyer and shrieks when she sees him. Elliott runs out to her defense. "Hello Gretchen, " Walt says, greeting her before curtly acknowledging Elliott. "I really like your new house," he says, in a not-entirely sinister tone. They ask what he's doing here, and he responds that he saw them on Charlie Rose. "You looked great," he adds to Gretchen. They both begin stammering out some sort of defense in case he's there to hurt them. "Actually, I'm here to give you something," he says, offering that the three of them walk to it since he couldn't get it past their gate. Understandably shaken, Elliott levels the knife he had been holding while Gretchen hides behind him. Walt is not amused. Adopting his best Mike Ehrmantraut, he tells his best friend that if they're going to go that way, he's going to need a bigger knife. Elliott drops it.
After the break, the three of them return with the last handfuls of money, which Walt explains is $9,720,000. Gretchen demands to know where it came from and why it's there, to which Walt explains that he earned it, and that they're going to give it to his son on his 18th birthday. Gretchen asks why he doesn't just give this money to his son himself. "My wife and son hate me. They won't take my money" he responds, again with the hindsight of a man past due. His children are his victims, just like the people undergoing meth rehab are that Gretchen and Elliott so recently wrote a $28 million check to. Let us not think this is Walter White getting his wings, however. As soon as he lays out the plan, he forbids Gretchen and Elliott from spending a single dime of their own money on this. "They use my money. Never yours." he spits, suggestiung that they shake on it and he leaves. After a couple stilted handshakes, not unlike the disgusted handshake Walt offered up to Uncle Jack so long ago, he turns to leave, but not before asking if he can trust them. Elliott immediately responds yes. Gretchen says nothing. Turning to face the entirely windowed side of the room, Walt gestures flatly, and two laser points appear, one on the chest of each Schwartz. Walt tells them not to move. He tells them that he took $200,000 from his pile and hired the "two best hitmen west of the Mississippi" to keep tabs on Gretchen and Elliott in case it turns out he can't trust them. He tells them that if his children don't get his money, that eventually, when they least expect it, death will come for them. "Darkness," he says, before grabbing each Schwartz by the shoulder and telling them to cheer up. "This is where you get to make it right," he says, the first and only vague reference he makes to the grave, unanswered wrongs he blames them for. Then he leaves. Walt pulls his car to the side of the road and flashes his lights a few times, code for two masked men to stumble out of the wilderness and get into his car. His masked assassins, who are of course Badger and Skinny Pete, the only two people left in New Mexico he knows don't know enough about him to take a job offer. They don't feel great about what they did, "you know, morality wise." Walter pays them to change their feelings, and asks about the Blue Meth still on the market. Confused, Badger and Pete say that they thought it was him. Walt pauses, and utters one word: "Jesse." As Badger and Pete argue over Pete hearing a rumor that Jesse moved to Alaska, Walt peels out and leaves, taking them all back to the ABQ.
After the break, we pick up on a scene Breaking Bad is not known for: an idyllic fairy tale where a clean, serene and peaceful Jesse Pinkman works on a box in a musty, sepia toned studio. This is the same box he talked about in therapy during Season 3's "Kafkaesque," when asked if he'd ever really given his all on anything. He related a story of his shop teaching calmly asking if what the did was "all he had," and responded by putting full effort into what he described as a beautiful tinder box. He smells his priceless creation, and turns to walk away, when the scene abruptly shifts to Jesse in Jack's hangar lab, carrying a different sort of box and chained to the ceiling. He looks scarred and haggard. His hair is too long and his eyes are almost entirely devoid of life. Totally Kafkaesque.
Now, we are finally caught up with the two flash-forwards that started the two halves of this final season. On the morning of Walt's 52nd birthday, he goes into a Dennys and buys an M-60 in the parking lot. Then he sneaks into his house and grabs the fabled ricin capsule, prepared so long ago for Gustavo Fring. We know all this, and there's no reason to go over it again. So we don't. The two scenes whisk by in highlight form, and then we're in the desiccated remains of the White's living room again, where Walt pauses in front of where his television used to be, and remembers Hank telling him that he needs to get a little excitement in his life. "Someday," the neutered shell of Walter White responded. That day has long since come and gone. Walt closes his front door. Without skipping a beat, we pick up behind Lydia as she walks to her favorite table and sits in her favorite seat at her favorite cafe to plan drug deals at. She grabs her favorite packet of Stevia and doesn't notice the disheveled man on the other side of the room. Todd walks in, sits down, and begins complimenting Lydia on her shirt. Walt strides up behind them, grabs a chair, and sits down, begging them for two minutes of their time. He begins a spiel about a new cooking method he has devised, that requires no methylamine. He needs the money, he begs, having spent all of his trying to stay ahead of the police. Lydia inquires how much it would cost. "Nothing short of a million," Walt responds. Lydia says that Jack should hear this. Walt agrees. The waiter arrives and asks what Todd and Walt will have. Lydia insists that Walt was just leaving. So he does, dejectedly. It seems as though he's been defeated. After he leaves, Lydia flatly states that there's no way they're doing business with him, insinuating that they need to kill him. "We'd be doing him a favor," Lydia muses, pouring another packet of Stevia into her tea. The camera lingers a little too long on it, though, and suddenly we remember another white powder Walter White seems to be so fond of, and we know who the ricin was for. Walter White remains a ghost and a whisper. People move in patterns, and Lydia knows Heisenberg as a man of action and fear, and man who cannot resist standing tall and bellowing out his victories. Lydia doesn't know better. Walter White does. And so, he again moves unseen into the periphery, unseen on the edges of life while his foes are looking for him in all the wrong places.
Out in the desert after the break, Walter White puts the finishing touches on the motorized winch he has built and wired to go off when he clicks the starter on his new car. As he leans in to inspect the apparatus as he puts it through its paces for the first time, his ring, still tied to a string around his neck, dangles free. He stops and grasps it, thinking of Skyler. So we cut to her new condo, with those old drawings of Ms. Lambert and her son on the wall, Walter no where to be found. Skyler's answering machine goes off. It's Marie, with "news about Walt." Skyler answers, and Marie tells her that Walt's in town. The widowed Mrs. Schrader, her house seemingly surrounded by DEA agents, tells her sister that the authorities found the car he stole in New Hampshire, and that her old next door neighbor ("what's her name, Becky?") saw him this morning. People have been calling in threats, to, as Marie perhaps correctly surmises, spread the police thin (I'm not unconvinced Walt wouldn't have had Badger and/or Pete do this). Marie reasons that there are agents watching her place, Flynn's high school, and probably Skyler's condo, the three places she assumes Walt would go. "There is no way Walt's getting to you," she states, before calling Walt an asshole and saying that he's not as smart as he thinks he is. They say their goodbyes and Marie wishes her sister well, before Skyler hangs up and puts out her cigarette. "Five minutes," she says, seemingly to herself, before the camera pulls in a little and reveals Walt in her kitchen, previously obscured by a well-placed pillar. Once again, he appears as if from nowhere. "You look terrible," she mutters. "Yeah," Walt agrees, somberly, before adding "but I feel good." Walt says that he needed a better goodbye than their last conversation, before admitting to Skyler that he's not going to the police. They're coming to him. Skyler asks if him being in custody will stop the men who threatened her and the children from coming back. "They're not coming back. Not after tonight," he says. Skyler asks what's going to happen tonight, and he doesn't respond. He takes a step forward, and Skyler insists that they don't want his money. Walt says that he doesn't have any to give, before pulling out the old, crumpled lottery ticket. He tells her that the numbers are coordinates, and that she should call the DEA and tell them that those coordinates are where they'll find Hank and Gomez' bodies. Skyler begins to weep, and Walt briefly reverts to his old persona, saying that that's where the men who stole his money killed Hank and Gomez and buried them. Walt wants her to trade this knowledge for a deal (a deal I'm sure would tell him probably wouldn't come). "All the things that I did," he begins, his old spiel long since defunct, before Skyler cuts him off. "I did it for me," he says. He was good at it, and he was...alive (echoing his own words in the Pilot to Jesse, that he was "awake"). He isn't that anymore. Skyler nods, seemingly relieved to hear him finally admit to his oldest lie, before saying that their son will be home soon. Walt asks to see Holly before he leaves. He rubs her head lovingly, before sharing one last look with his wife and leaving. Walt steals one last look at his actual son, arriving home from school under the watchful eye of the DEA, before leaving, fading out of focus like a wraith, dispelled from the mortal plane. The specter of Heisenberg is at least removed from the hearts of his family.
We return from the final break to Walt pulling up at the gates of Jack's compound, where Kenny strides out to greet him. Kenny appreciates Walt's car, then steps inside, directing Walt to park at the clubhouse. As they pull in, Walt purposefully misunderstands Kenny's directions, parking perpendicularly to the clubhouse instead of directly in front of it. The camera lingers on his remote starter as he and Kenny step out of the car, and Jack's man frisks him, taking his keys and his wallet. Kenny insists they check him for a wire, which they do. Satisfied, they bring him inside, leaving a man outside to watch. When Walt walks in, Jack marvels at his hair, asking if it's real and if Walt shaved before, to which Walt gives perfunctory yes and no answers, while never taking his eye of his discarded keys, laying behind Jack on a pool table. Walt begins trying to walk through his new plan, but Jack isn't buying it. He asks Todd to explain it to Jack, and Todd merely says that he never should have come back, and apologizes. Kenny aims a pistol at Walt's head and asks Jack if this is where he wants to do it. Jack tells them to take it out back and Walt snaps and says that Jack owes him. "For what," he responds incredulously, to which Walt replies that he owed him Jesse Pinkman and that, since they're still cooking, he knows Jesse and Jack are partners. That word, partners, catches Jack's attention and he calls his men off for a minute, determined to prove to Walt that while Jesse might be alive, they are in no way partners. Todd leaves, and soon after returns, marching Jesse to the clubhouse. Walt has managed to position himself where Jack once stood, back to the pool table, where he slowly, without being noticed, manages to grab his keys. Jesse is brought it and Jack urges Walt to look at him to see what sort of "partner" he really is. Walt steps forward, and they lock eyes, Jesse for the first time this having some sort of light in his eyes. Walt rolls the remote starter around in his hand, contemplating killing Jesse with the rest of them when he triggers his trap. Jack, continually mocking Jesse, asks them to hurry it up and make it quick. Walt obliges, tackling Jesse off screen while Kenny starts to raise up the massage chair he's been dicking around with this entire scene. The crew laughs at what they assume if another fight between White and Pinkman, and Jack tells Todd to pull them apart. He leans down to floor level to do so, and that's when Walt spring his trap. His car beeps, the trunk opens, and the M-60 he bought starts firing, chest level, through the walls of the clubhouse, ripping apart the man standing guard and everyone standing at all inside, including Kenny, who takes a round to the forehead for his trouble. Todd scrambles for cover as the bullets keep flying. Walt holds Jesse down, grunting as glass rains down around them. Jack's crew is wasted, and eventually, the bullets stop. The gun mechanism continues spinning. The clubhouse is now deathly quiet. Walt rolls himself off Jesse, while Todd scrambles to the window to see where the bullets came from. He begins to ask Mr. White a question, but is interrupted by Jesse's chains around his neck. They tumble back, bouncing off a table and onto the floor, where Walter stoically watches Jesse choke the life out of his primary tormentor without interfering. As this is happening, Jack begins to stir. Walt slowly, agonizingly leans down to grab a pistol. Meanwhile, Todd's neck breaks with a disturbingly satisfying snap. Jesse has choked the life out of him. Jesse finds Todd's keys and unlocks his cuffs and Walt advances on a slowly moving Jack, who props himself up. Walt raises the gun, and Jack puts up his hand in defense, asking him to wait. Walt, perhaps giving him the same courtesy at gunpoint he himself just received, does so. "You want your money, right?" Jack coughs, putting a cigarette between his lips. "You pull that trigger, you're never gon-" Jack starts, before Walt interrupts him with a bullet, definitely showing Jack the same courtesy at gunpoint Jack showed Hank in the desert.
Walt turns to see Jesse, risen from bondage and pacing nervously. Walt leans down, puts the gun on the floor, and slides it to Jesse, who picks it up and points it at Walt. "Do it," Walt says vacantly, having vanquished his foes and achieved his purpose. "You want this, " Walt urges, to which explodes, much like he did when Walt suggested he move to Alaska. He wants Walt to say that he, himself, wants this, and that nothing's going to happen until Jesse hears him say those words. Walt acquiesces, and Jesse glances down at Mr. White's stomach, a large patch of blood showing and growing through his clothes. He took a bullet in the chaos. Pausing, Jesse reflects for a moment, then casually drops the gun and tells Walt to do it himself. He said before that he's done doing what Walter White wants him to, and he means. He won't be manipulated anymore, even if it's to do the one thing he's wanted to do for half of this season. Jesse turns and leaves, and Todd's cell phone goes off. Walt scoops it up and answers. It's Lydia, looking sick as death, asking if "it's done." "He's gone. They're all gone," Walt says, slowly following Jesse outside. Confused by the voice she hears, Lydia asks who this is, to which Walt tells her. "How are you feeling?" he mockingly asks, wondering if she's feeling under the weather. "That would be the ricin I gave you," he says, before she can respond, revealing that he slipped it into her Stevia. Walt bids her goodbye and hangs up. Lydia is nothing if not a creature of routine, a fact which Walt used to her detriment and to his gain. Of course she would assume he wanted more money, and of course Jack assumed he was a nebbishy, unthreatening nothing. All Jack had ever seen of Heisenberg the schemer was a strange man staring at a hotel painting and ordering ten hits without ever getting his hands dirty. When Gretchen and Elliott reluctantly shook his hand earlier, they did so like they were disgusted to even be breathing the same air as him. Walt did the same thing when made a deal with Jack, but now, Walt understands that you can't succeed in his line of work without getting your hands dirty. This entire series, he'd been trying (and failing miserably) to extricate himself from the seedier, dirtier sides of what it is he did, leaving it to Jesse or Mike or Jack and his men. This is the new Walt. The post-Heisenberg Walt. He lives in the shadows. In the muck, and he has no qualms about killing.
Before Jesse leaves, he turns to look at Walt one last time, this time completely obscured in shadow. They stare at one another wordlessly, and Walt slowly, almost imperceptibly nods at him. The last time he nodded at Jesse, it was to give his consent to selling Jesse into torture and bondage at Jack and Todd's hands. This time, it's as something of a tacit approval to run, and to live. So Jesse runs. Flying out of the compound in Kenny's car, he blasts through the gates that had stopped his last escape attempt and speeds off into the night. The last image we see of Jesse Pinkman is him crying, then laughing, then screaming. Some have criticized this all as being too neat an ending, and maybe it is, but nothing about Jesse's life will ever be neat again. He'll carry the scar tissue from his two year tutelage with the Great Heisenberg for the rest of his days, wherever they take him. Maybe he'll finally get to Alaska and be one of those Ice Road Truckers he likes so much.
This leaves us with Walt. After he watches Jesse go, he slowly opens his jacket, wincing at the bloody wound now spilling out of his abdomen. Gingerly, he limps towards the hangar/lab. Striding around, he takes a look at Todd and Jack's setup, admiring the giant chemistry set he created. His legacy. As police sirens echo around behind him, he stops, and as Badfinger's "Baby Blue" begins, he lovingly cradles a gas mask, not unlike the ones he and Jesse used and left in the To'hajilee desert so long ago. Limping away again as police cruisers become visible in the distance, he brings himself in front of a giant mixing tub, patting it tenderly, a small smile crossing his face. Through the reflection on the tub, we see Walt collapse. His hand leaves behind a streak of blood. The camera focuses on Walt's face, life already gone from his eyes, and begins to pan up just like it did in Crawl Space, when he cackled the last bits of his soul into the nothing and emerged as a new sort of monster, ready to duel with Gus Fring and build an empire. The camera continues panning, up and up into the rafters. The police move in, guns at the ready, ready to apprehend Walter White. But Walter White is gone, and in the end, he respected the chemistry.
Executive Producer: Vince Gilligan.
No comments:
Post a Comment